Covid-19

[Yankee Tripper]

At the end of the day, neither am I. It's still depressing as hell though. So apparently after the Delta variant (and the Delta plus strain that attacks the spike that the mRNA vaccines use to gain efficacy - sorry if that doesn't make any sense, it's how I remember what my epidemiologist buddy said to me, but I did have a few drinks last night as we chatted), comes the Gamma variant.

Epsilon followed Delta but doesn’t seem to be as severe or transmittable as Delta. What gamma May become is currently unknown I believe.

[jlw1980]

I’m never really surprised anymore when I here someone isn’t vaccinated.

What about when you hear it? Lol

[ajra21]

What about when you hear it? Lol

Ahaha! Damn photo.

[YankeePride1967]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...market/619620/

Time for Covidnomics


Government has done what it can. Now we need to use the power of free markets to fight the pandemic.
By David FrumThe Atlantic
JULY 30, 2021
SHAREAbout the author: David Frum is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy(2020). In 2001 and 2002, he was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush.
First Canada overtook the United States in the vaccination race. Now the European Union has done so. Even poor European countries such as Greece, Lithuania, and Poland have surpassedvaccine-resistant U.S. states such as Ohio, Arkansas, and Missouri.

Why is this happening? Facebook exists on the other side of the Atlantic as much as it does on ours. Europeans do not lack for far-right political parties swayed by Russian misinformation. They are not better educated: Most EU countries send fewer of their young people to postsecondary institutions than the United States does. Anybody who has ever visited a European pharmacy has seen that Europeans are at least as susceptible to quack medicine as Americans.

One big difference between the U.S. and the EU is that European governments have been readier than U.S. governments to impose direct consequences on those who refuse vaccines. On July 1, the European Union adopted a digital pass confirming one’s vaccinated status, and individual member states are restricting access to public facilities for those who do not carry the pass. In Italy, for example, after August 6, anyone over the age of 12 who wants to enter a restaurant, gym, swimming pool, or cinema will need to have their green pass scanned at the door.

The EU system turns proof of vaccination into a QR code that EU citizens can store on their phone. The same code works in all EU countries and is available free of charge to EU citizens in both their national language and English.

[ojo]

That’s awesome, YP67.

Meanwhile, in the United States, as of August 1st, Florida leads the nation in hospitalized children.


https://www.chicagotribune.com/coron...cfa-story.html

People with Covid placed in beds in hospital hallways. Good times.

[ojo]

I’m an ICU doctor and I cannot believe the things unvaccinated patients are telling me.

“We can’t let COVID win.”

This was my colleague’s mantra when the pandemic started last year. And for the almost 18 months since, health care workers have rallied to the battlefields, even at times when we had no weapons to brandish.

We took care of the infected and the critically ill when no one else would. We reused N95 masks, carefully placing them in labeled brown paper bags in between shifts. We witnessed lonely deaths and held up iPads for families to say their heartbreaking goodbyes. We created elaborate backup schedules and neglected our personal lives. We stepped up during surges and when our colleagues fell ill. Camaraderie in the ICU had never been stronger because we recognized that this was a team effort and all of humanity was battling against a common enemy.

But as health care workers, we also were painfully aware of our own vulnerabilities. We can run out of ICU resources for our patients. We can run out of personal protective equipment for ourselves. We can be exposed on the job and get sick. And we can die — many of us did, more than 3,600 from COVID-19 in the first year.

Many of us quarantined away from our families to protect the ones we love. We counted the risk factors of our children, our elderly parents, our spouses, and came up with our own formulas to decide whether to come home at the end of the shift or hole up in a hotel room. One of our ICU directors wrote and rewrote our COVID-19 clinical guidelines to keep up with the evolving literature and somehow she carved out the time to write her own will.

I worked daily to adapt our end-of-life program to the changing needs and restrictions of the pandemic and signed up for a vaccine clinical trial as soon as one became available. I also updated my own advance directive and printed it out for my husband, just in case.

Then, effective vaccines became widely available in the U.S. — I briefly saw light at the end of the tunnel. The number of patients with COVID-19 in ICUs across the country plummeted. It looked like our sacrifices and commitment as health care workers had paid off. We believed herd immunity could become a reality and we could return to some sense of normalcy.

But the relief was short-lived, the hope was fleeting, and we are amid another surge. A surge that is fueled by a highly transmissible variant and those unvaccinated. My experiences in the ICU these past weeks have left me surprised, disheartened, but most of all, angry.

I am angry that the tragic scenes of prior surges are being played out yet again, but now with ICUs primarily filled with patients who have chosen not to be vaccinated. I am angry that it takes me over an hour to explain to an anti-vaxxer full of misinformation that intubation isn’t what “kills patients” and that their wish for chest compressions without intubation in the event of a respiratory arrest makes no sense. I am angry at those who refuse to wear “muzzles” when grocery shopping for half an hour a week, as I have been so-called “muzzled” for much of the past 18 months.

I cannot understand the simultaneous decision to not get vaccinated and the demand to end the restrictions imposed by a pandemic. I cannot help but recoil as if I’ve been slapped in the face when my ICU patient tells me they didn’t get vaccinated because they “just didn’t get around to it.” Although such individuals do not consider themselves anti-vaxxers, their inaction itself is a decision — a decision to not protect themselves or their families, to fill a precious ICU bed, to let new variants flourish, and to endanger the health care workers and immunosuppressed people around them. Their inaction is a decision to let this pandemic continue to rage.

I am at a loss to understand how anyone can look at these past months of the pandemic — more than 600,000 lives lost in the U.S. and more than 4 million worldwide — and not believe it’s real or take it seriously.

And meanwhile, immunocompromised people, for whom vaccines don’t generate much immunity, are desperately waiting for herd immunity. I have no way to comfort my rightfully outraged transplant patients who contracted COVID-19 after isolating for over a year and getting fully vaccinated as soon as they could. With angry tears, these patients tell me it’s not fair that there are people who are choosing to endanger both themselves and the vulnerable people around them. They feel betrayed by their fellow citizens and they are bitter and angry. I cannot blame them.

I am at a loss to understand how anyone can look at these past months of the pandemic — more than 600,000 lives lost in the U.S. and more than 4 million worldwide — and not believe it’s real or take it seriously. But the unhappy truth is that there are people who do not. They did not in the beginning and many are doubling down now.

I thought when this pandemic began that we were all in this fight together, engaged in a war against a common enemy. Now, I painfully realize: Perhaps we were never on the same side and we never had a common enemy. Perhaps the war has been among ourselves all along. We have won many battles but unvaccinated America is choosing to let COVID win the war.



Thanh Neville, M.D., M.S.H.S., is an ICU physician and researcher at UCLA Health

[ajra21]

Who'd have thought there would be consequences to spreading misinformation to stay in power?

[RhodyYanksFan]

That’s awesome, YP67.

Meanwhile, in the United States, as of August 1st, Florida leads the nation in hospitalized children.


https://www.chicagotribune.com/coron...cfa-story.html

People with Covid placed in beds in hospital hallways. Good times.

And their governor is holding back funds to any school district that institutes a mask mandate. This may be the most craven, despicable move I've seen any politician make. How can anybody look at this and not think he's actively rooting for the virus? And it's working...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/educa..._medium=social

Broward County Public Schools intends to comply with the Governor’s latest Executive Order,” the district said in a statement Monday.
“Safety remains our highest priority,” the district said, adding that it will “advocate” for all students and staffers to get vaccinated and “strongly” encourages mask-wearing “by everyone in schools.”

Broward schools, the second-largest district in Florida, and the sixth-largest in the country, announced last Wednesday a mask requirement after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued new guidance that students and staffers in K-12 schools wear masks regardless of their vaccination status in light of the recent surge of the coronavirus delta variant.

Not to be outdone by his fellow Floridaman, Senator Rick Scott came out with a straight face as their hospitals overflow and said the biggest problem Floridians are dealing with is inflation.

[YankeePride1967]

Just saw a town ball meeting in Arkansas where the Governor is belatedly trying to talk people into getting vaccinated. The reasons given by the zombies in the audience? I truly fear for the future of this country

[Texsahara]

Just saw a town ball meeting in Arkansas where the Governor is belatedly trying to talk people into getting vaccinated. The reasons given by the zombies in the audience? I truly fear for the future of this country

This guy?

@therecount
Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R-AR) says he regrets signing law banning local mask mandates, as COVID cases quickly rise in his state.
“In hindsight, I wish that had not become law,” said Hutchinson, who has asked lawmakers to allow school districts to adopt mask mandates. https://t.co/sj1Q8ukLCA

🙄

[ClownPickle]

LOL...

On the same day that New York City authorities announced new rules requiring proof of vaccination for workers and customers at indoor restaurants and gyms, Acting Mayor Kim Janey’s administration said Boston has no plans to follow suit. Asked about New York’s move, Janey emphasized Boston’s efforts on vaccine access and then invoked slavery and Donald Trump’s birtherism.

“When it comes to what businesses may choose to do, we know that those types of things are difficult to enforce when it comes to vaccines. There’s a long history in this country of people needing to show their papers whether we’re talking about this from the standpoint of, you know as away to, after, during slavery, post slavery,” Janey said during a Tuesday public appearance, according to audio from WCVB. “As recent as, you know, what the immigrant population has to go through here. We heard Trump with the birth certificate nonsense.” (Before Trump was elected president, he publicly fueled false rumors and stoked conspiracy theories about Barack Obama’s birthplace.)

“When we are combating a deadly virus and vaccine hesitancy in some communities, this kind of rhetoric is dangerous. Showing proof of vaccination is not slavery or birtherism,” said Councilor Andrea Campbell. “There is already too much misinformation directed at our residents about this pandemic, particularly Black and brown residents and it is incumbent upon us as leaders, particularly those of us who are Black, not to give these conspiracies any more oxygen.”

A spokeswoman for mayoral candidate Annissa Essaibi George, also a city councilor, said she “believes the only thing we should be focusing on is getting shots in arms, which is critical to ending this pandemic.”

“We should all be able to agree on that,” the spokeswoman said. “We need to stop making this a politically charged issue.”

Councilor Michelle Wu, in response to Janey’s comments, said in a statement that “Anyone in a position of leadership should be using that position to build trust in vaccines.”

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/08/...-requirements/

[YankeePride1967]

This guy?



🙄

Yup. First glad he is at least doing something but not going to give him credit for doing what he should have been for 18 months now. But some of the comments. What goes into a mind to come up with the conspiracy theories they do

[ajra21]

And their governor is holding back funds to any school district that institutes a mask mandate. This may be the most craven, despicable move I've seen any politician make. How can anybody look at this and not think he's actively rooting for the virus? And it's working...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/educa..._medium=social


Not to be outdone by his fellow Floridaman, Senator Rick Scott came out with a straight face as their hospitals overflow and said the biggest problem Floridians are dealing with is inflation.

If you are gonna be a dumbass, may as well double-down and be a complete dumbass.

[jlw1980]

Ducey has said he'll do the same thing DeathSantis is doing in Florida: No more mask mandates and saying he'll deny funds to districts that try to save lives with them. He literally does not care if we all die. So I'm getting emails from my kids' teachers saying that we're strongly encouraging everyone to wear masks with case numbers rising. Basically begging these fools to send their kids in masks. It's disheartening and absolutely enraging. I hate Douchey with a fiery passion, and that includes everyone who inflicted him on us. Anyone who voted for that trash is complicit.

[RhodyYanksFan]

Now today DeSantis is going back to the GQP greatest hits and blaming brown people for everything.

DeSantis veered away from the economy and instead blasted President Joe Biden "importing more virus from around the world" via illegal immigrants.

The governor said people are "pouring through."

"He's facilitating," DeSantis said. "Whatever variants are around the world, they're coming across that southern border. He's not shutting down the virus, he's helping to facilitate it."

And, not to be out done here comes perpetual "trying too hard" JD Vance with his version of this terrible take.

https://twitter.com/JDVance1/status/...664436226?s=20

Is breakthrough COVID when a COVID-positive illegal immigrants breaks through our southern border?