Good morning. 
Saturday in Whitewater will see thunderstorms with a high of fifty-two. Sunrise is 6:41 AM and sunset 7:17 PM, for 12h 36m 26s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 14.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand two hundred thirty-sixth day.
On this day in 1862, in the Battle of Glorieta Pass, Union forces stop the Confederate invasion of the New Mexico Territory.
Recommended for reading in full —
Conservative Jonathan V. Last writes COVID-19 Is Not a Black Swan. Trump Is the Black Swan (‘The problem isn’t that America couldn’t plan for a pandemic. It’s that we couldn’t plan for a president so incompetent that he failed to follow the most basic protocols for fighting a pandemic’):
See this section from the Atlantic’s big piece on what the COVID-19 endgame is going to look like:
As my colleagues Alexis Madrigal and Robinson Meyer have reported, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention developed and distributed a faulty test in February. Independent labs created alternatives, but were mired in bureaucracy from the FDA. In a crucial month when the American caseload shot into the tens of thousands, only hundreds of people were tested. That a biomedical powerhouse like the U.S. should so thoroughly fail to create a very simple diagnostic test was, quite literally, unimaginable. “I’m not aware of any simulations that I or others have run where we [considered] a failure of testing,” says Alexandra Phelan of Georgetown University, who works on legal and policy issues related to infectious diseases.
The testing fiasco was the original sin of America’s pandemic failure, the single flaw that undermined every other countermeasure. If the country could have accurately tracked the spread of the virus, hospitals could have executed their pandemic plans, girding themselves by allocating treatment rooms, ordering extra supplies, tagging in personnel, or assigning specific facilities to deal with COVID-19 cases. None of that happened.
Let me read the key part to you again:
“I’m not aware of any simulations that I or others have run where we [considered] a failure of testing,” says Alexandra Phelan.
People have been saying that you can’t plan for a once-in-a-century pandemic—there is no playbook for that kind of disaster.
This is not true. There is literally a playbook for pandemics.
What you can’t plan for is the possibility of a government seeing the pandemic coming and refusing to follow basic protocols for managing the crisis.
The black swan here isn’t COVID-19.
It’s Trump.
(Emphasis in original.)
Hannah Natansan reports After uproar, USDA says parents can pick up school meals without kids present:
The federal government is waiving a policy that required students to come in-person to pick up free meals during school closures, after legislators and advocates said the rule was imperiling the health and safety of children with compromised immune systems.
New guidance from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, issued this week, allows school districts to distribute meals “to a parent or guardian to take home to their children,” according to a copy of the guidance obtained by The Washington Post.
Therapy Dog Visits Quarantined Senior Citizens Through Safety of Windows: