Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
The House of Commons and Science and Technology Committee and Health and Social Care Committee have published their Report, Coronavirus: lessons learned to date, examining Read the full article…
“The illusion of reopening is that we’re back where we were in February of 2020. The reality is that in the meantime, there’s been incredible damage that has happened.” - New York Theatre
Another Winter of COVID The New Yorker. Nobody understands anything but vax, vax, vax. A truly splendid example of the systematic erasure of aerosol transmission (and, at a higher level, layered strategies of prevention, including masking). Why in the name of all that is holy do these ultra-smart people think that transmission rates differ indoors and outdoors? Concluding: “We all walked into this pandemic together. But we’ll leave it at different speeds, and at different times.” Yes, we will, but no, we all very didn’t. Handy map:
It sounded like the ultimate COVID-era travel bargain: five-star hotels in Manhattan at a 60 percent discount. “I do not know exactly what hotel u would be place but I know it would be 5 star hotel … be cash app ready!!” read a Facebook post hyping the deal. A Cash App–only hotel promotion might raise a few red flags, but trust that the rooms were very much real — they were just supposed to be set aside for COVID patients and health-care providers. The scam was uncovered after four months of excellent business, and this week, federal prosecutors charged Chanette Lewis with fraudulently booking New York’s emergency COVID hotel rooms using health-care workers’ stolen personal information. Lewis, 30, and three other accomplices are alleged to have advertised the rooms on Facebook and to have made a whopping $400,000 by booking more than 2,700 nights’ worth of stays in the spring and summer of last year.
Lewis, whose actual job was to book quarantine rooms on behalf of the city, had access to health-care workers’ personal information through her work at the Office of Emergency Management. But she allegedly used their credentials to book stays for her guests instead, making it look like they had been exposed to COVID. “I stole some doctor numbers and emails … I was writing down they employed ID number lmao,” prosecutors say Lewis wrote in a Facebook message. The hotel rooms, which would normally run hundreds of dollars a night, went for only $50 a night and $150 for the week. She then took the cash, prosecutors say, and the city was billed for the rooms. The grift went so well that Lewis recruited others to help her out. “I wanna teach u the ropes of it,” she messaged her co-conspirator Tatiana Benjamin, 26, in June. Her guests did the opposite of quarantine; some threw parties and, as one special agent for the U.S. Attorney ominously put it, “engaged in violence.”
