SWC’s Fast Five

Protests continue, the coronavirus gives head fakes, police culture is under scrutiny, jobs grew for a month – it was another roller coaster week as some of us get through it with a lot of sugar and twice the caffeine.

So, here’s this week’s Fast Five:

1 Calls to defund the police examines the meaning of public safety.

The proposal to defund the police emerging in pockets throughout the U.S., coming from elected officials, social justice groups and others, debates the broad role of police as community protectors.

2 It’s going to be a while: 500 epidemiologists on when they expect to do everyday activities again.

More than 500 epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists respond to The New York Times on when they anticipate resuming 20 activities. A majority said it would be more than a year before they stopped routinely wearing a mask outside their homes.

3 It’s official: The U.S. economy is in a recession.

Heard of the National Bureau of Economic Research? Neither had we but it decides if and when the U.S., has entered a recession, which it says we did, in February. The question is, when will it end, or hit bottom, and how long after that before we dig out of the hole it created?

4 Millions still sidelined and lose hope of getting jobs back.

A study by the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute for Economics reports that 42 percent of pandemic-related layoffs could become permanent job losses. It took five years to regain the nearly 9 million jobs lost in the Great Recession. More than 20 million jobs are still lost in this year of the coronavirus.

5 Dalgona: Instant coffee gets an unnecessary reprieve.

Apparently this is a pandemic-fostered craze. A coffee craze for which coffee is incidental. If you like to waste time, prepare a coffee drink that doesn’t taste like coffee but delivers all the sugar and twice the caffeine, dalgona is for you.