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Michael Osterholm and Neel Kashkari have an OpEd piece in Friday's (7 August 2020) New York Times.

These guys lay out an argument for more shelter-in-place activity as a mechanism to get the Coronavirus under control. They argue (and rightly so, IMHO) that the fastest way to get the economy going again is to take steps to reduce infections to a manageable level.

As the virus rages out of control through much of the US, people are less likely to put money into local businesses/economies or send their kids back to school. All of which will hamper any economic recovery.

The idea is that we need to get the virus under control, and only then start re-opening the economy.

Given how things have been going, I'm not sure how folks could arrive at a different conclusion.

I'm sure folks around here will disagree, and I expect we'll hear a lot about that disagreement. I wonder though, will we hear logical, fact-based arguments in disagreement? I guess we'll have to see.

Below is the text of the OpEd I mentioned, so you folks don't have to taint your browser caches with such a dirty, disgusting place as the New York Times. And you're welcome.

Here’s How to Crush the Virus Until Vaccines Arrive

To save lives, and save the economy, we need another lockdown.

In just weeks we could almost stop the viral fire that has swept across this country over the past six months and continues to rage out of control. It will require sacrifice but save many thousands of lives.

We believe the choice is clear. We can continue to allow the coronavirus to spread rapidly throughout the country or we can commit to a more restrictive lockdown, state by state, for up to six weeks to crush the spread of the virus to less than one new case per 100,000 people per day.

That’s the point at which we will be able to limit the increase in new cases through aggressive public health measures, just as other countries have done. But we’re a long way from there right now.

The imperative for this is clear because as a nation what we have done so far hasn’t worked. Some 160,000 people have died, and in recent days, roughly a thousand have died a day. An estimated 30 million Americans are collecting unemployment.

On Jan. 30, when the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a public health emergency, there were 9,439 reported cases worldwide, most in China, and only six reported cases in the United States.

On July 30, six months later, there were 17 million cases reported worldwide, including 676,000 deaths. The United States had four million reported cases and 155,000 deaths. More than a third of all U.S. cases occurred during July alone.

And the next six months could make what we have experienced so far seem like just a warm-up to a greater catastrophe. With many schools and colleges starting, stores and businesses reopening, and the beginning of the indoor heating season, new case numbers will grow quickly.

Why did the United States’ Covid-19 containment response fail, particularly compared with the successful results of so many nations in Asia, Europe and even our neighbor Canada?

Simply, we gave up on our lockdown efforts to control virus transmission well before the virus was under control. Many other countries didn’t let up until the number of cases was greatly reduced, even in places that had extensive outbreaks in March and April. Once the number of new cases in those areas was driven to less than one per 100,000 people per day as a result of their lockdowns, limiting the increase of new cases was possible with a combination of testing, contact tracing, case isolation and extensive monitoring of positive tests.

The United States recorded its lowest seven-day average since March 31 on May 28, when it was 21,000 cases, or 6.4 new cases per 100,000 people per day. This rate was seven to 10 times higher than the rates in countries that successfully contained their new infections. While many countries are now experiencing modest flare-ups of the virus, their case loads are in the hundreds or low thousands of infections per day, not tens of thousands, and small enough that public health officials can largely control the spread.

In contrast, the United States reopened too quickly and is now experiencing around 50,000 or more new cases per day.

While cases are falling in the hard-hit areas of Arizona, California, Florida and Texas because of the imposition of some physical-distancing measures, they are rapidly increasing in a few of Midwestern states. In Minnesota, we just documented the most new cases in a one-week period since the pandemic began.

At this level of national cases — 17 new cases per 100,000 people per day — we simply don’t have the public health tools to bring the pandemic under control. Our testing capacity is overwhelmed in many areas, resulting in delays that make contact tracing and other measures to control the virus virtually impossible.

Don’t confuse short-term case reductions in some states as permanent. We made that mistake before. Some have claimed that the widespread use of masks is enough to control the pandemic, but let us face reality: Gov. Gavin Newsom of California issued a public masking mandate on June 18, a day when 3,700 cases were reported in the state. On July 25, the seven-day daily case average was 10,231. We support the wearing of masks by all Americans, but masking mandates and soft limitations on indoor crowds in places such as bars and restaurants are not enough to control this pandemic.

To successfully drive down our case rate to less than one per 100,000 people per day, we should mandate sheltering in place for everyone but the truly essential workers. By that, we mean people must stay at home and leave only for essential reasons: food shopping and visits to doctors and pharmacies while wearing masks and washing hands frequently. According to the Economic Policy Institute, 39 percent of workers in the United States are in essential categories. The problem with the March-to-May lockdown was that it was not uniformly stringent across the country. For example, Minnesota deemed 78 percent of its workers essential. To be effective, the lockdown has to be as comprehensive and strict as possible.

If we aren’t willing to take this action, millions more cases with many more deaths are likely before a vaccine might be available. In addition, the economic recovery will be much slower, with far more business failures and high unemployment for the next year or two. The path of the virus will determine the path of the economy. There won’t be a robust economic recovery until we get control of the virus.

If we do this aggressively, the testing and tracing capacity we’ve built will support reopening the economy as other countries have done, allow children to go back to school and citizens to vote in person in November. All of this will lead to a stronger, faster economic recovery, moving people from unemployment to work.

We know that a stringent lockdown can have serious health consequences for patients who can’t get access to routine care. But over the past six months, medical professionals have learned how to protect patients and staffs from spreading the coronavirus; therefore we should be able to maintain access to regular medical care during any new lockdown.

This pandemic is deeply unfair. Millions of low-wage, front-line service workers have lost their jobs or been put in harm’s way, while most higher-wage, white-collar workers have been spared. But it is even more unfair than that; those of us who’ve kept our jobs are actually saving more money because we aren’t going out to restaurants or movies, or on vacations. Unlike in prior recessions, remarkably, the personal savings rate has soared to 20 percent from around 8 percent in January.

Because we are saving more, we have the resources to support those who have been laid off. Typically when the government runs deficits, it must rely on foreign investors to buy the debt because Americans aren’t generating enough savings to fund it. But we can finance the added deficits for Covid-19 relief from our own domestic savings. Those savings end up funding investment in the economy. That’s why traditional concerns about racking up too much government debt do not apply in this situation. It is much safer for a country to fund its deficits domestically than from abroad.

Congress should be aggressive in supporting people who’ve lost jobs because of Covid-19. It’s not only the right thing to do but also vital for our economic recovery. If people can’t pay their bills, it will ripple through the economy and make the downturn much worse, with many more bankruptcies, and the national recovery much slower.

There is no trade-off between health and the economy. Both require aggressively getting control of the virus. History will judge us harshly if we miss this life- and economy-saving opportunity to get it right this time.

Raspberry Pi Release Japanese Keyboard Variant

The Japanese keyboard is the latest layout available. Last month we saw the release of Swedish, Portuguese, Danish and Norwegian layouts of the official keyboard.

WHEEL REINVENTED:

Simon Martin, Senior Principal Engineer at Raspberry Pi Trading explains some of the challenges they faced “We ended up reverse-engineering generic Japanese keyboards to see how they work, and mapping the keycodes to key matrix locations. We are fortunate that we have a very patient keyboard IC vendor, called Holtek, which produces the custom firmware for the controller.”

Raspberry Pi makes Japanese keyboard

https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/the-shoe-finally-drops-on-the-nra-and-the-outcome-is-far-from-certain/

So yes, the lawsuits and their timing — heading into the fall election for which the NRA had just pledged to spend “tens of millions” in the Trump reelection effort — were transparent political attacks aimed at both Trump and the nation’s most prominent supporter of gun rights.

But that doesn’t mean that what’s being alleged by James (or Racine) in her lawsuit isn’t true. She’s alleging wrongdoing by LaPierre, NRA corporate counsel and secretary John Frazer, retired CFO Wilson Phillips, and the NRA’s embattled former COO, Josh Powell. James’s suit asks for the four to be fined and reimburse millions they allegedly wrongfully received.

So for all of our readers who reacted by dismissing this as another prominent Democrat using her office to attack the NRA and, by extension, gun owners and gun rights, we would only remind you that both things can be true. The lawsuit(s) can be both a conveniently timed political hit job and justifiable on the merits based on actual, verifiable wrongdoing.

That pretty much sums everything up, I believe. Many of us have been watching the NRA trainwreck unfold. Just like watching a real life train wreck, you can see it, but you can do NOTHING to help. Here it comes, rolling along, helter skelter all over the landscape. The best you can do, is to get the hell out of the way before it rolls over you.

The Argumentum ad Verecundiam is the fallacy of appealing to authority. Specifically, appealing to an inappropriate authority, like people who sell duck calls, or sing and dance when considering national policy.

Actually, an appeal to authority is always problematic, since the reason we are appealing is that we do not know the truth of what we are asserting, but are basing our claim on the opinion of another. Now a proper appeal to an authority would be an appeal to a real authority, someone with knowledge of the truth of our thesis. But if we don't know enough to affirm our claim on our own, we also probably do not know enough to judge whether our "authority" is veridical, or a quack. So, if you can verify an authority, you don't need one. If you need an authority, you are operating on trust, and that trust could be misplaced.

This is why the fallacy is explicit in situations where the alleged "authority" obviously has no more expertise on the question than anyone else, but has stature in some other area. When a celebrity endorses something, this is a case of the ad verecundiam. When a reality TV actor runs for office based on mere name recognition, well, good luck with that.

At one point in history, the Greek Philosopher Aristotle was given the title "The Philosopher", especially by Doctor Angelicus. It was common to end arguments by citing The Philosopher, and adding, "Ipse Dixit", "he himself said so." Appeal to authority, and while Aristotle was no Runaway1956 of philosophers, perhaps this trusted a bit too much. Even Aristotle could be wrong.

This leads to our current problem with ad verecundiam fallacies. We do not have the same knowledge as the expert, but if we recognize there is such a thing as expertise and valuable knowledge that is difficult to obtain, we need to distinguish between actual experts and frauds. This is where the lay public has to rely on the body of experts, such that if the majority of experts agree that some individual is an expert, we can rely on that vouchsafing. This is why doctors, engineers, philosophers, and even lawyers, are trained, educated, and certified by members of their own profession. Anyone who hangs their own shingle, without such recognition, is suspect, like certain alleged eye-doctors in Kentucky.

Now with science, we also rely on professional recognition, though it is a bit more amorphous. Climate change is a area where the majority is clearly on one side. But of course, that still does not mean they could not be wrong, as the history of science teaches us about majority opinions, even among scientists. Of course, that is no reason to go the other way, and deny climate change. This is this going too far with being suspect of authorities, and that is our problem today. Runaway's opinion is as good as anyone's, as an opinion. As a truth, however, it leaves much to be desired. And then there is Dr. Fauci. You see where this is going.

Speaking of Fauci, and the self-licensed Kentuckian,

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top US infectious diseases expert, on Tuesday defended his guidance to the federal government over how to respond to the Covid-19 outbreak, telling Sen. Rand Paul that "I have never made myself out to be the 'end-all'" and warning against "cavalier" thinking that children could be immune to the disease's effects.

One sign of a proper authority is humility. Non-cavalier.

  We have a recent case, when on CNN, Peter Navarro, President Trump's anti-Sinic trade advisor, got into a fight about hydroxychloroquine. Transcript from MSN:

CNN’s Erin Burnett Gets in Bonkers Hydroxychloroquine Fight With Peter Navarro
CNN’s Erin Burnett and White House trade adviser Peter Navarro got in a wild fight over Dr. Anthony Fauci and hydroxychloroquine during their 12-minute interview Wednesday night.

It started when Burnett brought up Fauci’s comments from Wednesday morning where the infectious disease doctor said he’s been getting death threats and needs security around his house after he’s become a target during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Erin, this is just so unacceptable behavior. To me, it’s so un-American. What’s always puzzled me from the onset of this crisis is here we have are the Chinese communist virus effectively sending a virus over here — whether it was done by accident or on purpose, I don’t know — but they send it over here and kill over 150,000 Americans, cause trillions of dollars of damage. Instead of being angry at them, we’re angry at each other. I’ve never seen America—”

Gets better.

"Right, but you’re the one who wrote an op-ed that said Anthony Fauci has been wrong on everything we’ve talked about,” Burnett responded.

“But those are fair policy disputes,” Navarro shot back.

“How is that your lane and stimulus isn’t?” Burnett asked.

Yeah, how?

“Peter, first of all, you’re an economist, not a scientist,” Burnett said as the two talked over each other.

The two began to go back-and-forth over specific studies related to hydroxychloroquine and which doctors agree with them and why. Burnett said five peer reviewed studies show it not to be true, and Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx don’t recommend taking it, which Navarro took issue to.

“You can’t do this,” Navarro said.

“I need to do this, Peter,” Burnett responded. “What you’re saying is irresponsible.”

Well, there it is. Appeal to actual authorities, like experts in medical science and the consensus of a discipline, rather than the opinion of a crackpot economist dismissed by his peers. Actually, that "economist, not a scientist" has to hurt: Economists for decades have been trying to hold themselves out as the "physicists of the social sciences." But Peter does the ad verecundiam, and very well, as fallacies go.

“All right, let me say this to you,” Navarro said before pausing. “I reach out to all your viewers. Scott Adams — you know Scott Adams, right? He’s the guy who wrote the Dilbert cartoon. He did a beautiful 10-minute video on Twitter, and the thesis of the video is that CNN might be killing thousands because of the way they’ve treated that. So, I would just ask — I’ll let Scott Adams’ video be my defense on this.”

Not a medical doctor, not a scientist, not really even an economist, but if you want proof, here is a cartoonist. And, it was the Chinese!

(Nota Bene: I am not suggesting that cartoonists are not authorities, on the contrary, they can be the only authorities on cartooning, as a discipline. But on malaria medications for a corona virus? That's just "demon sperm" talking. And speaking of medical authority, did you hear about the vaccine made with alien DNA? )

New York Attorney General Moves To Dissolve The NRA After Fraud Investigation
August 6, 202011:35 AM ET

The attorney general of New York took action Thursday to dissolve the National Rifle Association following an 18-month investigation that found evidence the powerful gun rights group is "fraught with fraud and abuse."

Attorney General Letitia James claims in a lawsuit filed Thursday that she found financial misconduct in the millions of dollars and that it contributed to a loss of more than $64 million over a three-year period.

The suit alleges that top NRA executives misused charitable funds for personal gain, awarded contracts to friends and family members, and provided contracts to former employees to ensure loyalty.

Am I missing something? I thought that "misused charitable funds for personal gain" was now the in thing? I mean, look to the president as our fine example.

Without the NRA, who will lobby for the right to keep bare arms?

It seemed appropriate to set the Topic to Hardware. The NRA may not be soluble in water.

Some of my perfectly good jokes will have to be rewritten!

(or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservations or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office upon which I am about to enter; So help me God.

For those of you who are unaware, the above is the oath taken by US military officers.

What *might* happen if the enemy "foreign or domestic" is the Commander in Chief of the US armed forces?

This is a relevant topic given that the individual currently in that position has, several times, threatened using the Insurrection Act in a cravenly political and partisan fashion, will not commit to accepting the results of the next election, and has repeatedly attempted to claim authority far beyond what his office provides.

Robert Taylor over at the Lawfare blog weighed in on what contingencies the military should plan for, should the current occupant of the White Hose attempt to issue unconstitutional orders to keep himself in power.

Note that I'm not claiming that *will* happen, nor am I claiming that the military is the only part of the government that can address such issues.

But I'm curious what Soylentils think about how the nation (the military, the courts, Congress and the public) could/should/would respond to such a constitutional crisis.

I fully expect the trolls and Trump cock gobblers to go full-on authoritarian and/or ridiculous bullshit here, and the QAnon morons will chime in too.

That said, I hope we can also have an interesting discussion about these potential issues and how they might be addressed.

Text of Robert Taylor's Essay:

Contingency Planning for Presidential Interference with the Election

One of the great strengths of the U.S. military is its planning, encompassing contingencies big and small. With sadness, I urge my former colleagues in the military services and at the Department of Defense level to plan now for the possibility of actions by the president to disrupt the forthcoming election or even to vitiate the election results. It is distressing that we have come to this point, where strategic planners must prepare for serious threats to our democracy from the president of the United States, and where the military must be prepared—better prepared than recent events have shown it to be at present—to avoid becoming an instrument of the demise of the great American experiment in democracy and the long and uneven march to a just society.

After the initial trickle of military voices decrying the president’s threat to invoke the Insurrection Act to send the military into our cities becoming a powerful stream, it seems likely that the president and his enablers have abandoned—at least for now—thoughts of invoking the Insurrection Act.

But the president and his enablers have found another way of usurping local and state control over law enforcement. They’ve sent first to Portland and now to Chicago, Albuquerque and other “Democrat-run cities” personnel from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), ostensibly to protect federal facilities. The protection of federal facilities is a legitimate mission of DHS, but the DHS personnel have been deployed away from federal facilities, and have disrupted, detained, and intimidated protesters, whether they were approaching a federal facility or not. The president has even intimated that the federal agents have been directed to protect monuments in which the federal government has no legitimate interest. The DHS personnel are federal law enforcement personnel, unlike members of the military. But they are dressed in camouflage uniforms, and their presence in the streets of Portland and elsewhere seems calculated to suggest a military operation. The presence of federal officers in Portland has done nothing to bring peace to the streets and seems intended to perpetuate and deepen disruptions.

This usurpation of local policing powers comes as the president’s abysmal performance of genuine federal responsibilities has led to cratering polling results and, most ominously, the president’s incessant drumbeat of attacks on the integrity of the forthcoming election. The president has refused to say that he would accept the results of that election, if he did not win, and he has even raised the prospect of postponing the election. Before the 2016 election, Mr. Trump also made statements refusing to commit to accepting the election results—as reckless and irresponsible as those statements were, he wielded no power at the time. Today, he is the president of the United States, wielding enormous power. This makes his statement a genuine threat to the rule of law and to the nation’s life as a democracy. The deployment of DHS officers has the flavor of a dress rehearsal for actions to disrupt and distort the upcoming election.

The military, sadly, must plan how to respond if the president attempts to wield the power of the presidency to thwart the electoral process, whether through the Insurrection Act or through other means.

Each military member, and every federal official, swears to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. Under the Constitution, all “executive and judicial officers” of the United States and of the states likewise must take an oath or affirmation to support the Constitution. The president’s possible abuse of office to prevent his losing the election (both before and after the date of the election itself) would put such oaths to the test in ways that are completely unprecedented.

How can today’s military members stay true to their oaths, and support and defend the Constitution?

First, we must look to our senior-most political leadership, especially Secretary of Defense Mark Esper. He has a critically important role, and he needs to be aware that the judgment of history will be focused on him. He must make it clear that the department will not carry out illegal orders, no matter what the president says. He has done this before, when he stated at a Pentagon briefing that the military would follow the rules of armed conflict and not attack cultural sites with no military value, despite the President’s threat to do so in Iran a few days previous. Making it clear that the military is a creature of law is a vital foundation for the support and defense of our Constitution.

Likewise, it is critical for senior military leaders—like the chairman of the joint chiefs, the chiefs of staff of the military branches and the combatant commanders—to reiterate that their loyalty is to the Constitution and to the nation, and not to any particular individual.

What is an illegal order will sometimes be clear—for example, if Trump attempts to prevent the electors selected in the various states from meeting and voting, or if he attempts to prevent the Congress from receiving the votes of the electors, military members would clearly be obligated to disobey any order to effectuate his purpose. And if Trump refused to leave the White House, as soon as his term is over the military would be obligated to disregard any order purportedly issued by Trump. An order to delay the elections, which the president has no authority to issue, would likewise have to be ignored.

But as the controversy over the president’s consideration of invoking the Insurrection Act showed, it is not always clear what an illegal order is. In the case of the Insurrection Act, the ability of the president to send in troops in the absence of a request from a state’s governor depends on questions of degree and judgment. More precisely, it hinges on whether the “domestic violence” occurring in cities across the country

so hinders the execution of the laws of that State … that any part or class of its people is deprived of a right, privilege, immunity, or protection named in the Constitution and secured by law, and the constituted authorities of that State are unable, fail, or refuse to protect that right, privilege, or immunity, or to give that protection …

The president might assert, without factual basis, that lawlessness and chaos meet this standard. But even if there were unusual violence, if that unlawful behavior is not directed at a particular “part or class” of people to “deprive[] [them] of a right, privilege, immunity, or protection named in the Constitution and secured by law,” the statute should not be read to provide authority. In the current situation, there are certainly law enforcement challenges, but there is not the kind of rampant lawlessness and chaos for which this provision of the Insurrection Act is intended. And there is no indication that a “part or class” of people is being deprived of their constitutional rights in any sort of general or systematic manner. Drawing the line between an organized effort to intimidate and subjugate a “part or class” of people to deny them their constitutional rights (think about Mississippi Burning in the mid-1960s) and random violence requires the exercise of some judgment. But when a blatantly unconstitutional motive—targeting the political opposition through force and violence—is proclaimed by the President, the task of determining the unlawfulness of such behavior becomes easier.

To be sure, judgment under the Insurrection Act, in the first instance, is to be exercised by the president. That it is a matter of judgment for the president is not the same thing as saying anything goes. There is a legal standard, and if that legal standard is not met there is no power. Allowing the president to be the final arbiter of whether the legal standard is met would eviscerate the constraints of law on the power of the president. Total deference to the president would not preserve the separation of powers, it would destroy it, rendering the Congress’s lawmaking role a mere chimera. The closer we get to the election—the ultimate check on the president’s authority, with free and fair elections being the very heart of what it means to be a democracy—the more searing should be the review of the president’s exercise of judgment. This is true for the courts, but it is also true for the Department of Defense and our military—and indeed for all officers, state, federal and local, who have sworn to uphold the Constitution.

Should the president issue an order for troops to deploy to the streets of Milwaukee in the weeks before the election, for example, personnel throughout the federal government should evaluate that order in the context of the president’s persistent attacks on the integrity of the electoral process, and his recent suggestion that the election should be postponed. Examined in that context, there is an obvious danger that any finding by the president that the predicate for deployment under the Insurrection Act has been met would be a disingenuous pretext for an effort to stifle voter turnout in a “Democrat city” so as to gain the electoral votes of the state.

The entire chain of command, from the secretary of defense on down, must be prepared to exercise judgment and refuse to carry out a pretextual, and thus illegal, order. Similar concerns may arise, for other officials at the state and federal level, with respect to the president’s possible use of other authority for the unlawful purpose to disrupt or delay the election. And our courts, including the Supreme Court, must take the uncomfortable step of being willing to exercise judgment to uphold our constitutional commitment to choosing our presidents through elections, not force.

The nation’s life as a democracy hangs in the balance.

With a title like that, I just could not reseeest!

It was the worst argument for democracy since the German federal elections of 1932. It was an offense against reason, against wisdom, and it rendered every compliment ever directed at the American experiment into a sad, bedraggled parody.

Trump v. Biden!

These aren't the choices you were given
They are the choices that you made!

To see if you are contagious, have someone check your aura

Nothing I said here is any more absurd than the 150,000+ killed by the incompetence and such raw corruption that still has so much public support that 90% of them will be reelected, again!

Your Russia/China, republican/democrat shit is so embarrassing! Like little children...

A lot of numbers get thrown around, in regards to Covid-19. This country has the most cases, that country has the most deaths, etc ad nauseum.

What is the PER CAPITA disease rate, and death rate? I found several hits on that, most of them old. RealClearPolitics has a page that appears to be updated. https://www.realclearpolitics.com/coronavirus/

The columns are sortable. For my immediate purposes, I'm only interested in the "Deaths/1 m pop" column.

Belgium 861.9
UK 694.9
Peru 613.1
Spain 608.8
Italy 581.7
Sweden 564.1
Chile 513.0
US 484.1

At the far end of the spectrum

Burundi 0.1
Caymans 15.2
Curacao 6.3
Benin 3.1
Congo 0.6
Taiwan 0.3

Alright - table doesn't seem to sort itself quite properly. As I work upward from the bottom, I find the Channel Islands hav 12,692.4/million? But they only have 47 deaths total, looks like bad math somewhere.

Are there better charts and graphs somewhere?

Click the column "Confirmed Cases / 1 m pop" and everthing changes.

Qatar 40,197
French Gulana 27,028
Bahrain 26,465
Chile 19,207
Kuwait 16,508
Oman 16,390
Panama 16,149
United States 14,719

Drop down to the bottom and read up,

Burundi 36.1
Cayman Islands 3,084
Liechtenstein 2,347
Curacao 182
Brit. Virgin Isle 266
Turks and Calcos 3,272

The graph is definitely not behaving properly. Maybe I should try a different browser . .. no, other browsers all seem to display the same errors.

Click the column labeled "Tests", and China tops the list with 90,410,000 tests administered. US in second, 60,000,000 and Russia in third with 29,000.000. That blows a lot of headlines away, claiming the US is far behind in testing.

Does anyone know of more useful charts and graphs? It would be really nice to get some kind of handle on all the numbers being thrown around.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deaths-worldwide-per-million-inhabitants/
Seems to have very similar numbers to the above, but only displays 50 entries max at a time.

SpaceX Starship rocket’s flight debut set for Monday

For the first time ever, a full-scale SpaceX Starship prototype could be less than a day away from an inaugural flight test in Boca Chica, Texas.

Expected to target the same 150m (~500 ft) maximum altitude as Starhopper’s final flight, the hop will see the full-scale tank section of Starship SN5 attempt to follow in the footsteps of its odd predecessor. Starhopper was essentially a back-of-the-envelope proof of concept, demonstrating that a large rocket could technically be built out of common steel with facilities so spartan and basic that it defied belief.

[...] SpaceX initially wanted to turn Starship SN5 around for its hop debut on Sunday, August 2nd – barely two days [after the static fire test]. Yesterday’s window came and went, though, and SpaceX ultimately pushed its hop test plans back by 24 hours and added a new backup window on August 4th.

Launch window is from 8am to 8pm CDT (13:00-01:00 UTC).