Ok let’s assume 142 people correctly wore masks. That doesn’t exactly make the point you think it does. First off Great Clips required masks. This wasn’t voluntary. Masks aren’t required most places, they should be. People aren’t wearing masks and many that do don’t wear them correctly.
My point is that if YOU wear your mask you’re less likely to contract it than if you don’t.
US testing lab reports its own Covid outbreak
A manufacturer of rapid coronavirus testing kits is now reporting its own outbreak.
Of the 600 employees at Maine’s Abbott Laboratories, 23 have become infected since mid-April. Five of the cases were recorded after 31 May, prompting the state’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to begin an investigation.
Maine’s CDC Director Nirav Shah said on Tuesday that Abbott conducts weekly tests on all workers, and is looking to ensure that the testing materials haven’t been contaminated by sick employees. It’s not yet clear if the employees contracted the virus from the lab, or elsewhere.
As of Wednesday, the state had reported more than 2,600 cases of Covid-19 and 100 deaths.
The number of new daily cases has been declining in Maine in recent weeks. But in at least nine states - including Texas, Arizona, and South Carolina - Covid hospitalisations have been on the rise since late May.
DC National Guards test positive for Covid after protests
Several members of the Washington, DC National Guard have tested positive for Covid-19 after being deployed to the Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the death of George Floyd, the military says.
The National Guard says it will not disclose the number of guardsmen infected due to “operational security”.
The members were among the 1,300 troops sent to the US capital during mass demonstrations that began last weekend. They were joined by almost 4,000 additional National Guard troops from other states.
Meanwhile members of the White House coronavirus task force say they fear a spike in cases linked to nationwide civil unrest triggered by Floyd’s death. Dr Deborah Birx advised state governors to ensure Covid tests are available in urban areas after 70 testing sites were destroyed in protests, US media report.
After several months of reporting a steady 50-70 cases per day, my county (pop. 1 million) has reported ~170 cases yesterday and ~120 cases the day before. Is it finally going to start taking off? They also estimate that ~80% of cases have recovered and ~700 active cases now.
1 Like
https://mobile.twitter.com/RexChapman/status/1270342876778631168
https://mobile.twitter.com/JimRebornCobra/status/1270352602182479872
2 Likes
That last sentence is why I don’t have a CPA. I’m reasonably financially literate and I do my own taxes. I make a good faith effort to pay what I owe (seriously) and it’s very likely that I overpay a bit. Mysteriously I have zero hassles from the IRS… probably too busy with the other self employed people who are constantly trying all kinds of shenanigans to avoid/evade their taxes.
You get zero hassles because the IRS is intentionally underfunded and short staffed. And also because even when they had significantly more resources they still only audited a small fraction of returns.
1 Like
Yeah I’m fairly sure taxpayers like me very rarely ever got audited even when the irs was better funded.
This is what we call the audit lottery
Most people can do what you are doing and act in bad faith and never hear anything about it
Belgian prince faces €10,000 fine for breaking lockdown rules
Prince Joachim has already apologised for breaching Spain’s quarantine rules when he travelled to the southern city of Córdoba last month.
Now he will be up to €10,400 (£9,200; $11,800) out of pocket too.
The 28-year-old prince, a nephew of King Philippe of Belgium, travelled to Spain last month for what the palace had described as an internship and a “family event”. He later tested positive for Covid-19 and health officials had to get in touch with people he had been in contact with.
According to local reports, the prince has been fined for failing to observe the necessary 14-day quarantine and attending two meetings or parties.
If he pays up within 15 days, he only needs to pay half the fine.
My logic is that even if audited I’ll be in pretty good shape as long as I act in good faith. My experience with the IRS has been that they are very reasonable and easy to deal with as long as you are trying to pay them what you owe and not get out of it. This is noticeably better than my experiences with the professional class of the US who usually seem to be trying to figure out how to soak me for billings.
An orgy and a family event are not usually found in the same sentence, at least not since the days of Caligula.
2 Likes
The IRS doesn’t collect state taxes… In my experience, these issues were invariably discovered when some big company with a real compliance department wanted to buy some small business and their accountants told them that there were $X million of unpaid sales taxes because [opaque reasons]. In almost all states, you can show up at the department of revenue’s door and enter into a “voluntary disclosure agreement” where you basically pay some of the back taxes (sometimes not even all of them!) and they waive all the penalties and sometimes the interest. It’s an inducement to get people to come clean with problems they discover later. I’m sure they’ve done the calculations and concluded that getting a larger number of people to disclose their problems in exchange for penalty waivers nets them a lot more money than what they would get from turning up some fraction of these problems on audit and then taking the taxpayer to the cleaners.
I don’t think these kind of VDAs are objectionable. The IRS ran (maybe is still running?) a comparable program for rich tax cheats with unreported foreign bank accounts that I find much, much more infuriating. Not only is there essentially no legitimate reason for an individual to have a Swiss bank account, they launched the program after they forced a bunch of subpoenas on the big Swiss banks and finally had the info to catch these people and send them to jail and/or bankruptcy court.
1 Like
Yes , proportionately my county is about the same and we are fucked
lol
1 Like
Sir, this is a COVID thread.
Damn it, suzz, you changed yours now my joke isn’t funny anymore.
2 Likes
I agree. Medical coverings are more sophisticated than average face coverings; they’re dealing with high viral load COVID patients, and they can’t get sick without compromising the medical system, so that makes sense. I think the point, as shown by the Missouri case, is that face coverings of any kind are far more helpful than nothing.
https://twitter.com/aslavitt/status/1270734242528583680?s=21
My poor wife is 2 days behind the mask curve. She just mentioned the WHO thing from the weekend and I had to tell her the actual message is the opposite of what she heard on the news. ABC Philly ran the anti-mask feature last night.
Sigh
1 Like