What Did Columbus Discover, More Bad News on Covid19 and Our Ads

In 1492 ...

Our President, in talking about our nation’s historical heritage, recently commented that it went back to 1492, when “Columbus discovered America.”   As usual, the President was a bit off base.  (Don’t blame Fordham, the Wharton School or New York Military Academy.  I’m sure he cut most of his classes wherever he was enrolled.) 

Actually, in 1492 Christopher Columbus landed on (or discovered) the island of Hispaniola and possibly visited other Caribbean locations as well.   His three subsequent voyages touched Cuba, Hispaniola, many islands in the Greater and Lesser Antilles and even the coasts of South America and Central America.   (He was unsuccessfully poking around, looking for a passage through the North American land mass to the Indies.)  

His having done so gives our citizens of Caribbean descent, particularly those whose families came from Haiti or the Dominican Republic which today comprise Hispaniola, a claim to a meaningful part of our heritage.  They are not proud of this bit of history, but it cannot be denied.   If Columbus had gone a few hundred miles further northwest, he might have reached what is now the United States mainland.  But he didn’t, despite the President’s comments.  Therefore Columbus should be acknowledged, not for discovering America, meaning what is now the United States of America, but for bringing the Western Hemisphere, or at least islands adjacent to it, to the attention of Europe, which up to then knew little if anything of it.

In any event, his treatment of the indigenous peoples he found wherever he landed was savage.  Whether it warrants removing monuments to Columbus, whose Italian heritage is something in which Americans of Italian descent take great pride, is another question, to be addressed at another time on this blog. 


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Hard to be an Optimist After Reading This

You may be following the Coronavirus guidelines, but enough around you are not, and that increases the chance of your coming in contact with the virus.   We called Governor DeSantis an idiot when he prematurely "reopened" places in Florida where people can spread the virus.  That was far too gentle.  

July 6, 2020

An informed guide to the global outbreak, with the latest developments and expert advice about prevention and treatment.

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By Jonathan Wolfe and Lara Takenaga

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, warned today that the U.S. was still “knee-deep in the first wave” of the pandemic. Keisha Lance Bottoms, the mayor of Atlanta, announced this evening that she had tested positive for the virus. Israel tightened restrictions as cases reached new heights, and the prime minister warned that the country was “a step away from a full lockdown.” Get the latest updates here, as well as maps and a tracker for U.S. metro areas.

The danger indoors

Elected officials in the United States are beginning to acknowledge that the rush to reopen was a mistake, as many of the hardest-hit areas in recent weeks have been places that lifted lockdown restrictions fastest. And one factor seems to be playing an outsize role in the uptick: indoor transmission from businesses like bars and restaurants.

More than 239 scientists from 32 countries are now warning that airborne transmission of the virus indoors should be taken more seriously and are calling on the World Health Organization to revise its recommendations, which they say underestimate the dangers of transmission by tiny, viral particles that linger in the air indoors.

Our colleague Donald G. McNeil Jr., who covers science for The Times, told The Daily podcast that when people talk or laugh, they create an “invisible mist” or a “droplet cloud” of tiny particles that floats around near their head. That fog can hold enough virus to transmit the disease; walking into it is akin to someone “spitting on your face.”

Indoors, without a breeze, the cloud can drift across a room, like in a bar or at a cocktail party, at more or less head level, he said, to be inhaled by revelers until 20, 30 or 40 people are infected.

Evidence is also mounting, Donald said, that Covid-19 is more of a blood vessel disease than a respiratory disease. While the virus enters the body through the lungs, it seems to do its damage by attaching to the insides of blood vessels, infecting organs, like the kidneys and the brain, with lots of fine blood vessels.

“When they do autopsies, they find thousands of tiny little blood clots all over the body,” Donald said. That explains why some patients may experience strokes, dementia and disorientation — and why children and young adults have experienced so-called Covid toe.

Ancient history meets modern disease. A gene segment inherited from Neanderthals around 60,000 years ago increases the risk of severe illness from the coronavirus, according to a new study. The variant is common in Bangladesh, which may explain why patients of Bangladeshi descent are dying at a higher rate in Britain.

Partying on while the virus rages

Florida has quickly become a cradle of infection in the U.S. On the Fourth of July, the state reported a record 11,458 new cases — more than a fifth of the nation’s total tally that day. As hospitals begin to fill up with coronavirus patients, some local officials are pointing the finger at over-the-top house parties.

In Miami, where nightclubs were closed in March, some homes have turned into all-night venues with bouncers and maskless revelers who flout social-distancing guidelines. Cases among young people have increased, but cracking down on house parties is much harder than, for example, forcing restaurants and bars to scale back or to close. And partygoers have made the job even more challenging for overwhelmed contact tracers in Florida, often refusing to share information about whom they were with.

Because of the skyrocketing infection rate, the mayor of Miami-Dade County signed an executive order today that would effectively shut down Miami’s social scene. Beginning on Wednesday, residents will be under a curfew and indoor dining at restaurants, gyms, banquet facilities and other entertainment venues will be shut down.                                                   *   *   *   *

What Happened to the Ads

Until recently, Jackspotpourri.com featured advertisements provided by Google Adsense.  For every click on these ads, the blog received a few pennies in the form of a deposit into my bank once they added up to at least $100.  All of these funds were donated to charities dedicated to finding cures for cancer.  Over the past few months, using Google Adsense has become increasingly difficult.  Ads did not appear and determining what was owed to the blog was nearly impossible, without complicated and time-consuming computer maneuvers.  Therefore, you will not be seeing ads any longer on the blog.  I do, however, recommend that you make donations on your own to the community’s Papanicolaou chapter, its Hadassah chapter, the Leukemia-Lymphoma Association and the Neuroendocrine Tumor Research Foundation, all of which have benefited from ads on this blog over the past years.  From here on in, it is up to you to be as generous as possible with your donations to these groups.

JL