On the front lines

Saturday, March 21st. April is in sight. Happy birthday to Eddie Money, Rosie O’Donnell and Twitter.

Google has finally posted a page with coronavirus resources. Nothing about testing and, strangely for Google, no site search.

Today’s local coronavirus wrap-up: – The T is allowing passengers to board from the rear door. Payment optional. – Increasingly, Boston area health care workers are getting infected. There have been 10 at Tufts and 9 at Brigham so far. Local surgeon and author Atul Gawande is taking lessons from Singapore and Hong Kong on how to prevent these infections. – Marty Walsh is exercising a measured approach to restricting activities. No complete shutdown yet, but he’ll reassess as conditions change. – Parking enforcement in Boston is relaxed but it’s not the wild west. Here is a list of things you still can’t do. – Local breweries are offering curbside pick up and home delivery. More here (via Universal Hub). – Some states are following the feds and extending tax deadlines to July. Massachusetts hasn’t done that yet. You can still delay but you’ll need to file an extension. – And FaceTime for Nana! What a great idea!

Apparently Putin likes the numbers where they are.

Epidemiologist Larry Brilliant explains the pandemic ‘gold ring‘ and how we get to it: “A, a large enough quantity of us have caught the disease and become immune. And B, we have a vaccine. The combination of A plus B is enough to create herd immunity, which is around 70 or 80 percent.”

Throwing in this graphic from Ian McKay showing the probable timeline of pre-symptomatic infectiousness.

For obvious reasons, movies and theaters are having a bad season. This crisis may hasten the decline of the old model of people paying to watch movies together in theaters as studios embrace direct-to-digital and streaming out of necessity.

And don’t forget the people who are holding things together for all of us these days, truckers and grocery store workers.

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