COVID everywhere

Marin County: 940 test results; 53 positive; 3 newly hospitalized; 1 new death (in the county's general population).

SQ data - declining number of active cases, the website shows 11 deaths but this may be cumulative, it's not clear.

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Everywhere. Yesterday, for reasons I note at the end, I was on a call with community activists from some poor places: the Eastern Cape, in South Africa; rural Maharashtra, India; two areas in Brazil; Myanmar. Some notes:

* In parts of South Africa, the government guidance to wash hands frequently is absurd - if a town has no running water or, perhaps worse, just one tap for hundreds of households.

* In rural India: schools have gone online. But the poor kids don't have devices, and their parents often went into debt to get them into the good schools and rural economies are collapsing because villages or towns are clustered into quarantine zones.

* In Brazil, big ISPs have cut off community networks so many poor communities have no access to the Internet, let alone relevant news.

* In more places than you'd imagine, the "holy men" advocate getting crowds together to pray.

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Even for wealthier folks ... a close friend of mine here in California faces a dilemma. His father, in southern India, is in fading health - not COVID related. The dad cannot get decent health support unless the son shows up. There are occasional, overbooked, government-sanctioned evacuation flights from JFK to New Delhi. There's no obvious (healthy) way to get from New Delhi (a COVID hot spot) to Hyderabad.

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Why I was on this call since I'm not a healthcare specialist or community activist? Later this month, I will be giving a short talk on a separate subject at a meeting at Internet Archive. The meeting mostly will feature live presentations from these people, if anyone's interested.