3 Stories You Should Read 5/7/2020: The Moon, Covid 19 tests, White House and Face Masks

May 7, 2020 Confluence

Reading Time: 2 minutes

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In the category of: Failure to cooperate

White House becomes ground zero for culture war over face masks

President Donald Trump won’t wear one in public, at least in front of cameras. His aides in the West Wing remove them before walking inside. Vice President Mike Pence violated a hospital’s rules by visiting without one last week, only to say later he should have tied one on.

On Thursday, the White House confirmed one of the President’s staffers — a US military member responsible for attending to his personal needs in the Oval Office — had tested positive for coronavirus. Like others inside the building, valets haven’t been wearing masks at work as they go about their jobs serving the President and his family.

The development angered Trump and led to a renewed round of testing for him and Pence. But it did not appear likely to change the unwritten code inside the White House against wearing masks, despite recommendations from Trump’s own administration on wearing face coverings where social distancing is difficult.

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In the category of: To test or not to test, this is the question

Should we bother testing people with coronavirus symptoms?

The debate over how to allocate limited Covid-19 tests, explained.

It’s essential to determining who has the virus, which can spread from people who may not exhibit any symptoms at all, sometimes for weeks. These unwitting spreaders are prolonging the pandemic, forcing the government to enact costly economic shutdowns. The way to relax these measures is to test people, sometimes repeatedly, and isolate the infected.

But since there still aren’t enough tests in the US to go around, who should be tested?

Current guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) put hospitalized patients with symptoms; health care workers and first responders with symptoms; and nursing home residents and prisoners at the top of the list — and people who don’t have any Covid-19 symptoms much lower.

However, some researchers say the focus right now should be on finding people with the virus who don’t have symptoms because they are driving new infections. People who are starting to experience fever, shortness of breath, and a loss of smell, they say, should not be tested and should be treated as if they are already infected.

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In the category of: In other beautiful news

New image captures ‘impossible’ view of the moon’s surface

You’ve never seen the moon like in this ‘all terminator’ image (and you never will).

Shadows creep down the banks of every crater on the near-side of the moon, highlighting the pockmarked face of Earth’s gravitationally-bound buddy with a clarity never before seen.

According to photographer Andrew McCarthy, who posted the stunning image to his Instagram in April, there’s a simple explanation for the unprecedented level of detail in his work — this lunar view is actually “impossible.”

“This moon might look a little funny to you, and that’s because it is an impossible scene,” McCarthy wrote on Instagram. “From two weeks of images of the waxing moon, I took the section of the picture that has the most contrast … aligned and blended them to show the rich texture across the entire surface.”

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