Cartoon

Unmasked

Written by SK Ashby

(Cartoonist -- Mike Luckovich)

In other news, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin has been arrested for the killing George Floyd which kicked off two nights of protests across the country. He's been charged with murder and manslaughter.

Meanwhile, Twitter obscured and put a warning on one of Trump's tweets after he called for protesters to be shot.

Finally, a survey of investors including health care investors found that a majority of them do not believe the very first coronavirus vaccine approved for use later this year or early next year won't be good enough to reinvigorate the economy. They believe it will take longer to develop a better vaccine that can be used by virtually everyone.

The survey of over 100 investors -- more than half of whom specialize in health care -- found there’s a 43% probability that Moderna’s vaccine would be sufficient to set the U.S. economy aright, analyst Joshua Schimmer wrote in a note. Still, a majority expect the next update on mRNA-1273 will be positive and predicted emergency use authorization will be granted in the fourth quarter and regulatory approval in 2021.

Investors pegged the probability at 70% that a better potential vaccine emerges within the next year. [...]

Criticism of the first look at Moderna’s vaccine data has been mounting and pessimism about the potential for a broadly used vaccine has tamped down some of the more heady stock gains among companies racing to stymie the spread of Covid-19.

The world is on fire and I had a minor panic attack this morning after temporarily losing my phone at the grocery, so I'm calling it a weekend to go play with my new hot air brush and drink my cheap wine.

I'm getting my hair done for the first time since February tomorrow. I suppose I was prepared for the pandemic in that I was planning to let my hair grow out anyway. My natural hair is past my shoulders in the back now.

This is a story I'll be watching next week: states are running out of ICU beds after reopening.

Intensive care units in Montgomery, Ala., are overflowing with Covid-19 patients, pushing them into emergency departments that are not primed to care for them. And Alabama’s capital city could be a harbinger for other parts of the country.

ICU beds are also starting to fill up in places like Minnesota’s Twin Cities; Omaha, Neb.; and the entire state of Rhode Island, according to local health officials and epidemiologists tracking such data, a warning sign of possible health care problems down the road. The availability of ICU beds is one measure of a hospital’s ability to care for its most vulnerable patients — people with severe illness who require more staff to treat them and may need life-support equipment such as a ventilator to breathe. And it's served as a metric for whether the local health care system is able to handle a coronavirus outbreak, albeit a constantly shifting one.

With an incubation period of up to two weeks, new infections that resulted from reopening should be popping up over the next two.