Spotlight on Donald: No matter how angry he is with the press, President Trump couldn’t stay out of the spotlight for more than two days. After announcing he would have no more coronavirus briefings, Trump dove back into the pool yesterday.

  The President announced a plan to help the states conduct more tests, but he’s leaving it up to them to do it. The goal is to have the states test two percent of their population every month with Washington as “a supplier of last resort.”

  “We want to get our country open, and testing is not going to be a problem at all,” Trump said at the White House, even though testing has been a problem all along.

  At his briefing, Trump rolled out a lineup of health company executives to deliver speeches about what great work they are doing.

  Democratic leaders immediately jumped on Trump, saying his plan is not very specific and does nothing to solve the supply problems the states have been facing. It’s been seven weeks since Trump said anyone who needs a test can get one, and that has not happened. 

  Trump also suggested to governors on a conference call that the states should start re-opening schools. According to an audio recording obtained by The New York Times, Trump said, “The young children have done very well in this disaster that we’ve all gone through, so a lot of people are thinking about the school openings.”

  Good luck keeping seven year-olds six feet apart.

 When told by a reporter that there’s been a spike in calls to poison control centers since he suggested that taking disinfectant might be a cure, the President said,  “I can’t imagine why.” Asked if he took responsibility, he said, “No, I don’t.”

  The President’s briefing took place after he spent time yesterday morning taking shots at the press. “FAKE NEWS, THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!” he tweeted. And he said, “There has never been, in the history of our Country, a more vicious or hostile Lamestream Media than there is right now, even in the midst of a National Emergency, the Invisible Enemy!”

The Toll: New York health officials have noticed an unusually high death rate in recent weeks that goes beyond the addition of known coronavirus deaths to the usual statistics. More than 27,000 New Yorkers have died since the start of the novel coronavirus outbreak in March, 20,900 more than would be expected over this period. There’s no explanation for it yet, but the numbers have health officials wondering whether the virus has been even more devastating for the city than they know.

  Deaths are falling in New York and across the country. This morning, a total of 17,515 New Yorkers have died of the virus, 235 of them in the past 24 hours. While that’s an improvement, it’s still a high number.

  Overall, the country is moving quickly toward 60,000 deaths; 56,253 as of this morning.

For Whom the Bell Tolls: A prominent Manhattan emergency room doctor who had been in the trenches with the coronavirus committed suicide in Charlottesville, Va., where she was staying with family. Dr. Lorna Breen, 49, was the medical director of the emergency department at New York-Presbyterian Allen Hospital. 

  Dr. Breen had contracted the virus but was sent home again after recovering for about a week and a half. Her father told The NY Times that she described horrific scenes of people dying even before they could be brought out of an ambulance.

  Her father, Dr. Phillip Breen, told the Times, “Make sure she’s praised as a hero, because she was. She’s a casualty just as much as anyone else who has died.”

Re-opening: While the World Health Organization says the pandemic is far from over, at least a dozen US states are moving forward with re-opening their economies. Texas announced that stores, restaurants, movie theaters, and malls would be allowed to re-open with limited capacity. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine is allowing manufacturing to resume and offices to reopen next week. Many restaurants re-opened in Georgia, with few customers.

The Bulletin Board: The computers at the Small Business Administration immediately crashed yesterday morning under the weight of demand for the second round of emergency loans. — New York’s Democratic party has cancelled its June presidential primary calling the vote “essentially a beauty contest” that the state can’t afford during the pandemic crisis. Although Bernie Sanders has conceded the race, one of his top advisers criticized the decision as a “blow to American democracy.”  — New York Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that the city would close at least 40 miles of streets to vehicle traffic to give New Yorkers more outdoor space for social-distancing. He said the city would start with streets in and near the parks. The mayor said, “The goal is to get up to 100 miles of those open streets.” 

Small Spaces: One of the longest running arguments in the computer age has been whether it’s still appropriate to put two spaces at the end of a sentence before starting the next. Like this.  Two spaces are a hangover from the days of typewriters, but some people still like them.

  Not so with Microsoft, which has decided to have its Word program flag two spaces after a sentence as an error.

  Evidently you can instruct your Word program to ignore the error identification and allow you two spaces, something about right clicking and yeah, you know. Maybe about a dozen people will do that. It’s basically the end of the story for two spaces at the end of a sentence. 

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