Dr. Nathan Lents is a Darwinist biologist who has tangled with design science in the past. His response to the coronavirus pandemic is, believe it or not, to chastise ordinary people who question the competence of public health experts. On Twitter, Dr. Lents rants:

Something I have heard WAY TOO OFTEN from otherwise smart/thoughtful people: "What about all the harm to mental and physical health by saying home/alone this much?" Y'all need to STOP with the notion that #PublicHealth scientists at the CDC/NIH/WHO are just forgetting or ignoring the costs & dangers of all this sheltering-in-place. OF COURSE they know all that. The entire field of Public Health is about weighing multiple factors, balancing disparate health risks and benefits, calculating costs and dangers. THAT IS WHAT THE FIELD *IS*.

A U.S. postal carrier is dead after reportedly being shot by a man on her route following disagreements about withheld mail including stimulus checks and an aggressive dog, according to multiple media outlets.

The president of the local mail carriers union in Indianapolis says Angela Summers was shot after a person inside a home she delivers mail to had not received their stimulus check, according to WXIN.

Tony Cushingberry, 21, was charged Wednesday with "second-degree murder, assaulting a federal employee and discharging a firearm during a crime, according to court documents filed Wednesday," the Indianapolis Star reported.

"Anyone who threatens, assaults, or otherwise harms a postal employee fulfilling her critical mission will be apprehended and held fully accountable," Detroit Division Acting Inspector in Charge Felicia George said in a news release.

One by one, the five mothers confronted the man they hold responsible for the death of their children, young people recruited by a corrupt rehab program in South Florida who never got the help they needed and eventually overdosed.

The object of their anger, Kenneth Chatman — the architect of a multimillion-dollar scheme that turned desperate addicts into money machines and forced women into prostitution — showed little emotion as he listened to their stories and waited to hear how much time he will spend in prison.

"You destroyed my life," Tina Pekar, whose son Ryan overdosed in one of Chatman's two "sober homes" in 2014, said in federal court on Wednesday.

Sandy Hinkle's 23-year-old daughter, Kaitlyn Cruea, died of an overdose in February 2016. She had never been on a plane before but flew from Ohio to West Palm Beach to deliver a message to the judge who would decide Chatman's fate.

Jean Wickham's two sons are in college. Her husband has worked at the same New Jersey casino for 36 years.

She recently felt secure enough to trade her full-time casino job for two part-time gigs that came with an expectation of bigger tips.

Then the coronavirus shut down every casino in Atlantic City and instantly put more than 26,000 people out of work — 10 percent of the county's population.

"I've worked since I was 14 years old," said Ms. Wickham, 55, a card dealer. "We've never had to rely on anyone else."

Until now.

The Wickhams' minivan was one of thousands of vehicles that snaked as far as the eye could see one morning last week in Egg Harbor, N.J., 10 miles west of Atlantic City. The promise of fresh produce and a 30-pound box of canned food, pasta and rice from a food bank drew so many cars that traffic was snarled for nearly a mile in three directions, leading to five accidents, the police said.

A town in southern Sweden has turned to a traditional source to try to prevent the coronavirus spreading during an annual festive event on Thursday - chicken manure.

The university town of Lund began spreading chicken droppings in its central park to put off would-be revellers who would usually come on April 30 to celebrate Walpurgis Night.

The occasion, marking the shift away from dark, chilly winter days towards brighter spring and summer days, is typically celebrated with picnics, parties and bonfires across the country, and regularly attracts thousands of students.

"This is a park where usually 30,000 people gather, but with COVID-19 this is now unthinkable," the town's mayor, Philip Sandberg, told Reuters. "We don't want Lund to become an epicentre for the spread of the disease."

Sweden has taken a softer approach than many other countries to preventing the spread of the respiratory disease that the coronavirus can cause, asking rather than ordering people to maintain social distancing.

First-time filings for unemployment insurance hit 3.84 million last week as the wave of economic pain continues, though the worst appears to be in the past, according to Labor Department figures Thursday.

Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been looking for 3.5 million.

Jobless claims for the week ended April 25 came in at the lowest level since March 21 but bring the rolling six-week total to 30.3 million as part of the worst employment crisis in U.S. history. Claims hit a record 6.87 million for the week of March 28 and have declined each week since then.

Last week's initially reported figure was revised up by 15,000 to 4.4 million, meaning that the most recent total is a decrease of 603,000.

Continuing claims rose to just shy of 18 million, a rise of 2.2 million from the previous week.

Below is a new interview with Dr. Knut M. Wittkowski, PhD, ScD, who headed the Department Biostatistics, Epidemiology & Research Design at Rockefeller University in New York for 20 years. It's a follow up interview from one he gave nearly a month ago, where he made a number of interesting observations about the new coronavirus pandemic, at the time. For example, he looked into the claim that people were making that in China and in South Korea, social distancing had successfully helped to control the epidemic. He went through the data and found out that social distancing, isolation and lockdown measures were not put in place until well after the peak of the epidemic in those countries.

This hinted to the idea that herd immunity, not lockdown, was responsible for the already declining number of cases and deaths in those countries. He emphasized, in that interview, that social distancing and lockdown measures were preventing herd immunity in the United States, and as a result there might be a 'second wave' that will come not long after lockdown measures ease. Of course, this second wave will mostly likely be attributed to lifting lockdown measures, when, according to Wittkowski, it will be a result of preventing herd immunity due to lockdown measures.

Gleaming new tent hospitals sit empty on two suburban New York college campuses, never having treated a single coronavirus patient. Convention centers that were turned into temporary hospitals in other cities went mostly unused. And a Navy hospital ship that offered help in Manhattan is soon to depart.

When virus infections slowed down or fell short of worst-case predictions, the globe was left dotted with dozens of barely used or unused field hospitals. Some public officials say that's a good problem to have — despite spending potentially billions of dollars to erect the care centers — because it's a sign the deadly disease was not nearly as cataclysmic as it might have been.

Many of the facilities will now be kept on standby for a possible second wave of infections. Some could even be repurposed as testing sites or recovery centers.

Democratic candidate Joe Biden's campaign says the sexual assault claim against him was disproven by a New York Times probe. Originally criticized for going too soft on Biden, the Times now says it never wrote off the allegation.

Tara Reade, who worked for Biden's Senate office in 1993, claims that Biden cornered her in the basement of a Capitol Hill office building and forced himself on her, penetrating her with his fingers against her will. Biden's campaign has dismissed the allegations, and has circulated the talking points it's using to counter them.

Those talking points, revealed by Buzzfeed News on Tuesday, instruct campaign surrogates to refer back to a New York Times article published earlier this month, which the Biden campaign claims "found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden," and concluded "this incident did not happen."

These points have been repeated almost verbatim by Biden's supporters in recent days. Former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams - angling for a slot as Biden's running mate - trotted them out in a CNN interview on Tuesday, saying "The New York Times did a deep investigation and they found that the accusation was not credible. I believe Joe Biden."

The New York Times, however, says that Biden's campaign is misrepresenting its article. "Our investigation made no conclusion either way," the Times's vice president of communications, Danielle Rhoades-Ha told the Washington Examiner on Wednesday. Team Biden's talking points "inaccurately" suggest that the alleged incident "did not happen," the statement added.

Received this letter from Wyoming Doc today, which I post with his permission:

Over the last few days, I along with some 5 million other Americans watched a video of 2 ER doctors in California discussing our current status and situation regarding COVID. They had their own spin on the government's own numbers. They said a few things that I categorically disagree with. I disagree with lots of things I read and see. That is part of having a human mind that can think critically. The ER docs' overall take was that the current lockdown approach was not helping and very likely making things worse — not only with the viral epidemic, but certainly with our economy.

I will confirm for you that for the last three weeks, my number of COVID patients has been absolutely dwarfed by the number of patients with acute anxiety, depression, wife beating, child beating, suicidal ideation, and any number of young grown men crying like babies on televisits or in my office. Large numbers of people are losing their livelihood, and they are freaking out. We are headed for a severe tragedy in this society, and its name is not COVID.

I will also tell you that I am on a conference call every day with some of the pre-eminent epidemiologists and infectious disease doctors in this country. Just Monday, one of the brightest epidemiologic minds in this nation basically stated - and I am paraphrasing - "I am certainly not minimizing this virus. This thing is evil. But it, like its cousins, is not really amenable to our current approaches. The immunity response is looking more and more like it is variable and incomplete. Therefore vaccines and immunity testing are going to be very unreliable if not impossible with our current abilities. That may change in the future, but who knows how long that will take. More importantly, a fundamental aspect of public health — herd immunity — may be very different with this current virus than we have experienced before. This virus is most definitely not measles. We just do not know the extent yet, but things are certainly not going to be what we are used to. Because of this, the current lockdown approach may not be of any help at all; it may actually be making things worse. We just do not know — and the stakes are enormous. We absolutely have a tiger by the tail. We are walking through the undiscovered country."