Tuesday, April 7 coronavirus updates

[Transcript] Hello, welcome to The Daily Moth. Here are updates with the coronavirus pandemic.

Wisconsin ended up holding their primary elections today with in-person voting after the Wisconsin Supreme Court blocked Gov. Tony Evers’ (D) executive order to delay voting until June 9. Axios reported that the conservative-majority court said the governor does “not have the power to unilaterally postpone the election.” The New York Times showed an image of a long line of Wisconsin voters, many wearing masks. They are the first state to hold a major election in spite of stay-at-home orders among multiple states due to the coronavirus. Voters will decide if they want to support Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders and for multiple state-level offices and for a State Supreme Court seat. We won’t know the results until April 13.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is still in an ICU unit in a London hospital after his coronavirus symptoms worsened. He is said to be able to breathe normally but is receiving oxygen support. He isn’t using a ventilator. If Johnson becomes severely ill or dies, the next person in the line of succession seems to be the British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab.

News reports say that China has ended its lockdown of Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic. People can leave Wuhan if they show a government phone app that says they are not a risk of spreading the virus. China also reached a milestone in that it had a full day with no reported COVID-19 death since January. There are 11 million people who live in Wuhan.

The Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly has resigned. He was the one who fired the former captain of the USS Theodore Roosevelt, Brett Crozier, after Crozier wrote an email to about 20 people pleading for the ship to be docked in Guam because the coronavirus was spreading among a crew of over 4,000 sailors. The letter by Crozier ended up being leaked to the media and it led to Modly firing Crozier.

Crozier was removed from the ship a few days ago and a video posted on Twitter shows the crew chanting “Captain Crozier” in support of him.

Yesterday Modly went to Guam and gave a speech to the ship’s crew in which he said Crozier did a serious violation of Navy rules by purposefully leaking his letter, and that if he didn’t think it could get leaked, he was too naive or stupid to lead the ship. Modly also chided the crew for cheering on Crozier, telling them that they are under no obligation to love him, but to love the country instead. His speech was criticized by sailors on the ship and by many lawmakers in Washington D.C., mostly Democrats, and its led to his ouster.

The ship is docked in Guam and there are about 230 confirmed cases of COVID-19 among the crew. So there are two top Navy officials who were removed in this controversy.

Politico reported that President Trump has removed Pentagon inspector general Glenn Fine as the person who was tasked with overseeing the $2 trillion coronavirus law to make sure there was no waste, fraud, or corruption. Trump replaced him with the inspector general of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Democratic leaders said this is a distributing patten of Trump acting out in retaliation, pointing out that he fired the intelligence community Inspector General Atkinson on Friday (he was the one who advanced a whistleblower complaint about Trump’s phone call with Ukraine’s president that led to Trump’s impeachment last year). Atkinson was fired on Friday, and we have the removal today, so there is criticism and concerns.

In separate but related news, President Trump blasted the inspector general of the Health and Human Services Christi Grimm for writing a report that said there were serious issues with testing delays and supplies at hospitals across the U.S. Trump said she wrote “another fake dossier!” There is controversy with Trump’s relationship with inspector generals from different agencies.

As of 5:00 pm today, there are 386,800 cases of COVID-19 in the United States. 12,285 have died while 20,191 have recovered.

USAToday reported that data from New York showed that out of the state’s 4,700 deaths from COVID-19, 61% were men and that 86% of those who died had underlying health issues such as hypertension (high blood pressure) and diabetes. So they had those issues and with COVID-19, they died. 63% of the deaths were those aged 70 or older.

That’s all for today. See you tomorrow and stay with the light!

https://www.axios.com/wisconsin-primary-delay-tony-evers...
https://www.nytimes.com/.../wisconsin-primary-election.html
https://www.nytimes.com/.../coronavirus-updates-news-live...
https://www.axios.com/china-wuhan-coronavirus-lockdown...
https://www.usatoday.com/.../coronavirus.../2963986001/
https://www.nbcnews.com/.../videos-show-sailors-cheering...
https://taskandpurpose.com/.../navy-secretary-blasts...
https://www.usatoday.com/.../new-york.../2960151001/
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