“Some church members said their health is in God’s hands.”
Coronavirus deniers and hoaxers persist despite dire warnings, claiming ‘it’s mass hysteria’:
Sunday unfolded with relative normalcy in tiny Wellsville, pop. 1,809, even as Franklin County officials declared a “state of local disaster” and shut the schools until March 30. Restaurants were open and the hardware parking lot was full. A nearby Dollar General had steady business, with one lone toilet paper roll left on the shelves.
Services went on as scheduled at Wellsville Baptist Church, though Pastor Bill Hendricks is trying to move the gatherings online. Hand sanitizer was placed on tables in the back, and residents jokingly tried to bump elbows rather than greet each other with hugs.
In his sermon, Hendricks said he had but one message for his flock this day — turn off the television.
“What’s being played over and over again,” he said, “is stoking fear.”
Some church members said their health is in God’s hands.
“We just need to trust the Lord to solve this,” said Ted Buckley, 73, a retired salesman. “I don’t know anybody personally with coronavirus. We shouldn’t be thrown into a state of panic because of what we hear, rather than what we see and witness.”
Religion can bring out the worst and most ignorant in people, can’t it?
But hold on, let’s get nuanced. I don’t disagree with everything this fuckwit pastor said. I do agree in limiting your exposure to media, be it social or mass. Don’t spend your entire day watching CNN, Fox, Facebook, or Twitter. The term I use for my routine is, “dip in, dip out”. I launch Twitter, I skim my feed, maybe like or reply to something, and close the browser window. I dip in and I dip out.
Now for what the rocket scientist Ted Buckley said, if anyone believes in “trusting the lord to solve this” then they need to stop using modern medicine and see how long they last. They are no longer allowed to visit pharmacies, ERs, or use bandages.
If Buckley develops throat cancer, he needs to gargle with “holy” water. Leave it in god’s hands.
“such a tool is barely in its trial stages”
Gizmodo: Google Scrambles to Make the White House Seem Competent:
Google has announced that it’s partnering with the White House to create a national coronavirus website, which is totally related to whatever the hell the administration was talking about at Friday’s press conference. There, President Donald Trump vastly oversold and misattributed an upcoming, supposedly Google-run project to build a “nationwide” coronavirus screening site to direct people to nearby “drive through” testing depending on their symptoms.
In reality—as Google clarified in a frantic tweet just hours later—such a tool is barely in its trial stages at Verily, Google’s sister-company under the Alphabet umbrella, and it will only be useful for people in the San Francisco Bay Area for the foreseeable future. It purportedly wasn’t even intended to be publically available until White House staff dropped the ball.
A person familiar with the matter told the New York Times that Verily’s pilot program (not a website—that’s still yet to be announced) is planned to launch Monday and can direct Bay Area residents exhibiting flagged symptoms to a total of three testing locations. While still absolutely commendable, don’t get me wrong, that’s still significantly different and scaled-down from what Trump and co. were selling.
Anyone who works on websites and apps knows no one, not even Google, can launch a nationwide website in few days, or a few weeks. There’s many moving parts: design, development, databases, security, redundancy, HIPAA Compliance, and testing/QA to name just a few.