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We are all Grand Princess cruise ship passengers now

Barry Dredze
4 min readApr 16, 2020

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Operation Gridlock, Lansing, MI, April 15, 2020; AP photo by Paul Sancya

Back in the first week of March, the Grand Princess cruise ship sat floating off the coast of San Francisco in political limbo after 21 of its passengers and crew members tested positive for covid-19 with 2,422 passengers stuck onboard along with 1,111 crew members, some of them serving meals to passengers’ rooms.

“I like the numbers being where they are,” the president said about the possibility of allowing the passengers and crew off the ship. “I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.”

While the curve has yet to plateau, as infections still surge and with the White House frantically flailing to reopen the frozen culture and commerce of the nation, the American Clinical Laboratory Association reported that the number of daily samples analyzed by commercial labs fell from 108,000 on April 5 to 75,000 by April 12.

He doesn’t even have to care because, as long as we cannot adequately test, we cannot track the viral spread and we cannot know exactly how many are infected or have died from it. Without the data, any old argument for “getting back to normal” will do.

Yesterday, Wednesday, April 15, 2020, Michigan reminded the rest of us of the armed protests of the Obama era, when it was common enough for teabaggers to show off their arsenals…

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Barry Dredze
Barry Dredze

Written by Barry Dredze

Just another mortal, tweaking my cognitive map on the fly.

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