Group items tagged

it’s unclear whether infectious virus can persist in blood or stool

the infection can spread through the mucous membranes, from the nose down to the rectum.

while the virus appears to zero in on the lungs, it may also be able to infect cells in the gastrointestinal system, experts say. This may be why some patients have symptoms like diarrhea or indigestion

“The virus will actually land on organs like the heart, the kidney, the liver, and may cause some direct damage to those organs,

some patients in China recovered but got sick again, apparently because they had damaged and vulnerable lung tissue that was subsequently attacked by bacteria in their body.

As the body’s immune system shifts into high gear to battle the infection, the resulting inflammation may cause those organs to malfunction, he said.

About 80 percent of people infected with the new coronavirus have relatively mild symptoms. But about 20 percent of people become more seriously ill and in about 2 percent of patients in China, which has had the most cases, the disease has been fatal.

the effects appear to depend on how robust or weakened a person’s immune system is. Older people or those with underlying health issues, like diabetes or another chronic illness, are more likely to develop severe symptoms

the course a patient’s coronavirus will take is not yet fully understood.

Some patients can remain stable for over a week and then suddenly develop pneumonia, Dr. Diaz said. Some patients seem to recover but then develop symptoms again.

more than half of 121 patients in China had normal CT scans early in their disease.

Coronavirus particles have spiked proteins sticking out from their surfaces, and these spikes hook onto cell membranes, allowing the virus’s genetic material to enter the human cell.

That genetic material proceeds to “hijack the metabolism of the cell and say, in effect, ‘Don’t do your usual job. Your job now is to help me multiply and make the virus,’

As copies of the virus multiply, they burst out and infect neighboring cells. The symptoms often start in the back of the throat with a sore throat and a dry cough.

The virus then “crawls progressively down the bronchial tubes,”

That can damage the alveoli or lung sacs and they have to work harder to carry out their function of supplying oxygen to the blood

The swelling and the impaired flow of oxygen can cause those areas in the lungs to fill with fluid, pus and dead cells. Pneumonia, an infection in the lung, can occur

Some people have so much trouble breathing they need to be put on a ventilator

the really painful message our daughter will receive is that we're embarrassing. For most people who aren't New Atheists, or old atheists, and have no passion invested in the subject, either negative or positive, believers aren't weird because we're wicked. We're weird because we're inexplicable; because, when there's no necessity for it that anyone sensible can see, we've committed ourselves to a set of awkward and absurd attitudes that obtrude, that stick out against the background of modern life, and not in some important or respectworthy or principled way, either.

Believers are people who try to insert Jee-zus into conversations at parties; who put themselves down, with writhings of unease, for perfectly normal human behaviour; who are constantly trying to create a solemn hush that invites a fart, a hiccup, a bit of subversion. Believers are people who, on the rare occasions when you have to listen to them, like at a funeral or a wedding, seize the opportunity to pour the liquidised content of a primary-school nativity play into your earhole, apparently not noticing that childhood is over.

What goes on inside believers is mysterious. So far as it can be guessed at it appears to be a kind of anxious pretending, a kind of continual, nervous resistance to reality.

to me, it's belief that involves the most uncompromising attention to the nature of things of which you are capable. Belief demands that you dispense with illusion after illusion, while contemporary common sense requires continual, fluffy pretending – pretending that might as well be systematic, it's so thoroughly incentivised by our culture.

The atheist bus says: "There's probably no God. So stop worrying and enjoy your life."

the word that offends against realism here is "enjoy". I'm sorry – enjoy your life?

If you based your knowledge of the human species exclusively on adverts, you'd think that the normal condition of humanity was to be a good-looking single person between 20 and 35, with excellent muscle-definition and/or an excellent figure, and a large disposable income. And you'd think the same thing if you got your information exclusively from the atheist bus

The implication of the bus slogan is that enjoyment would be your natural state if you weren't being "worried" by us believers and our hellfire preaching. Take away the malignant threat of God-talk, and you would revert to continuous pleasure

What's so wrong with this, apart from it being total bollocks? Well, in the first place, that it buys a bill of goods, sight unseen, from modern marketing. Given that human life isn't and can't be made up of enjoyment, it is in effect accepting a picture of human life in which those pieces of living where easy enjoyment is more likely become the only pieces that are visible.

But then, like every human being, I am not in the habit of entertaining only those emotions I can prove. I'd be an unrecognisable oddity if I did. Emotions can certainly be misleading: they can fool you into believing stuff that is definitely, demonstrably untrue. Yet emotions are also our indispensable tool for navigating, for feeling our way through, the much larger domain of stuff that isn't susceptible to proof or disproof, that isn't checkable against the physical universe. We dream, hope, wonder, sorrow, rage, grieve, delight, surmise, joke, detest; we form such unprovable conjectures as novels or clarinet concertos; we imagine. And religion is just a part of that, in one sense. It's just one form of imagining, absolutely functional, absolutely human-normal. It would seem perverse, on the face of it, to propose that this one particular manifestation of imagining should be treated as outrageous, should be excised if (which is doubtful) we can manage it.

suppose, as the atheist bus goes by, you are povertystricken, or desperate for a job, or a drug addict, or social services have just taken away your child. The bus tells you that there's probably no God so you should stop worrying and enjoy your life, and now the slogan is not just bitterly inappropriate in mood. What it means, if it's true, is that anyone who isn't enjoying themselves is entirely on their own. What the bus says is: there's no help coming.

Enjoyment is great. The more enjoyment the better. But enjoyment is one emotion. To say that life is to be enjoyed (just enjoyed) is like saying that mountains should only have summits, or that all colours should be purple, or that all plays should be by Shakespeare. This really is a bizarre category error.

A consolation you could believe in would be one that wasn't in danger of popping like a soap bubble on contact with the ordinary truths about us. A consolation you could trust would be one that acknowledged the difficult stuff rather than being in flight from it, and then found you grounds for hope in spite of it, or even because of it

The novelist Richard Powers has written that the Clarinet Concerto sounds the way mercy would sound, and that's exactly how I experienced it in 1997. Mercy, though, is one of those words that now requires definition. It does not only mean some tyrant's capacity to suspend a punishment he has himself inflicted. It can mean – and does mean in this case – getting something kind instead of the sensible consequences of an action, or as well as the sensible consequences of an action.

from outside, belief looks like a series of ideas about the nature of the universe for which a truth-claim is being made, a set of propositions that you sign up to; and when actual believers don't talk about their belief in this way, it looks like slipperiness, like a maddening evasion of the issue.

I am a fairly orthodox Christian. Every Sunday I say and do my best to mean the whole of the Creed, which is a series of propositions. But it is still a mistake to suppose that it is assent to the propositions that makes you a believer. It is the feelings that are primary. I assent to the ideas because I have the feelings; I don't have the feelings because I've assented to the ideas.

what I felt listening to Mozart in 1997 is not some wishy-washy metaphor for an idea I believe in, and it's not a front behind which the real business of belief is going on: it's the thing itself. My belief is made of, built up from, sustained by, emotions like that. That's what makes it real.

I think that Mozart, two centuries earlier, had succeeded in creating a beautiful and accurate report of an aspect of reality. I think that the reason reality is that way – that it is in some ultimate sense merciful as well as being a set of physical processes all running along on their own without hope of appeal, all the way up from quantum mechanics to the relative velocity of galaxies by way of "blundering, low and horridly cruel" biology (Darwin) – is that the universe is sustained by a continual and infinitely patient act of love. I think that love keeps it in being.

That's what I think. But it's all secondary. It all comes limping along behind my emotional assurance that there was mercy, and I felt it. And so the argument about whether the ideas are true or not, which is the argument that people mostly expect to have about religion, is also secondary for me.

No, I can't prove it. I don't know that any of it is true. I don't know if there's a God. (And neither do you, and neither does Professor Dawkins, and neither does anybody. It isn't the kind of thing you can know. It isn't a knowable item.)

let's be clear about the emotional logic of the bus's message. It amounts to a denial of hope or consolation on any but the most chirpy, squeaky, bubble-gummy reading of the human situation

It's got itself established in our culture, relatively recently, that the emotions involved in religious belief must be different from the ones involved in all the other kinds of continuous imagining, hoping, dreaming, and so on, that humans do. These emotions must be alien, freakish, sad, embarrassing, humiliating, immature, pathetic. These emotions must be quite separate from commonsensical us. But they aren't

The emotions that sustain religious belief are all, in fact, deeply ordinary and deeply recognisable to anybody who has ever made their way across the common ground of human experience as an adult.

It's just that the emotions in question are rarely talked about apart from their rationalisation into ideas. This is what I have tried to do in my new book, Unapologetic.

You can easily look up what Christians believe in. You can read any number of defences of Christian ideas. This, however, is a defence of Christian emotions – of their intelligibility, of their grown-up dignity.

living organisms concentrate carbon-12 in their cells—and when they die, that signature persists. When scientists find graphite that’s especially enriched in carbon-12, relative to carbon-13, they can deduce that living things were around when that graphite was first formed. And that’s exactly what the Tokyo team found in the Saglek Block—grains of graphite, enriched in carbon-12, encased within 3.95-billion-year-old rock.

the team calculated the graphite was created at temperatures between 536 and 622 Celsius—a range that’s consistent with the temperatures at which the surrounding metamorphic rocks were transformed. This suggests that the graphite was already there when the rocks were heated and warped, and didn’t sneak in later. It was truly OG—original graphite.

Still, all of this evidence suggests Earth was home to life during its hellish infancy, and that such life abounded in a variety of habitats. Those pioneering organisms—bacteria, probably—haven’t left any fossils behind. But Sano and Komiya hope to find some clues about them by analyzing the Saglek Block rocks. The levels of nitrogen, iron, and sulfur in the rocks could reveal which energy sources those organisms exploited, and which environments they inhabited. They could tell us how life first lived.

There are genres whose principal business is fact—journalism, history, popular science—but the essay has never been one of them. If the form possesses a defining characteristic, it is that the essay makes an argument

That argument can rest on fact, but it can also rest on anecdote, or introspection, or cultural interpretation, or some combination of all these and more

what makes a personal essay an essay and not just an autobiographical narrative is precisely that it uses personal material to develop, however speculatively or intuitively, a larger conclusion.

Nonfiction is the source of the narcissistic injury that seems to drive him. “Nonfiction,” he suggests, is like saying “not art,” and if D’Agata, who has himself published several volumes of what he refers to as essays, desires a single thing above all, it is to be known as a maker of art.

D’Agata tells us that the term has been in use since about 1950. In fact, it was coined in 1867 by the staff of the Boston Public Library and entered widespread circulation after the turn of the 20th century. The concept’s birth and growth, in other words, did coincide with the rise of the novel to literary preeminence, and nonfiction did long carry an odor of disesteem. But that began to change at least as long ago as the 1960s, with the New Journalism and the “nonfiction novel.”

What we really seem to get in D’Agata’s trilogy, in other words, is a compendium of writing that the man himself just happens to like, or that he wants to appropriate as a lineage for his own work.

What it’s like is abysmal: partial to trivial formal experimentation, hackneyed artistic rebellion, opaque expressions of private meaning, and modish political posturing

If I bought a bag of chickpeas and opened it to find that it contained some chickpeas, some green peas, some pebbles, and some bits of goat poop, I would take it back to the store. And if the shopkeeper said, “Well, they’re ‘lyric’ chickpeas,” I would be entitled to say, “You should’ve told me that before I bought them.”

when he isn’t cooking quotes or otherwise fudging the record, he is simply indifferent to issues of factual accuracy, content to rely on a mixture of guesswork, hearsay, and his own rather faulty memory.

His rejoinders are more commonly a lot more hostile—not to mention juvenile (“Wow, Jim, your penis must be so much bigger than mine”), defensive, and in their overarching logic, deeply specious. He’s not a journalist, he insists; he’s an essayist. He isn’t dealing in anything as mundane as the facts; he’s dealing in “art, dickhead,” in “poetry,” and there are no rules in art.

D’Agata replies that there is something between history and fiction. “We all believe in emotional truths that could never hold water, but we still cling to them and insist on their relevance.” The “emotional truths” here, of course, are D’Agata’s, not Presley’s. If it feels right to say that tae kwon do was invented in ancient India (not modern Korea, as Fingal discovers it was), then that is when it was invented. The term for this is truthiness.

D’Agata clearly wants to have it both ways. He wants the imaginative freedom of fiction without relinquishing the credibility (and for some readers, the significance) of nonfiction. He has his fingers crossed, and he’s holding them behind his back. “John’s a different kind of writer,” an editor explains to Fingal early in the book. Indeed he is. But the word for such a writer isn’t essayist. It’s liar.

he point of all this nonsense, and a great deal more just like it, is to advance an argument about the essay and its history. The form, D’Agata’s story seems to go, was neglected during the long ages that worshiped “information” but slowly emerged during the 19th and 20th centuries as artists learned to defy convention and untrammel their imaginations, coming fully into its own over the past several decades with the dawning recognition of the illusory nature of knowledge.

Most delectable is when he speaks about “the essay’s traditional ‘five-paragraph’ form.” I almost fell off my chair when I got to that one. The five-paragraph essay—introduction, three body paragraphs, conclusion; stultifying, formulaic, repetitive—is the province of high-school English teachers. I have never met one outside of a classroom, and like any decent college writing instructor, I never failed to try to wean my students away from them. The five-paragraph essay isn’t an essay; it’s a paper.

What he fails to understand is that facts and the essay are not antagonists but siblings, offspring of the same historical moment

—by ignoring the actual contexts of his selections, and thus their actual intentions—D’Agata makes the familiar contemporary move of imposing his own conceits and concerns upon the past. That is how ethnography turns into “song,” Socrates into an essayist, and the whole of literary history into a single man’s “emotional truth.”

The history of the essay is indeed intertwined with “facts,” but in a very different way than D’Agata imagines. D’Agata’s mind is Manichaean. Facts bad, imagination good

When he refers to his selections as essays, he does more than falsify the essay as a genre. He also effaces all the genres that they do belong to: not only poetry, fiction, journalism, and travel, but, among his older choices, history, parable, satire, the sermon, and more—genres that possess their own particular traditions, conventions, and expectation

one needs to recognize that facts themselves have a history.

Facts are not just any sort of knowledge, such as also existed in the ancient and medieval worlds. A fact is a unit of information that has been established through uniquely modern methods

Fact, etymologically, means “something done”—that is, an act or deed

It was only in the 16th century—an age that saw the dawning of a new empirical spirit, one that would issue not only in modern science, but also in modern historiography, journalism, and scholarship—that the word began to signify our current sense of “real state of things.”

It was at this exact time, and in this exact spirit, that the essay was born. What distinguished Montaigne’s new form—his “essays” or attempts to discover and publish the truth about himself—was not that it was personal (precursors like Seneca also wrote personally), but that it was scrupulously investigative. Montaigne was conducting research into his soul, and he was determined to get it right.

His famous motto, Que sais-je?—“What do I know?”—was an expression not of radical doubt but of the kind of skepticism that fueled the modern revolution in knowledge.

It is no coincidence that the first English essayist, Galileo’s contemporary Francis Bacon, was also the first great theorist of science.

That knowledge is problematic—difficult to establish, labile once created, often imprecise and always subject to the limitations of the human mind—is not the discovery of postmodernism. It is a foundational insight of the age of science, of fact and information, itself.

The point is not that facts do not exist, but that they are unstable (and are becoming more so as the pace of science quickens). Knowledge is always an attempt. Every fact was established by an argument—by observation and interpretation—and is susceptible to being overturned by a different one

A fact, you might say, is nothing more than a frozen argument, the place where a given line of investigation has come temporarily to rest.

Sometimes those arguments are scientific papers. Sometimes they are news reports, which are arguments with everything except the conclusions left out (the legwork, the notes, the triangulation of sources—the research and the reasoning).

When it comes to essays, though, we don’t refer to those conclusions as facts. We refer to them as wisdom, or ideas

the essay draws its strength not from separating reason and imagination but from putting them in conversation. A good essay moves fluidly between thought and feeling. It subjects the personal to the rigors of the intellect and the discipline of external reality. The truths it finds are more than just emotional.

How did it go? I was absolutely miserable dating appropriate-age marketing associates who lived near me. I always wanted to be at home reading instead

Then one night I held a reading with some authors I admire at a bookstore, and I threw an after-party at my favorite dive bar. In walked a friend of a friend who I sort of knew from the internet but who I’d never met in real life. He is six years younger than I am (way too young for me) and he lived in Harlem (that’s a $40 cab fare from my home in Brooklyn) and he’s a writer/comedian (warning flags coming at me from every direction). But we talked and he charmed me. He was online dating, too, but I never would’ve found him on an app. He wasn’t on my metaphorical vision board, but he fit into my real life in ways I never could’ve imagined. He’s my husband now. (He likes David Foster Wallace.)

The internet is supposed to make it easier for us to find people and places and perfect gifts, and more profitable for companies that offer those services. And yet here I am, with my too-old dog and my too-young husband and my ever-growing book collection, happier than I could have predicted.

It’s risky not to have data, to be without numbers you can plug in when you’re looking for something or someone to love. We think we know exactly what we want. But I hope that our guts remain true to our hearts, and in this world measured by clicks and stars and highest customer reviews, we remember that some rules are made to be broken in the most delightful of ways.

Her reason for coming was obvious. She was around 40 weeks pregnant

She was an office worker in Ohio when she became pregnant by a man who wasn’t going to marry her. The most remarkable part of her story was this: When she knew she was about to give birth, she drove westward out of Ohio, stopping at Indianapolis only because it was the first big city she encountered

She arranged to place the baby for adoption and gave birth the next day.

The baby was me. If she’d driven farther, I’d be a native of Chicago or St. Louis, but Indianapolis it was

Life is a journey, and I was born on a road trip.

Secrecy was considered best for all concerned. In recent decades, open adoption has been replacing this practice, but rules governing past adoptions change slowly, and I was barred from seeing my birth records.

Everything I just told you about my biological parents was unknown to me growing up; they were such a blank that I could not even imagine what they might be like.

I accepted this until I became an adoptive parent in 2012 and a social worker suggested that my adopted daughter might want to know my story someday

She’s from China, and like many international adoptees, she also had no story of her biological family.

I requested my records from the State of Indiana and was denied.

Next I called the Children’s Bureau, where a kind woman on the phone had my records in her hands, but was not allowed to share them.

Typed notes from the Children’s Bureau recorded a visit with my biological mother in the hospital. Asked how she felt, she cried

It’s been nearly two years since I first read those documents, and I’m still not over it. Knowing that story has altered how I think about myself, and the seemingly simple question of where I’m from

It’s brought on a feeling of revelation, and also of anger. I’m not upset with my biological mother; it was moving to learn how she managed her predicament alone.

Her decisions left me with the family that I needed — that I love. Nor am I unhappy with the Children’s Bureau, which did its duty by preserving my records.

I am angry that for 50 years, my state denied me the story of how I came to live on this earth. Strangers hid part of me from myself.

While I now have the privilege of knowing my information, many people’s stories are still hidden.

About 2 percent of U.S. residents — roughly six million people — are adoptees

A majority were adopted domestically, with records frequently sealed, especially for older adoptees

I was never able to tell a doctor my family medical history when asked. It’s one of those little things that never bother you until it does.

The people who blocked me from learning my past must have thought their motives were pure.

Closed adoption began as “confidential” adoption in the early 20th century, enabling parents and children to avoid the stigma of illegitimacy.

Records were sealed to all but people directly involved

But nobody asked if I wanted my identity hidden from me.

Should adoptees and biological families contact each other, after the law forbade it for so long?

Not without mutual consent:

information alone is powerful.

As records are opened, people’s privacy should be respected; that’s why I’m withholding my biological mother’s name and any details that might identify her. But my story is mine, and other adoptees have a right to recover theirs.

As a 15-year-old, I was condemned to long-term solitary confinement in the Florida prison system, which ultimately lasted for 18 consecutive years

From age 15 to 33.

For 18 years I didn’t have a window in my room to distract myself from the intensity of my confinement

I wasn’t permitted to talk to my fellow prisoners or even to myself. I didn’t have healthy, nutritious food; I was given just enough to not die

These circumstances made me think about how I ended up in solitary confinement.

United Nations standards on the treatment of prisoners prohibits solitary confinement for more than 15 days, declaring it “cruel, inhuman or degrading.”

For this I was arrested and charged as an adult with armed robbery and attempted murder.

My court-appointed lawyer advised me to plead guilty, telling me that the maximum sentence would be 15 years. So I did. But my sentence wasn’t 15 years — it was life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

But a year and a half later, at age 15, I was put back into solitary confinement after being written up for a few minor infractions.

Florida has different levels of solitary confinement; I spent the majority of that time in one of the most restrictive

I was finally released from prison in 2016 thanks to my lawyer, Bryan Stevenson

Researchers have long concluded that solitary confinement causes post-traumatic stress disorder and impairs prisoners’ ability to adjust to society long after they leave their cell.

In the summer of 1990, shortly after finishing seventh grade, I was directed by a few older kids to commit a robbery. During the botched attempt, I shot a woman. She suffered serious injuries to her jaw and mouth but survived. It was reckless and foolish on my part, the act of a 13-year-old in crisis, and I’m simply grateful no one died.

More aggressive change is needed in state prison systems

In 2016, the Obama administration banned juvenile solitary confinement in federal prisons, and a handful of states have advanced similar reforms for both children and adults.

Yet the practice, even for minors, is still common in the United States, and efforts to end it have been spotty

Because solitary confinement is hidden from public view and the broader prison population, egregious abuses are left unchecked

I watched a corrections officer spray a blind prisoner in the face with chemicals simply because he was standing by the door of his cell as a female nurse walked by. The prisoner later told me that to justify the spraying, the officer claimed the prisoner masturbated in front of the nurse.

I also witnessed the human consequences of the harshness of solitary firsthand: Some people would resort to cutting their stomachs open with a razor and sticking a plastic spork inside their intestines just so they could spend a week in the comfort of a hospital room with a television

On occasion, I purposely overdosed on Tylenol so that I could spend a night in the hospital. For even one night, it was worth the pain.

Another time, I was told I’d be switching dorms, and I politely asked to remain where I was because a guard in the new area had been overly aggressive with me. In response, four or five officers handcuffed me, picked me up by my feet and shoulders, and marched with me to my new dorm — using my head to ram the four steel doors on the way there.

The punishments were wholly disproportionate to the infractions. Before I knew it, months in solitary bled into years, years into almost two decades.

As a child, I survived these conditions by conjuring up stories of what I’d do when I was finally released. My mind was the only place I found freedom from my reality

the only place I could play basketball with my brother or video games with my friends, and eat my mother’s warm cherry pie on the porch.

No child should have to use their imagination this way — to survive.

It is difficult to know the exact number of children in solitary confinement today. The Liman Center at Yale Law School estimated that 61,000 Americans (adults and children) were in solitary confinement in the fall of 2017

No matter the count, I witnessed too many people lose their minds while isolated. They’d involuntarily cross a line and simply never return to sanity. Perhaps they didn’t want to. Staying in their mind was the better, safer, more humane option.

Solitary confinement is cruel and unusual punishment, something prohibited by the Eighth Amendment, yet prisons continue to practice it.

When it comes to children, elimination is the only moral option. And if ending solitary confinement for adults isn’t politically viable, public officials should at least limit the length of confinement to 15 days or fewer, in compliance with the U.N. standards

As I try to reintegrate into society, small things often awaken painful memories from solitary. Sometimes relationships feel constraining. It’s difficult to maintain the attention span required for a rigid 9-to-5 job. At first, crossing the street and seeing cars and bikes racing toward me felt terrifying.

I will face PTSD and challenges big and small for the rest of my life because of what I was subjected to.

And some things I never will — most of all, that this country can treat human beings, especially children, as cruelly as I was treated.

Sadly, solitary confinement for juveniles is still permissible in many states. But we have the power to change that — to ensure that the harrowing injustice I suffered as a young boy never happens to another child in America.

Some of you said you had formed new habits that you think might stick, including meditating online and gathering weekly with pals over Zoom.

Some readers said they were grateful for virtual stand-ins but could not wait to get back to the library and hugging their family members.

This year, reading together has strengthened our bond at a distance. He calls me all of the time, asking me to please read him another story.

During lockdown, we discovered we could use an app called JamKazam to play music together over the internet in real time.

reading e-books on my iPad

To be honest, I miss holding a physical book in my hand, turning a page and the satisfying feeling of closing the book when you’ve finished.

My new tech habit is meditation class by Zoom. I have never before been able to successfully meditate

But being at home, in my most comfortable chair in front of the fireplace with a cup of coffee has worked for me. Meditation has been a great tool to help me cope with the stress and anxiety of this terrible, no-good year.

I started drawing cartoons that highlight how our lives have changed during the pandemic

I’ve been able to maintain my social ties with my musician friends and make some new musical friends as well. Last, but not least, I am encouraged to keep practicing.

My new habit is ordering groceries online and no contact pickup

My “shoppers” have done an outstanding job! It’s a true improvement that should remain in place

I am 86 years old and haven’t hugged anyone in my family for one year. But I’ve learned to use Zoom and to order my groceries online, both of which helped me keep myself fed, independent and sane

I’ve attended services at my synagogue without having to put on my snow boots. I’ve gone to art galleries and operas without having to dress up or worry about where to park.

My psychologist is now doing telehealth visits, and I love it. It’s my hope that this becomes a permanent option in the future.

Not only for me, but for the multitudes of people who need mental health care and aren’t in a position to access it in person.

I teach ballet to older women. When we had to stop dancing together in person, I was motivated to find a way to deliver a class in some form. With an iPhone, my teenager’s tripod and the tech advice of my three adult children and my son-in-law, I was able to quickly learn to record a ballet class, edit it on my laptop, make a YouTube channel, upload the video and share it.

I purchased Duolingo and brushed up on French and picked up Arabic and German.

I go to an annual girls’ weekend trip on Lake Gaston with five other women. That had to be canceled last year. We’ve instituted a weekly Zoom call on Tuesday nights after we put the kids to bed to catch up with each other and talk and laugh, and sometimes cry.

It’s brought us even closer together than the usual once per year weekend could

“herd immunity might be hard to achieve without children being vaccinated,” Dr. Erbelding said.

Each dose will be assessed first in children 5 through 11 years of age, then in children ages 2 through 4 years, and finally in the youngest group, six months to 2 years.

“It sounds like a good plan, and it’s exciting that another Covid-19 vaccine is moving forward with trials in children,”

More than 3.3 million children have tested positive for the virus, at least 13,000 have been hospitalized and at least 260 have died,

Other vaccines have helped to control many horrific childhood diseases that can cause long-term complications,

Any side effects are likely to appear soon after the shot, within the first week and certainly within the first few weeks, experts have said.

there’s a higher degree of confidence now in giving this vaccine to kids.”

The more transparent you can be, the better.”

Patients in this study had a mean age of 44 years, so were very much part of the young, working-age population. Only 18% had been hospitalised with COVID-19, meaning organ damage may occur even after a non-severe infection.

Another piece of early research (awaiting peer review) suggests that SARS-CoV-2 could also have a long-term impact on people’s organs.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, people with more severe disease initially – characterised by more than five symptoms – seem to be at increased risk of long COVID. Older age and being female also appear to be risk factors for having prolonged symptoms, as is having a higher body mass index.

Rather harder to explore is the symptom of fatigue. Another recent large-scale study has shown that this symptom is common after COVID-19 – occurring in more than half of cases – and appears unrelated to the severity of the early illness.

While men are at increased risk of severe infection, that women seem to be more affected by long COVID may reflect their different or changing hormone status.

Some symptoms of long COVID overlap with menopausal symptoms, and hormone replacement using medication may be one route to reducing the impact of symptoms.

What is clear, however, is that long-term symptoms after COVID-19 are common, and that research into the causes and treatments of long COVID will likely be needed long after the outbreak itself has subsided.

She was 104.

Always sympathetic, never condescending, she presented her readers with characters they knew and understood, the 20th-century equivalents of Huck Finn or Louisa May Alcott’s little women, and every bit as popular: Her books sold more than 85 million copies

“Cleary is funny in a very sophisticated way,

At her library job in Yakima, Ms. Cleary had become dissatisfied with the books being offered to her young patrons

The protagonists tended to be aristocratic English children who had nannies and pony carts, or poor children whose problems disappeared when a long-lost rich relative turned up in the last chapter.

“I wanted to read funny stories about the sort of children I knew,” she wrote, “and I decided that someday when I grew up I would write them.”

After marrying Clarence Cleary, a graduate student she had met at Berkeley, she moved to San Francisco and, while her husband served in the military, sold children’s books at the Sather Gate

Book Shop in Berkeley and worked as a librarian at Camp John T. Knight in Oakland.

“She gets very close to satire, which I think is why adults like her, but she’s still deeply respectful of her characters — nobody gets a laugh at the expense of another. I think kids appreciate that they’re on a level playing field with adults.”

She had been particularly touched by the plight of a group of boys who asked her, “Where are the books about us?”

“Why didn’t authors write books about everyday problems that children could solve by themselves?”

“Why weren’t there more stories about children playing? Why couldn’t I find more books that would make me laugh? These were the bo

oks I wanted to read, and the books I was eventually to write.”

“When I began ‘Henry Huggins’ I did not know how to write a book, so I mentally told the stories that I remembered and wrote them down as I told them,”

Ramona Quimby, introduced in a small role as the annoying younger sister of Henry’s friend Beatrice, better known as Beezus, emerged as a superstar.

“I thought like Ramona, but I was a very well-behaved little girl.”

By the time “Beezus and Ramona” was published, Ms. Cleary had twins, Malcolm and Marianne, to provide her with fresh material. They survive her, along with three grandchildren and one great-grandchild. Her husband died in 2004.

Ramona mounts a campaign to have her father quit smoking, a habit he abuses after losing his job.

That book won the Newbery Medal in 1984. A sequel, “Strider,” followed in 1991.

“That little girl, who has remained with me, prevents me from writing down to children, from poking fun at my characters, and from writing an adult reminiscence about childhood instead of a book to be enjoyed by children.”

But in the weeks that followed, reports of violence against people of Asian descent have multiplied in the Bay Area

This week alone in San Francisco three Asian people were attacked on downtown streets, including a 75-year-old Chinese grandmother and a 83-year-old Vietnamese man.

The assaults have followed a disturbing pattern: images circulate on social media of battered faces, police departments say they are searching for motives and victim’s families post pleas for assistance paying for medical bills.

“When I fell down, he continued to beat me,

The police arrested a suspect, Jorge Devis-Milton, 32, who is also accused of slashing a 65-year-old white man on the same day.

“After this incident I am no longer comfortable living in California and will need to look for another safe place to stay,” Mr. Chang said.

According to the police, the assailant was chased by a security guard and while being pursued punched the 75-year-old woman,

“Investigators are working to determine if racial bias was a motivating factor in the incident,”

The attacks come amid an increase in gun violence and murders in the Bay Area that criminologists have linked to the pandemic.

The police in San Francisco this week also arrested three men accused of robbing a 67-year-old Asian man in a laundromat last month

Images of the attack were captured on security cameras and widely circulated on social media.

she does not let her mother out of the house anymore because the streets are too dangerous to walk alone.

“I’m scared,” Ms. Monthanus said.

The increase came even though the number of miles traveled by vehicle fell 13% from 2019.

Motorcyclist deaths rose 9% last year to 5,015, while bicyclist deaths were up 5% to 846. Pedestrian deaths remained steady at 6,205, and the number of people killed in passenger vehicles rose 5% to 23,395, according to NHTSA.

Deaths involving a large truck fell 2%, while traffic fatalities among people 65 and older fell 9%.

Alaska became the first state to make vaccinations available to all adults over the age of 16 earlier this month, followed by Mississippi. Several others have since followed suit, including Arizona, Utah, Indiana, Georgia and West Virginia.

Other states are moving to make more groups eligible ahead of schedule, based on age or underlying conditions.

According to a map released by the White House COVID-19 Response Team on Friday, four states have yet to confirm plans to expand eligibility ahead of the May 1 deadline: New York, Wyoming, Arkansas and South Carolina, where officials have said they are not on track to hit that threshold until May 3.

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said at the briefing that the country has seen an uptick in case counts and hospital admissions, with the most recent 7-day averages showing about 57,000 cases and 4,700 hospitalizations per day, and hospitalizations hovering around 1,000.

The U.S. is administering 2.5 million shots a day at its current pace, Zients said, adding that vaccine makers are "setting and hitting targets." Some 27 million doses went to states, tribes and territories this week.

Johnson & Johnson has accelerated production of its single-shot vaccine and is on track to deliver 11 million doses next week.

reassure the country of the safety of the vaccines.

Delaware

get the entire Covid operation up and running,

US Capitol, which was stormed and breached by supporters of President Donald Trump

impeach President Donald Trump

incitement of insurrection

"That's my hope and expectation,

refusing to take masks

irresponsible,

listen to public health experts

to stop the spread of the virus.

50 million Americans in his first 100 days.

n 374,500 Americans have died

cases are rapidly climbing across the country.

encouraged Americans to receive one as soon as it becomes available to them.

requires two doses administered several weeks apart in order to reach nearly 95% efficacy.

9 million people have received a first dose

adults, ages 75 and older, and "frontline essential workers,"

Vice President-elect Kamala Harris received the first dose

Jill Biden and Doug Emhoff, Harris' husband, have also both received the first doses

100 million Covid-19 vaccine shots

Mike Pence was administered the first dose

President was likely to get his shot once it was recommended by his medical team.

Trump's treatment for Covid-19 included the monoclonal antibody cocktail made by Regeneron.

"People will not be subject to age or disability discrimination when the going gets tough."

The new OCR action makes clear that doctors cannot issue a blanket DNR and cannot substitute their subjective beliefs about the quality of a disabled person's life over the person's own wishes.

"that discrimination against persons with disabilities will be absolutely forbidden and stereotypes about their usefulness should never be part of a discussion when we allocate care."

it would become a significant expansion of disability civil rights law.

But a final rule exists in draft form, according to a source at HHS, with hopes that new Biden Administration officials will pick it up.

include language to guarantee doctors will not pressure patients to sign Do Not Resuscitate orders and not exclude people from treatment based on their disability alone.

The steps taken by OCR to stop medical discrimination reflect the findings of a series of papers on bioethics and disability, issued by the National Council on Disability,

"Disability discrimination in health care is among the most insidious — with life and death consequences — and it's hard to root out,"

"sends an unequivocally clear message that we will not accept health care that relegates people with disabilities to last in line or 'lost cause.'"

They then compared the MRI data of participants who reported often feeling lonely with those who did not.

Researchers found the default networks of lonely people were more strongly wired together and surprisingly, their grey matter volume in regions of the default network was greater.

The fact the structure and function of this network is positively associated with loneliness may be because lonely people are more likely to use imagination, memories of the past or hopes for the future to overcome their social isolation.

In lonely people, the structure of this fibre tract was better preserved.

"In the absence of desired social experiences, lonely individuals may be biased towards internally-directed thoughts such as reminiscing or imagining social experiences.

Loneliness is increasingly being recognized as a major health problem, and previous studies have shown older people who experience loneliness have a higher risk of cognitive decline and dementia.

the urgency of reducing loneliness in today's society,

This is not to say that Alzheimer’s- and dementia-related memory impairments are fiction — they are very real — but every lapse of short-term memory doesn’t necessarily indicate a biological disorder.

Some aspects of memory actually get better as we age. For instance, our ability to extract patterns, regularities and to make accurate predictions improves over time because we’ve had more experience.

Second, older adults have to search through more memories than do younger adults to find the fact or piece of information they’re looking for. Your brain becomes crowded with memories and information.

In states across the country, demand for the vaccine has far outweighed supply

Tens of thousands of people have already received the vaccines, and none of them have reported any serious health problems.

Other states have decided to remain focused exclusively on vaccinating health care workers and nursing home residents before opening up to a wider swath of the public.

Life will return to normal only when society as a whole gains enough protection against the coronavirus. Once countries authorize a vaccine, they’ll only be able to vaccinate a few percent of their citizens at most in the first couple months.

At least 28 states and Washington, D.C., have begun vaccinating older people, a New York Times survey shows, in many cases marking a shift in earlier plans that had put medical workers and nursing home residents at the front of the line for Covid-19 inoculations.

“I couldn’t hug her,” Ms. Johnson said. “We didn’t share food. We each brought our own sandwich. It was just surreal.”

“Usually by four to six weeks, there’s not much left,” said Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona. But germinal centers stimulated by the mRNA vaccines are “still going, months into it, and not a lot of decline in most people.”

The broader the range and the longer these cells have to practice, the more likely they are to be able to thwart variants of the virus that may emerge.

“Everyone always focuses on the virus evolving — this is showing that the B cells are doing the same thing,” said Marion Pepper, an immunologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. “And it’s going to be protective against ongoing evolution of the virus, which is really encouraging.”

Dr. Ellebedy’s team found that 15 weeks after the first dose of vaccine, the germinal center was still highly active in all 14 of the participants, and that the number of memory cells that recognized the coronavirus had not declined.

“The fact that the reactions continued for almost four months after vaccination — that’s a very, very good sign,” Dr. Ellebedy said. Germinal centers typically peak one to two weeks after immunization, and then wane.

After an infection or a vaccination, a specialized structure called the germinal center forms in lymph nodes. This structure is an elite school of sorts for B cells — a boot camp where they become increasingly sophisticated and learn to recognize a diverse set of viral genetic sequences.

The results suggest that a vast majority of vaccinated people will be protected over the long term — at least, against the existing coronavirus variants

But older adults, people with weak immune systems and those who take drugs that suppress immunity may need boosters; people who survived Covid-19 and were later immunized may never need them at all.

In the absence of variants that sidestep immunity, in theory immunity could last a lifetime, experts said. But the virus is clearly evolving.

“Anything that would actually require a booster would be variant-based, not based on waning of immunity,” Dr. Bhattacharya said. “I just don’t see that happening.”

The good news: A booster vaccine will probably have the same effect as prior infection in immunized people, Dr. Ellebedy said. “If you give them another chance to engage, they will have a massive response,” he said, referring to memory B cells.

Dr. Ellebedy said the results also suggested that these signs of persistent immune reaction might be caused by mRNA vaccines alone, as opposed to those made by more traditional means, like Johnson & Johnson’s

But that is an unfair comparison, because the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is given as a single dose, Dr. Iwasaki said: “If the J & J had a booster, maybe it will induce this same kind of response.”