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No large public events in Somerville for the rest of the year: No Honk, no Fluff, no ArtBeat
By adamg on Sat, 05/16/2020 - 11:13am
Somerville Mayor Joe Curtatone announced yesterday that the city has canceled all large events for the rest of 2020 due to Covid-19 concerns:
It breaks my heart to cancel city events for rest of the year, but it had to be done. It leaves a huge hole in the social fabric of our city. Yet we will find other ways to share our art and culture during these times.
Curtatone added that the announcement does not include public schools - what to do about those remains up in the air.
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Comments
We need a Hipster French Toast Alert System
Irony has been cancelled in it's very home.
No Fluff Festival, no Honk!
Four dollar donuts in Union Square weep, as hipster pork pie hats are reworked into mandatory face coverings all through Davis.
Say it ain't so, Joe.
This comment deserves it
OKAY BOOMER!
OK Alanis
No. But what is ironic is when some old dude mistakenly labels something "irony", but instead only shows that said old dude doesn't know what the word means.
Relieved to hear this
2020 is gonna be a washout anyway, and I appreciate that Somerville is being honest and up-front about it instead of "let's take this like a week at a time and drag it out" (the Baker approach) or "Yay we won already cause I defeated it" (the Trump approach).
A week at a time, I wish!
A week at a time, I wish! Baker just extended the essential only order 24 hours. And he wont say what happens then, he wants to announce it and it to happen all at once. So those of us who work in non-essential may have less than a day to find out and return to work. Businesses have less than a day to prepare if they find out they can open. He played this game with the olympics, bravely waiting till after Boston pulled out to announce his stance. This is much more serious.
Highly doubt restrictions are lifted tomorrow
The order was set to expire tomorrow so it had to be extended 24 hours to provide time for the official announcement of new rules.
Easy enough to predict these extensions
Just pay attention to the data - just like the governor does. For a non-epidemiologist, the guy really does get it.
IF the deaths and cases and hospitalizations all rise, the order gets extended.
If they don't drop for a time and just hold or bounce up and down, the current status gets extended.
If they consistently drop for a period of time, things start to slow open. If there is a slow open and they spike back, we close down again.
https://www.mass.gov/info-details/covid-19-response-reporting
Simple.
Except for the Epedemiologists saying the opposite
John Ioannidis, David Katz, Knut Wittowski, Johan Geseinke...all excellent epedemiologists saying the exact opposite. Im not sure where so many peopke are getting data, but it looks like pharma sponsored MSM. Sweden is faring better than MA with zero lockdown and schools open. Im not sure why anyone thinks that crowding more peopke into fewer stores makes any bit of sense on how to tackle this thing, but its truly amazing to view how fast people climb on board bad data. Unfortunately, most of you are your own worst enemies, causing deaths through economic fallout. The UN just released a report predicting hundreds of thousands of infant deaths due to economic problems, and 60 million CHILDREN put into extreme poverty. So many brainless people trying to tie this to politics. I hope everyone remembers where they stood on this issue 6 months or a year from now.
Yeah, Sweden's great, as long as you ignore all the dead people
And I realize that the Republican Party has become a death cult that no longer cares how many people die, but, even with that:
Source.
Also, unlike many Americans, Swedes are smart enough to have voluntarily done many of the same things we're supposed to do here, without turning face masks into a political issue:
Finally, unlike much of the US, Sweden has a well functioning public-health and hospital system.
Absurd to call me Republican
For one..Im not even close to Republican. Secondly, bringing politics into science just makes people look like they dont appreciate science. The data is excellent on Sweden. They even go so far as to report numbers dying with Covid(where covid is present but not necessarily causing the death) and from covid(where death was actually caused by covid) the numbers you see, and generally reported are the "with Covid", despite being higher in total by around 1,000 deaths. Denmark and Norway are both half the popukation of Sweden and only report "from Covid" numbers. There statistics are far more similar than people like to admit. Lastly, any possible way you slice the data, Sweden is doing FAR better than MA. More immunity, fewer deaths, kids being educated, way fewer unemployed, less lical and federal funds being eroded, less rent and mortgage defaults. The WHO has lauded Sweden for their ability to achieve these results without lockdown. Everyone is now beciming the Swedish model..cant you see that??? Its not a matter of if, its a matter of when. The death cult members are the moronic who believe you can take the never before attempted step of shutting down an economy and believe this can magically happen without repercussions. THAT CAUSES DEATHS!!!! More than this virus ever will. 1 in 4 restaurants predicted to shutter..bankruptcies, mortgage defaults, plummeting real estate prices are all waiting right around the corner. Wake up and smell the depression if you can pull yourselves away from CNN's fear mongering about a virus killing the unhealthiest 1%. Stat of the day..if you are under 65, you had a better chance being killed by the flu this year than Covid 19.
Check your sources, please!
Wittowski is not an epidemiologist - he's a computer guy. Several others you mentioned are not public health trained, either. They may have some association with medicine, but that isn't the same as public health.
They are hacks trying to find excuses to "sound sciency" and explain away things that are inconvenient to their forturnes. Put them in your drawer of "scientists" who deny climate change - a bunch of people with some science background pretending to know things that 99 percent of their peers don't.
I am an epidemiologist. I follow these things. I can tell who knows what they are talking about, and who is an economist pretending to possess or discover some knowledge that somehow got missed in 200 years of the profession. Follow the money, honey.
Sweden made a bet using chips we don't have. They ran the same models, noticed that their healthy population and sound health and social welfare support system bought them some slack, and took a gamble on that. Why did they fail so badly? They didn't know (nobody knew, really) the extent of the role of superspreaders - asymptomatic people who go about their business and spread virus like Johnny Appleseed.
And yes, THEY FAILED. The bodies are piling up. Massively bigger impact than the surrounding countries with similar populations. 10x the death rate of Norway, which had the same social support and health status advantages. It is also doubtful that they spared their economy any pain given the impacts of that death toll.
And, again, the US NEVER could have done this. We have the shittiest health outcomes in the "wealthy" world, and shit for social welfare supports.
Anders Tegnell, Sweden's state epidemiologist and architect behind Sweden's coronavirus plan even said he wasn't sure if the relaxed approach is working.
Why so negative?
I really disagree and dont knownwhy you need to cancel now unless there is intense planning and money being spent for something. People seem a bit unwillingvto accept the science that this thing is running its course. It seems Boston is already in the neighborhood of 10% immunity, which shoukd already get the transmission rate below 1. That combined with warm weather and I would imagine we will see very few new cases by mid June. The charts are almost identical to other respiratory viruses in their spread and decrease...this one, however seems partucularly dangerous to those above the years of t-cell production, and the fact that it was novel was certainly scary at the beginning. The media fear mongering has been insane for this thing, though. Our schools should be open right now and the healthy should be at work, and the at risk should be quarantined. We cannot run a functioning society this way..This is the first time in history we have quarantined the healthy.
No it isn't
You might want to read up on the public-health efforts related to the second wave of the 1918 flu epidemic.
If I sound negative
It's because 100,000 Americans have died in two months and the big takeaway seems to be how unfair it is that we can't go to Olive Garden. It's like being mad at 1:00 on 9/11/01 that you're bored by the news and can't believe they won't show your soap opera.
What the Fluff?
Sad but necessary.
Other Somerville events that this cancels
SomerStreets in August (Highland Ave), September (Holland St), and October (Somerville Ave)
Ignite! festival in August (Union Square)
Rock and Roll Yard Sale in September (Union Square)
Evolution of Hip-Hop in September (Union Square)
RiverFest in September (Assembly Row)
Illuminations Trolley Tour in December
Docent tours of Milk Row Cemetery, Prospect Hill Tower, and Powder House (each twice-monthly during warm-weather months)
(previously cancelled)
Big Gay Dance Party in June (Union Square)
SomerStreets Carnival in June (Broadway, East Somerville)
Joe's Jazz and Blues Festival in June (Powder House Park)
pre-July 4 fireworks (Trum Field)
I don't know if it will affect these events, which occur on private property and are not sponsored by the city:
Greek Food Festival in September
Brickbottom and Joy Street Open Studios in November
Vernon Street Open Studios, often (but not every year) in December
Also
Taste of Somerville, the Turkey Trot, and random Halloween race and the Santa Run.
East Somerville Foodie Crawl, too
which is normally scheduled for September
Maybe all the parties should be moved to Malden.
Their City Council would approve.
Only if they are all about
Only if they are all about HER.
All tomorrows parties
2021 or maybe 2022 will be a massive celebration time. Most of these celebrations will return in time and they will be blowout awesome!
Think of the absence of FLUFF! as a metro-scale marshmallow test. If we don't have Fluff now, we will live to next year to have more fluff.