Good morning. 
Monday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with afternoon showers and a high of sixty-four. Sunrise is 7:06 AM and sunset 6:15 PM, for 11h 09m 20s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 25.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand four hundred thirty-fourth day.
Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6 PM.
On this day in 1928, an iron lung respirator is used for the first time at Boston Children’s Hospital.
Recommended for reading in full —
Trump’s words on covid-19 are like ‘slap in the face’ for those who lost family:
President Trump’s comparisons in October of the coronavirus to the flu and admonitions not to fear it were “appalling” to those who have lost family members.
Nicola Davis reports on ‘Brain fog’: the people struggling to think clearly months after Covid:
For Mirabai Nicholson-McKellar, Covid-19 brought an onslaught of symptoms from chest pains to an 11-day migraine, three positive test results, and a period in hospital.
Seven months later, the rollercoaster is far from over: the 36-year-old from Byron Bay, Australia is still experiencing symptoms – including difficulties with thinking that are often described as “brain fog”.
“Brain fog seems like such an inferior description of what is actually going on. It’s completely crippling. I am unable to think clearly enough to [do] anything,” says Nicholson-McKellar, adding that the experience would be better described as cognitive impairment.
….
Dr Michael Zandi, a consultant at the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology , says he has seen patients who have been living with brain fog for a few months. While some have been admitted to hospital or intensive care with Covid, Zandi says he is now seeing cases among people who coped with Covid at home.
“The proportion of people with cognitive symptoms for any period of time as a result of Covid-19 is unknown, and a focus of study now, but in some studies could be up to 20%,” he says.
Kate Manne writes Trump obsesses over ‘dominating’ covid-19 because he wants to look manly (‘According to this worldview, if you take any pandemic precautions, you “submit” to the virus’):
The president, a self-professed germaphobe, could hardly have been more explicit about his worldview: This potentially deadly illness is something to dominate or be dominated by. It does not matter whether a person is an essential worker, is in a high-risk demographic, has a chronic health condition, or is simply and sometimes tragically unlucky: Illness is a weakness, and those who succumb are feeble, even pathetic. Those who conquer it are, conversely, strong and morally admirable. This view is a crucial element of toxic masculinity, which festers and causes harm, not just to individual men but to everyone around them.
….
Bankrupt machismo feeds Trump’s denialism about this disease, whether he’s contemplating his own frailty or that of the American people. Whatever it means to be a “real man” (a concept I doubt has any genuine value), it’s clear that our era’s incarnation of toxic masculinity has little to do with the real strength it takes to protect and serve the community. Instead it’s about weakness, and the fearful inability to admit to human vulnerability — and it takes an appalling pride in endangering those around you.
(Trump replaces science with ignorance, and prudence with pride. Pride is a sin.)