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ethanmoser

Army, local police probe recent mystery deaths of 11 Fort Hood soldiers | Fox News - 0 views

www.foxnews.com/...ths-11-fort-hood-soldiers.html

shared by ethanmoser on 16 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • Army, local police probe recent mystery deaths of 11 Fort Hood soldiers | Fox News
  • The Army and local police are investigating the deaths of 11 Fort Hood soldiers who have died on and off the large Texas base in the past three months under mysterious circumstances, according to reports.
  • “At this point in the investigative process we do not suspect foul play, but have not completely ruled it out while we conduct a complete and thorough death investigation,” Criminal Investigations spokesman Christopher Grey told the paper.
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  • Taylor is at least the 11th Fort Hood soldier to have died in the U.S. since Oct. 12.
  • Three other soldiers died from gunshot wounds. One of them, Pvt. Kevin Paulino, 24, died from a gunshot while he was in Indiana, Stars and Stripes reported. The Army said the soldiers' deaths were under investigation.
  • Three soldiers from Fort Hood died November 12 in a suicide bomb attack at Bagram air base in Afghanistan: Staff Sgt. John Perry, 30; Private First Class Tyler Iubelt, 20; and Sgt. 1st Class Allan Brown, 46. Brown died of injuries suffered in the attack at Walter Reade National Medical Center in Bethesda Dec. 6, the Houston Chronicle reported Friday.
cjlee29

Hillary Clinton supports death penalty for accused Charleston shooter Dylann Roof - The... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...charleston-shooter-dylann-roof

shared by cjlee29 on 02 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • Hillary Clinton supports the pursuit of the death penalty for the man accused of killing nine parishioners inside a Charleston, S.C., church last year.
  • she respects the Justice Department decision" to seek the highest punishment for Dylann Roof
  • Clinton's long-held position of support for the death penalty is one that has put her at odds with many Democrats.
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  • She has been endorsed by the Rev. Anthony Thompson, whose wife, Myra, was killed in the shooting and who was featured in one of her campaign ads.
  • they have mixed feelings about the death penalty
  • Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Clinton's opponent in the Democratic presidential race, has criticized her support of the death penalty.
  • defend its use in extreme cases of mass violence or terrorism
  • r Clinton was confronted by a man who had spent decades on death row for a crime he didn't commit, Clinton acknowledged the moral complexity of the issue.
brickol

Germany coronavirus: Why is the Covid-19 death rate so low? (opinion) - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

COVID-19 crisis

shared by brickol on 25 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • As of this past weekend, nine countries had diagnosed more than 9,000 cases, and three -- South Korea, Switzerland, and Germany -- had deaths rates well below the others. For South Korea, this in part is due to the cases occurring in much younger people, while the information in Switzerland is only now emerging. But for Germany, Covid-19 is being diagnosed in the same middle-aged people as other countries. The deaths in Germany also fit the seemingly established pattern of also occurring among the very old.
  • Recent articles have raised this issue with several theories put forth by local experts. Some feel that it is a temporary situation, since Germany, like South Korea, has been aggressively testing its population from the outset. Aggressive testing likely will identify persons otherwise too well to come to medical attention, thereby diluting the tested pool with a large set of infected but otherwise well people who are likely to remain so.
  • Others have speculated that the first cases in Germany were older adults who had used an early spring vacation to go skiing in countries that turned out to have high rates of Covid-19. So yes, goes this thinking: the German cases are in older persons, but all were well enough to ski, that is, they were people without the various other medical conditions that increase risk of death.
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  • There might be other explanations. With any infection, there are four basic questions to ask when looking at broad differences in death rates. Is the virus different here versus there? NO. Right now, there is no evidence that the virus is mutating toward a more potent strain in the US.Is one country diagnosing the virus sooner than another? YES. As above, this may be skewing German and South Korean results by identifying asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic persons unlikely to require medical care. Hospitalization rates by country, currently not tracked, would help sort out the contribution of aggressive testing to survival rates. Is the infected patient different here versus there? YES. South Korea (young patients) and Italy (old patients) are unique in the outbreak, and the characteristics in Iran are not well known. All other countries with specific information, from China to even the US epicenter of New York City, have shown the same basic distribution with respect to age, sex (more men than women) and smoking. Is the health care system different here versus there? OH YES. Health care system differences at the country level are hard to examine: information is sparse and, given the 50,000-foot view, possibly misleading. However, health care experts typically can rely on "structural measures" to determine the quality of a hospital or a state or a country.
  • The World Bank tracks health care information by country on three relevant structural measures (though recentness of information varies country to country), each measured per 1,000 general population: doctors, nurses and hospital beds. They and other sources also track two other relevant variables: lifespan per country and health care spending per individual. Neither of these demonstrate differences in affected Western European countries that might explain a difference in Covid-19 survival.
  • Among the nine countries with the highest number of Covid-19 cases, the country that has the highest nurse rate also has the lowest death rate from the disease. Germany has 13.2 nurses per 1,000 (echoing a trend for high nurse numbers throughout Northern Europe) far above the other heavily Covid-19 affected countries. This may be just another armchair epidemiologist observation of course. But higher numbers of nurses may reflect one of two beneficial factors (or both): first, that nurses, the backbone of hospital (and especially ICU) care, are essential to patient management and, ultimately, survival.
  • Either way, it is a reminder that Covid-19 will continue to reveal the strengths and weaknesses of health care systems across the world. The current observed differences also mandate that, when we finally are out from underneath the weight of the current crisis, we must work to determine how we can deliver better health care to large populations across the world.
Javier E

Amid death, experts see glimmers of hope on pandemic - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-9bee-c5bf9d2e3288_story.html

shared by Javier E on 08 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • “Right now we’re projecting that we are reaching a plateau in the total number of hospitalizations, and you can see the growth and you see it starting to flatten,” Cuomo told reporters Tuesday. “Change in daily ICU admissions is way down, and that’s good news. The daily intubations number is down, and that’s good news. The discharge rate is right about where it was.”
  • one computer model of the disease’s future spread — relied upon by governors and the White House — shifted its estimate of covid-19’s U.S. death toll downward this week. Instead of roughly 94,000 deaths as estimated a week ago, the University of Washington model now predicts about 82,000 by late summer.
  • The University of Washington model predicts the worst day for deaths will be around April 16, meaning daily death tolls will grow higher until then.
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  • “From all the data we have, it suggests we’re just beginning to approach the peak for several regions of the country,” Kolak said. She said she is worried about future surges in tribal areas in the Southwest, and in areas of the South where social distancing measures were implemented just recently.
  • Hanage said he remains “incredibly anxious” about smaller communities around the nation.
  • In Europe, the virus-ravaged countries of Italy and Spain seemed to be on the far side of the pandemic’s peak, with infection rates growing far more slowly.
Javier E

Opinion | Will We Shrug Off Coronavirus Deaths as We Do Gun Violence? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-deaths.html

violence gun pandemic death liberty politization normaiization

shared by Javier E on 06 May 20 - No Cached
  • I first saw it on Twitter. “Someone poke holes in this scenario,” a tweet from Eric Nelson, the editorial director of Broadside Books, read. “We keep losing 1,000 to 2,000 a day to coronavirus. People get used to it. We get less vigilant as it very slowly spreads. By December we’re close to normal, but still losing 1,500 a day, and as we tick past 300,000 dead, most people aren’t concerned.”
  • This hit me like a ton of bricks because of just how plausible it seemed. The day I read Mr. Nelson’s tweet, 1,723 Americans were reported to have died from the virus. And yet their collective passing was hardly mourned. After all, how to distinguish those souls from the 2,097 who perished the day before or the 1,558 who died the day after?
  • Such loss of life is hard to comprehend when it’s not happening in front of your own two eyes. Add to it that humans are adaptable creatures, no matter how nightmarish the scenario, and it seems understandable that our outrage would dull over time.
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  • There’s also a national precedent for Mr. Nelson’s hypothetical: America’s response to gun violence and school shootings.
  • As a country, we seem resigned to preventable firearm deaths. Each year, 36,000 Americans are killed by guns — roughly 100 per day, most from suicide
  • In every case, the death tolls climb but we fail to act. There are occasional marches and protests but mostly we continue on with our lives.
  • As with gun violence, the data medical professionals and governments are relying on during the pandemic is piecemeal. And, as with gun violence, we throw up our hands and deem it intractable.
  • The federal government could have moved swiftly like some in Europe to “freeze” the economy and commit to paying at least part of workers’ salaries if their companies don’t lay them off. Instead, our economic stimulus has been scattershot and underwhelming.
  • the administration seems to be cheering on the reopening while internally preparing for a substantial increase of loss of lives. An internal document based on modeling by the Federal Emergency Management Agency obtained by The Times projects that the daily death toll will reach about 3,000 on June 1, a 70 percent increase from the May 1 number of about 1,750.
  • For Dr. Megan Ranney, an emergency physician and Brown University professor who works on gun violence prevention, the dynamics of the lockdown protesters are familiar.
  • “This group has moved the reopening debate from a conversation about health and science to a conversation about liberty,” Dr. Ranney told me. “They’ve redefined the debate so it’s no longer about weighing risks and benefits and instead it’s this politicized narrative. It’s like taking a nuanced conversation about gun injury and turning it into an argument about gun rights. It shuts the conversation down.”
  • As in the gun control debate, public opinion, public health and the public good seem poised to lose out to a select set of personal freedoms.
  • But it’s a child’s two-dimensional view of freedom — one where any suggestion of collective duty and responsibility for others become the chains of tyranny.
  • This idea of freedom is also an excuse to serve one’s self before others and a shield to hide from responsibility.
  • In this narrow worldview, freedom has a price, in the form of an “acceptable” number of human lives lost. It’s a price that will be calculated and then set by a select few. The rest of us merely pay it.
g-dragon

Black Death in Asia: The Origins of the Bubonic Plague - 0 views

www.thoughtco.com/-in-asia-bubonic-plague-195144

Bulbonic Plague asia origins

shared by g-dragon on 24 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • it killed an estimated one-third of the European population
  • started in Asia and devastated many areas of that continent as well.
  • Many scholars believe that the bubonic plague began in north-western China, while others cite south-western China or the steppes of Central Asia.
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  • an outbreak erupted in the Yuan Empire and may have hastened the end of Mongol rule over China. Three years later, the disease killed over 90 percent of the Hebei Province's populations
  • with deaths totaling over 5 million people.
  • From its origin at the eastern end of the Silk Road, the Black Death rode trade routes west stopping at Central Asian caravansaries and Middle Eastern trade centers and subsequently infected people all across Asia.
  • "The Land of Darkness," or Central Asia. From there, it spread to China, India, the Caspian Sea and "land of the Uzbeks," and thence to Persia and the Mediterranean.
  • The Central Asian scourge struck Persia just a few years after it appeared in China — proof if any is needed that the Silk Road was a convenient route of transmission for the deadly bacterium.
  • Civilization both in the East and the West was visited by a destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish
  • The region's population was slow to recover, in part due to the political disruptions caused by the fall of Mongol rule and the later invasions of Timur (Tamerlane).
  • In 1335, the Il-Khan (Mongol) ruler of Persia and the Middle East, Abu Said, died of bubonic plague during a war with his northern cousins, the Golden Horde. This signaled the beginning of the end for Mongol rule in the region
  • He goes on to charge that the Mongol leader "ordered corpses to be placed in catapults and lobbed into the city in hopes that the intolerable stench would kill everyone inside."
  • This incident is often cited as the first instance of biological warfare in history. However, other contemporary chroniclers make no mention of the putative Black Death catapults.
  • European observers were fascinated but not too worried when the Black Death struck the western rim of Central Asia and the Middle East
  • , the holy city of Mecca was hit by the plague, likely brought in by infected pilgrims on the hajj.
  • It seems more likely, however, that traders from further east brought diseased fleas
  • It swallowed up many of the good things of civilization and wiped them out... Civilization decreased with the decrease of mankind. Cities and buildings were laid waste, roads and way signs were obliterated, settlements and mansions became empty, dynasties and tribes grew weak. The entire inhabited world changed."
  • Perhaps the most significant impact that the Black Death had on Asia was that it contributed to the fall of the mighty Mongol Empire. After all, the pandemic started within the Mongol Empire and devastated peoples from all four of the khanates.
  • The massive population loss and terror caused by the plague destabilized Mongolian governments from the Golden Horde in Russia to the Yuan Dynasty in China. The Mongol ruler of the Ilkhanate Empire in the Middle East died of the disease along with six of his sons.
  • Although the Pax Mongolica had allowed increased wealth and cultural exchange, through a reopening of the Silk Road, it also allowed this deadly contagion to spread rapidly westward from its origin in western China or eastern Central Asia. As a result, the world's second-largest empire ever crumbled and fell.
  • g-dragon on 24 Oct 17
     
    A summary about the route the Black Plague took and the tole it had. It is intesting how they called Central Asia the land of the darkness.
aidenborst

Covid case and death rates were higher in GOP-led states in second half of 2020, study ... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

Politics death US history Culture gop Biden democratic-party covid-19 Pandemic

shared by aidenborst on 11 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • In the second half of 2020, Republican-led states had higher Covid-19 case rates and death rates than Democrat-led states, according to a study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine on Tuesday.
  • States with Republican governors had higher case rates after June 3, and death rates tipped on July 4.
  • At their peak differences, case rates and deaths rates in Republican-led states were about 1.8 times higher than those in Democrat-led states.
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  • Democrat-led states -- such as New York and California -- were early entry points for Covid-19, perhaps contributing to higher incidence rates early on, according to the study's authors. But the reversal in trends "may reflect policy difference that could have facilitated the spread of the virus," they said.
  • "Governors' party affiliation may have contributed to a range of policy decisions that, together, influenced the spread of the virus," Sara Benjamin-Neelon, senior study author and professor at Johns Hopkins University, said in a news release. "These findings underscore the need for state policy actions that are guided by public health considerations rather than by partisan politics."
  • However, the new study's findings do not imply that political affiliation of a state leader was a cause of Covid-19 case or death incidence, according to the study's authors.
  • While the analysis was adjusted for rurality, the study notes that "the findings could reflect the virus's spread from urban to rural areas."
mimiterranova

Kendrick Johnson Case Will Be Reinvestigated By Georgia Sheriff's Office : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...ia-teen-found-in-rolled-up-gym

case US culture justice system

shared by mimiterranova on 12 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • A Georgia sheriff's office is reopening an investigation into the 2013 death of Kendrick Johnson, a Black teenager whose body was found inside a rolled-up gym mat in his high school gymnasium.
  • State authorities ruled his death an accident in 2013, suggesting he dove into the mat to retrieve a shoe and got trapped inside, after an autopsy found that he died of "positional asphyxia." The Lowndes County Sheriff's Office closed the case, but Johnson's family still suspected foul play.
  • A second autopsy, done at the family's request, determined the cause of death was blunt force trauma to the right side of Johnson's neck and the "manner of death was not
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  • an accident," according to federal investigators.
  • The Justice Department closed the case in June 2016, saying it could not meet the high legal threshold needed to file federal criminal charges — it would have needed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that someone had killed Johnson, and was motivated by racial animus to do so.
cartergramiak

N.Y. Severely Undercounted Virus Deaths in Nursing Homes, Report Says - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nursing-home-deaths-cuomo.html

politics pandemic US crisis history

shared by cartergramiak on 05 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • ALBANY, N.Y. — For most of the past year, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has tried to brush away a persistent criticism that undermined his national image as the man who led New York through the pandemic: that his policies had allowed thousands of nursing home residents to die of the virus.
  • He also asserted that the lack of data on hospital deaths of nursing home residents was due to concern and caution about the accuracy of data that nursing homes supplied — an issue also raised by the attorney general. “D.O.H. does not disagree that the number of people transferred from a nursing home to a hospital is an important data point,” he said.
  • The report also cast a critical eye on perhaps the governor’s most criticized decision since the beginning of the pandemic last year: a March 25 directive from the Health Department that ordered nursing homes to accept and readmit patients who had tested positive..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-c7gg1r{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:0.875rem;line-height:0.875rem;margin-bottom:15px;color:#121212 !important;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-c7gg1r{font-size:0.9375rem;line-height:0.9375rem;}}.css-1sjr751{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}.css-1sjr751 a:hover{border-bottom:1px solid #dcdcdc;}.css-rqynmc{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.9375rem;line-height:1.25rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-rqynmc{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-rqynmc strong{font-weight:600;}.css-rqynmc em{font-style:italic;}.css-yoay6m{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-yoay6m{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.css-1pd7fgo{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% - 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1pd7fgo{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-1pd7fgo:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1pd7fgo{border:none;padding:20px 0 0;border-top:1px solid #121212;}.css-1pd7fgo[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-1pd7fgo[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-1pd7fgo[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:'See more';}.css-1pd7fgo[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-k9atqk{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-k9atqk strong{font-weight:700;}.css-k9atqk em{font-style:italic;}.css-k9atqk a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;border-bottom:1px solid #ccd9e3;}.css-k9atqk a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd;}.css-k9atqk a:hover{border-bottom:none;}
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  • The Democratic chairman of the investigations and government operations committee in the State Senate, James Skoufis, who has accused the Health Department of stonewalling investigators, suggested on Thursday that he would use a subpoena to compel the release of data from Dr. Zucker’s office.
  • The attorney general asked 62 nursing homes — about a tenth of the state’s total — for information about on-site and in-hospital deaths related to the virus; investigators then cross-referenced that information with public reports of deaths issued by the Health Department. The deaths reported to the attorney general’s office at most of those facilities totaled 1,914, compared to the state’s much lower count of 1,229.
  • Under normal circumstances, the attorney general’s office “would issue a report with findings and recommendations after its investigations and enforcement activities are completed,” Ms. James said in her report. “However, circumstances are far from normal.”
anonymous

During The Pandemic Lockdown, Traffic Deaths Soared To The Highest Level In 13 Years : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...risky-behavior-during-the-pand

shared by anonymous on 03 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • U.S. traffic deaths rose 7% last year, the biggest increase in 13 years even though people drove fewer miles due to the coronavirus pandemic, the government's road safety agency reported Thursday.
  • The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration blamed the increase on drivers taking more risks on less-congested roads by speeding, failing to wear seat belts, or driving while impaired by drugs or alcohol.
  • An estimated 38,680 people died in traffic crashes last year, the most of any year since 2007, the agency said in releasing preliminary numbers. Final numbers normally come out in the fall.
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  • 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%.
anonymous

U.S. Executes Dustin Higgs In 13th And Final Execution Under Trump Administration : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...ion-under-trump-administration

shared by anonymous on 16 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The U.S. government has executed Dustin Higgs, the last prisoner executed during the Trump administration, and the 13th in the space of six months.
  • The Supreme Court declined to stop the execution, although some justices dissented, noting that before the first of the 13, it had been 17 years since a federal execution had been carried out.
  • Higgs, along with two other men, killed three women in 1996, with one of the men, Willis Haynes, actually pulling the trigger. Haynes pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison. Higgs was found guilty in 2000 of multiple federal offenses including first-degree premeditated murder, three counts of first-degree felony murder, and three counts of kidnapping resulting in death.
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  • "after waiting almost two decades to resume federal executions, the Government should have proceeded with some measure of restraint to ensure it did so lawfully."
  • The crimes were carried out in Maryland which has since dropped the death penalty. Higgs was executed at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind., and was pronounced dead at 1:23 a.m., according to the Associated Press. In a statement following the execution, Shawn Nolan, an attorney for Higgs, called him "a fine man, a terrific father, brother, and nephew" who "spent decades on death row in solitary confinement helping others around him, while working tirelessly to fight his unjust convictions."
  • "There was no reason to kill him, particularly during the pandemic and when he, himself, was sick with Covid that he contracted because of these irresponsible, super-spreader executions,"
  • Corey Johnson, 52, was executed Thursday night. He had also contracted COVID-19 while in prison, and his attorney argued that executing him following the infection would have been "cruel and unusual punishment." Lisa Montgomery was executed early Wednesday. She was the only woman on federal death row and the first female prisoner to be put to death by the U.S. government since 1953.
  • The executions come days before the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden, who has opposed the federal death penalty. On Monday, Senate Democrats unveiled legislation that would abolish it.
anonymous

Colorado officials resume review of ketamine program after Elijah McClain's death - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by anonymous on 16 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Colorado health officials will resume their review of a program allowing ketamine to be administered outside of hospital settings, an investigation initially announced after the death of Elijah McClain in police custody. The 23-year-old Black man died in August 2019 after paramedics administered the powerful anesthetic during a confrontation with police. A grand jury investigation into McClain's death was announced earlier this month.
  • The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) first announced the ketamine program review last summer, about a year after McClain's death,
  • Without reviewing individual cases, the CDPHE said it would evaluate authorization for "ketamine use in Colorado, in the prehospital setting and associated outcomes at a statewide level." "This more clearly defined scope will allow us to do a review that examines the health outcomes of ketamine administration by EMS providers in the field, broadly,
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  • Ketamine has been used illegally as a club drug. The medication, which is used in hospitals primarily as an anesthetic, generates an intense high and dissociative effects. EMS providers in Colorado need a waiver from the CDPHE to use ketamine in the field. The drug is allowed to be administered for patients "with a presumptive diagnosis or excited delirium,"
  • Paramedics administered ketamine to McClain after he was stopped one night in August 2019 by three White Aurora police officers as he walked home from a convenience store. A 911 called had reported a "suspicious person," according to a police news release that said McClain "resisted contact" with officers before a struggle ensued. McClain is heard in footage from an officer's body camera telling the officers, "I'm an introvert, please respect the boundaries that I am speaking."
  • Paramedics arrived and administered ketamine, the letter said. McClain was taken to a hospital but suffered a heart attack on the way, and he was declared brain dead three days later, the letter said.
  • The report noted McClain's history of asthma and the carotid hold, though the autopsy did not determine whether it contributed to McClain's death. The concentration of ketamine in his system was at a "therapeutic level," the report said.
  • The district attorney declined to file criminal charges at the time, but the case attracted renewed attention last summer after the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. As protests took place across the country, demonstrations in the Denver suburb focused on McClain and his family's calls for justice, and Gov. Jared Polis tapped Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser to review the case. Weiser announced this month he was opening a grand jury investigation into McClain's death
xaviermcelderry

C.D.C. Warns New Virus Variant Could Fuel Huge Spikes in Covid Cases - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...covid-cdc-variant.html

Covid

shared by xaviermcelderry on 15 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • ederal health officials sounded the alarm Friday about a fast spreading, far more contagious variant of the coronavirus that is projected to become the dominant source of infection in the country by March, potentially fueling another wrenching surge of cases and deaths.
  • Only 76 cases of the variant have been identified so far in the U.S., but the actual number is believed to be higher and is expected to spiral upward in the next few weeks, officials said.
  • But spikes in cases threaten to cripple already overwhelmed hospitals and nursing homes in many parts of the country. Some are at or near capacity. Others have faced troubling rates of infection among their staff, causing shortages and increasing patient loads.
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  • “I want to stress that we are deeply concerned that this strain is more transmissible and can accelerate outbreaks in the U.S.
  • Covid cases and deaths have broken record after record across the country, with a peak number of deaths, 4,400, announced on Tuesday. At least 3,973 new deaths and 238,390 new cases were reported on Thursday, and the nation is nearing a milestone of 400,000 deaths.
  • The new variant, called B 1.1.7 was first identified in Britain, where it rapidly became the primary source of infections, accounting for as many 60 percent of new cases diagnosed in London and surrounding areas.
  • In the new report, C.D.C. scientists modeled how quickly the variant might spread in the United States, assuming about 10 percent to 30 percent of people have pre-existing immunity to the virus, and another 1 million people will be vaccinated each week beginning this month.
  • It’s not yet clear what makes the new variants more contagious. They share at least one mutation, called N501Y, that is thought to be involved. One possibility, researchers said, is that the mutation may increase the amount of virus in the nose but not in the lungs — potentially explaining why it is more contagious, but not more deadly.A higher amount of virus in the nose means anyone infected would expel more virus while talking, singing, coughing or even breathing, said Trevor Bedford, an evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle
  • Federal health officials sounded the alarm Friday about a fast spreading, far more contagious variant of the coronavirus that is projected to become the dominant source of infection in the country by March, potentially fueling another wrenching surge of cases and deaths.
  • The variant is not known to be more deadly or to cause more severe disease. But the dire warning — hedged by limited data about just how prevalent the variant first identified in Britain has become — landed in a week where the nation’s nascent vaccination campaign was hampered by confusion and limited supplies as demand grew among growing numbers of eligible people
  • Only 76 cases of the variant have been identified so far in the U.S., but the actual number is believed to be higher and is expected to spiral upward in the next few weeks, officials said.
  • One in 860 Americans have died of Covid-19 in the last year, according to new figures released by the C.D.C. But the burden of deaths has not fallen equally across racial, ethnic lines and geographic regions, and there is concern that vaccines will not reach the hardest hit communities, where access to health services is limited and distrust is rampant. Editors’ PicksFor Pro Athlete Leading Social Justice Push, a Victory and UncertaintyJames Comey’s View of Justice — and How It Differs From Donald Trump’sHow ‘Orwellian’ Became an All-Purpose InsultAdvertisementContinue reading the main storyImage
  • But spikes in cases threaten to cripple already overwhelmed hospitals and nursing homes in many parts of the country. Some are at or near capacity. Others have faced troubling rates of infection among their staff, causing shortages and increasing patient loads.
  • If the variant is about 50 percent more contagious, as suggested by data from Britain, it will become the predominant source of all infections in the United States by March, the model showed. A slow rollout of vaccinations will hasten that fate.
rerobinson03

Christianity - Dogma, Definition & Beliefs - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...history-of-christianity

shared by rerobinson03 on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • hristianity is the most widely practiced religion in the world, with more than 2 billion followers.
  • The Christian faith centers on beliefs regarding the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
  • Christians are monotheistic, i
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • The essence of Christianity revolves around the life, death and Christian beliefs on the resurrection of Jesus. Christians believe God sent his son Jesus, the messiah, to save the world. They believe Jesus was crucified on a cross to offer the forgiveness of sins and was resurrected three days after his death before ascending to heaven.
  • Christians contend that Jesus will return to earth again in what’s known as the Second Coming.
  • The Holy Bible includes important scriptures that outline Jesus’s teachings, the lives and teachings of major prophets and disciples, and offer instructions for how Christians should live.
  • Both Christians and Jews follow the Old Testament of the Bible, but Christians also embrace the New Testament.The cross is a symbol of Christianity.The most important Christian holidays are Christmas (which celebrates the birth of Jesus) and Easter (which commemorates the resurrection of Jesus).
  • Most historians believe that Jesus was a real person who was born between 2 B.C. and 7 B.C.
  • According to the text, Jesus was born to a young Jewish virgin named Mary in the town of Bethlehem, south of Jerusalem in modern-day Palestine.
  • he aimed to reform Judaism—not create a new religion.
  • Some of the main themes that Jesus taught, which Christians later embraced, include:Love God.Love your neighbor as yourself.Forgive others who have wronged you.Love your enemies.Ask God for forgiveness of your sins.Jesus is the Messiah and was given the authority to forgive others.Repentance of sins is essential.Don’t be hypocritical.Don’t judge others.The Kingdom of God is near. It’s not the rich and powerful—but the weak and poor—who will inherit this kingdom.
  • Many scholars believe Jesus died between 30 A.D. and 33 A.D.
  • Jesus was arrested, tried and condemned to death. Roman governor Pontius Pilate issued the order to kill Jesus after being pressured by Jewish leaders who alleged that Jesus was guilty of a variety of crimes, including blasphemy.
  • The Christian Bible is a collection of 66 books written by various authors. It’s divided into two parts: The Old Testament and the New Testament.
  • The Old Testament, which is also recognized by followers of Judaism, describes the history of the Jewish people, outlines specific laws to follow, details the lives of many prophets, and predicts the coming of the Messiah.
  • The New Testament was written after Jesus’s death. The first four books—Matthew, Mark, Luke and John—are known as the “Gospels,” which means “good news.” These texts, composed sometime between 70 A.D. and 100 A.D., provide accounts of the life and death of Jesus.
  • According to the Bible, the first church organized itself 50 days after Jesus’s death on the Day of Pentecost—when the Holy Spirit was said to descend onto Jesus’s followers.
  • Early Christians considered it their calling to spread and teach the gospel. One of the most important missionaries was the apostle Paul, a former persecutor of Christians.
  • Many historians believe Christianity wouldn’t be as widespread without the work of Paul. In addition to preaching, Paul is thought to have written 13 of the 27 books in the New Testament.
  • Early Christians were persecuted for their faith by both Jewish and Roman leaders.
  • n 64 A.D., Emperor Nero blamed Christians for a fire that broke out in Rome. Many were brutally tortured and killed during this time.
  • tarting in 303 A.D., Christians faced the most severe persecutions to date under the co-emperors Diocletian and Galerius. This became known as the Great Persecution.
  • When Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, religious tolerance shifted in the Roman Empire.
  • In 313 A.D., Constantine lifted the ban on Christianity with the Edict of Milan. He later tried to unify Christianity and resolve issues that divided the church by establishing the Nicene Creed.
  • When the Roman Empire collapsed in 476 A.D., differences emerged among Eastern and Western Christians.
  • In 1054 A.D., the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox church split into two groups
  • Between about 1095 A.D. and 1230 A.D., the Crusades, a series of holy wars, took place. In these battles, Christians fought against Islamic rulers and their Muslim soldiers to reclaim holy land in the city of Jerusalem.
  • In 1517, a German monk named Martin Luther published 95 Theses—a text that criticized certain acts of the Pope and protested some of the practices and priorities of the Roman Catholic church.
  • Luther’s ideas triggered the Reformation—a movement that aimed to reform the Catholic church.
  • As a result, Protestantism was created, and different denominations of Christianity eventually began to form
  • Catholic, Protestant and (Eastern) Orthodox.
Javier E

The Not-So-Soft Bigotry of COVID Indifference - The Bulwark - 0 views

thebulwark.com/-bigotry-of-covid-indifference

bigotry covid indifference liberty gop demographics deaths pandemic effects

shared by Javier E on 15 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • As the coronavirus pandemic continues to cut a wide swath through American communities, many have started to ignore it or, worse, rationalize the country’s mounting losses as a “sad but unavoidable” fact of life. The “sadness” appears to be of a very limited type. A recent poll found nearly 60 percent of Republicans view the deaths we’ve experienced as “acceptable.
  • There may be a relatively simple explanation for this complacency: the pandemic has disproportionately affected populations that are mostly out of sight and mind for the majority of Americans
  • COVID-19, for much of America, is something that happens to other people and many of the others are very old, very poor, people of color, or some combination of all these characteristics.
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  • Our real concern, the logic goes, should be for younger people who have their whole lives ahead of them and are sacrificing their economic futures to lockdowns. This collapse of the inter-generational compact has been far more effective at killing them off than any death panel dreamed up in Sarah Palin’s fevered imagination.
  • Similarly, ethnic and racial minorities including African Americans, Latinos/Hispanics, and Native Americans have all been disproportionately affected by COVID-19
  • Farm and food processing workers—dominated by Latino and other immigrant workers—are another population that has disproportionately been affected by COVID-19.
  • That social reciprocity has broken down to this degree ought to be an embarrassment and shame to us all.
  • Heavily agricultural regions like California’s Central Valleyand Washington State’s Yakima Valley have seen huge COVID spikes. In response, the U.S. Department of Labor has so far levied just $29,000 in fines against two companies, Smithfield and JBS, who have combined sales of $65 billion per year.
  • Adding to the misery of COVID-vulnerable populations is an unfortunate, and very human, tendency to find reasons to blame disadvantaged groups for their illness.
  • Reviewing the data and history pandemic discrimination, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the majority of America has concluded that these groups—the poor, the minority, the imprisoned, and the elderly—are the “acceptable” losses.
  • Were the situation reversed and the white, middle aged, and middle/upper classes the primary victims of the pandemic—one of the features of the 1918 influenza—COVID-19 would be a true national emergency and there would be far less complaining about disrupted schools, work, and social life brought about by social distancing requirements and economic shutdowns
  • Last are the millions of Americans behind bars. Per statistics from the Marshall Project, there have been more than 121,000 COVID-19 cases reported among prisoners and more than a thousand deaths.
  • The message seems to be that Americans have abandoned e pluribus unum (out of many, one) for “everyone—or at least every group—for themselves.”
  • Pro-lifers have for decades protested American indifference to the deaths of millions of unborn children (another invisible and voiceless minority), and they have been right to do so. Where are these champions of human life when other weak and vulnerable populations are dying at the rate of a thousand a week or more?
carolinehayter

U.S. To Proceed With Executions Through Transition In Break With Precedent : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...sition-in-break-with-precedent

politics us trump biden death penalty Policy gop

shared by carolinehayter on 24 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • The Justice Department is proceeding with plans for more federal executions in the closing days of President Trump's administration
  • Attorney General William Barr announced the moves, connected with what he called "staggeringly brutal murders," in a statement late Friday.
  • If the Justice Department plan moves forward, 13 people will have faced death by lethal injection during the Trump administration. Legal experts who follow capital punishment said that would be the most since the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who served 12 years in office before his death in 1945.
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  • Robert Dunham of the Death Penalty Information Center said the Trump Justice Department had behaved in ways that are "historically anomalous."
  • "In a normal presidency that followed the traditional norms of civility, you wouldn't see executions during a transition period," Dunham said. "The outgoing administration would defer to the incoming administration in matters like this."
  • Their legal teams say Bourgeois and Johnson suffer from intellectual disabilities and that Higgs didn't pull the trigger to kill the women. Instead, the man who admitted firing the weapon was tried separately and was sentenced to life in prison.
  • "The federal government has already presided over the executions of eight people so far this year," said Hannah Riley, a spokeswoman at the Southern Center for Human Rights. "The death penalty is always unconscionable, but it is especially egregious to carry out executions as hundreds of people are dying of COVID-19 in this country every day."
  • Dunham said the unusual moves by the Justice Department also extended to an announcement about a decision to seek capital punishment against a defendant who has not yet gone to trial.
  • The Biden transition team didn't comment directly on the Justice Department plan. But during the campaign, candidate Biden pledged to eliminate the death penalty, citing 160 people who were sentenced to capital punishment and were later exonerated.
  • Biden said he wanted to work with Congress to pass a law to eliminate federal capital punishment and "incentivize" states to follow that example.
  • Lawyers who follow federal capital punishment trends said they hoped that Biden, who supported expanding the death penalty 30 years ago, only to reverse course, had learned from hard experience that informal moratoriums don't solve the problem.
Javier E

America's Racial Contract Is Showing - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...611389

racial contract racism pandemic

shared by Javier E on 09 May 20 - No Cached
  • To see the sequence of events that led to Arbery’s death as benign requires a cascade of assumptions. One must assume that two men arming themselves and chasing down a stranger running through their neighborhood is a normal occurrence. One must assume that the two armed white men had a right to self-defense, and that the black man suddenly confronted by armed strangers did not. One must assume that state laws are meant to justify an encounter in which two people can decide of their own volition to chase, confront, and kill a person they’ve never met.
  • Barnhill’s leniency is selective—as The Appeal’s Josie Duffy Rice notes, Barnhill attempted to prosecute Olivia Pearson, a black woman, for helping another black voter use an electronic voting machine. A crime does not occur when white men stalk and kill a black stranger. A crime does occur when black people vote.
  • The underlying assumptions of white innocence and black guilt are all part of what the philosopher Charles Mills calls the “racial contract.”
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  • the racial contract is a codicil rendered in invisible ink, one stating that the rules as written do not apply to nonwhite people in the same way.
  • The Declaration of Independence states that all men are created equal; the racial contract limits this to white men with property
  • The law says murder is illegal; the racial contract says it’s fine for white people to chase and murder black people if they have decided that those black people scare them.
  • “The terms of the Racial Contract,” Mills wrote, “mean that nonwhite subpersonhood is enshrined simultaneously with white personhood.”
  • as the process in the Arbery case shows, the racial contract most often operates unnoticed, relying on Americans to have an implicit understanding of who is bound by the rules, and who is exempt from them.
  • Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign, with its vows to enforce state violence against Mexican immigrants, Muslims, and black Americans, was built on a promise to enforce terms of the racial contract that Barack Obama had ostensibly neglected, or violated by his presence.
  • Struggling white farmers in Iowa taking billions in federal assistance are hardworking Americans down on their luck; struggling single parents in cities using food stamps are welfare queens.
  • Black Americans struggling in the cocaine epidemic are a “bio-underclass” created by a pathological culture; white Americans struggling with opioid addiction are a national tragedy.
  • Poor European immigrants who flocked to an America with virtually no immigration restrictions came “the right way”; poor Central American immigrants evading a baroque and unforgiving system are gang members and terrorists.
  • The coronavirus epidemic has rendered the racial contract visible in multiple ways. Once the disproportionate impact of the epidemic was revealed to the American political and financial elite, many began to regard the rising death toll less as a national emergency than as an inconvenience.
  • The lives of workers at the front lines of the pandemic—such as meatpackers, transportation workers, and grocery clerks—have been deemed so worthless that legislators want to immunize their employers from liability even as they force them to work under unsafe conditions.
  • In East New York, police assault black residents for violating social-distancing rules; in Lower Manhattan, they dole out masks and smiles to white pedestrians.
  • The implied terms of the racial contract are visible everywhere for those willing to see them. A 12-year-old with a toy gun is a dangerous threat who must be met with lethal force; armed militias drawing beads on federal agents are heroes of liberty.
  • by mid-April, conservative broadcasters were decrying the restrictions, small bands of armed protesters were descending on state capitols, and the president was pressing to lift the constraints.
  • the pandemic has introduced a new clause to the racial contract. The lives of disproportionately black and brown workers are being sacrificed to fuel the engine of a faltering economy, by a president who disdains them. This is the COVID contract.
  • In the interim, data about the demographics of COVID-19 victims began to trickle out. On April 7, major outlets began reporting that preliminary data showed that black and Latino Americans were being disproportionately felled by the coronavirus. That afternoon, Rush Limbaugh complained, “If you dare criticize the mobilization to deal with this, you’re going to be immediately tagged as a racist.”
  • That night, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson announced, “It hasn’t been the disaster that we feared.” His colleague Brit Hume mused that “the disease turned out not to be quite as dangerous as we thought.” The nationwide death toll that day was just 13,000 people; it now stands above 70,000, a mere month later.
  • That more and more Americans were dying was less important than who was dying.
  • The disease is now “infecting people who cannot afford to miss work or telecommute—grocery store employees, delivery drivers and construction workers,”
  • Containing the outbreak was no longer a question of social responsibility, but of personal responsibility. From the White House podium, Surgeon General Jerome Adams told “communities of color” that “we need you to step up and help stop the spread.”
  • Public-health restrictions designed to contain the outbreak were deemed absurd. They seemed, in Carlson’s words, “mindless and authoritarian,” a “weird kind of arbitrary fascism.” To restrict the freedom of white Americans, just because nonwhite Americans are dying, is an egregious violation of the racial contract.
  • majority-black counties “account for more than half of coronavirus cases and nearly 60 percent of deaths.” The disproportionate burden that black and Latino Americans are bearing is in part a direct result of their overrepresentation in professions where they risk exposure, and of a racial gap in wealth and income that has left them more vulnerable to being laid off. Black and Latino workers are overrepresented among the essential, the unemployed, and the dead.
  • “Due to the meatpacking, though, that’s where Brown County got the flare,” Roggensack interrupted to clarify. “It wasn’t just the regular folks in Brown County.”
  • Roggensack was drawing a line between “regular folks” and the workers who keep them fed, mobile, safe, and connected. And America’s leaders have treated those workers as largely expendable, praising their valor while disregarding their safety.
  • In South Dakota, where a Smithfield plant became the site of an outbreak infecting more than 700 workers, a spokesperson told BuzzFeed News that the issue was their “large immigrant population.”
  • “We can’t keep our country closed down for years,” Trump said Wednesday. But that was no one’s plan. The plan was to buy time to take the necessary steps to open the country safely. But the Trump administration did not do that, because it did not consider the lives of the people dying worth the effort or money required to save them.
  • the only tension between stopping the virus and reviving the economy is one the Trump administration and its propaganda apparatus have invented. Economists are in near-unanimous agreement that the safest path requires building the capacity to contain the virus before reopening the economy—precisely because new waves of deaths will drive Americans back into self-imposed isolation, destroying the consumer spending that powers economic growth
  • The frame of war allows the president to call for the collective sacrifice of laborers without taking the measures necessary to ensure their safety, while the upper classes remain secure at home.
  • But the workers who signed up to harvest food, deliver packages, stack groceries, drive trains and buses, and care for the sick did not sign up for war, and the unwillingness of America’s political leadership to protect them is a policy decision, not an inevitability
  • Trump is acting in accordance with the terms of the racial contract, which values the lives of those most likely to be affected less than the inconveniences necessary to preserve them.
  • Collective solidarity in response to the coronavirus remains largely intact—most Americans support the restrictions and are not eager to sacrifice their lives or those of their loved ones for a few points of gross domestic product. The consistency across incomes and backgrounds is striking in an era of severe partisan polarization
  • But solidarity with the rest of the nation among elite Republicans—those whose lives and self-conceptions are intertwined with the success of the Trump presidency—began eroding as soon as the disproportionate impact of the outbreak started to emerge.
Javier E

Opinion | Life here in Britain is largely returning to normal, highlighting Trump's fai... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ghting-trumps-failures-america

uk pandemic response crisis politics policy trump

shared by Javier E on 13 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • to put it bluntly: At the moment, the United States has a covid-19 death rate that is five times worse than the worst country in Europe.
  • The latest seven-day rolling average of deaths has the United Kingdom at around 40 covid-19 deaths per day, or about one death per 1.5 million residents. By contrast, that same statistic for the United States is around 1,150 per day, or roughly one death for every 290,000 residents
  • Britain’s pandemic response was a failure. The British government continues to make serious mistakes, with some scientists still questioning its strategy. But the fact that the United Kingdom is now on a drastically better trajectory than the United States underscores a depressing lesson: Trump’s incompetence and his indifference to mass death was a policy choice. It didn’t have to be this way.
Javier E

The Steep Cost of Ron DeSantis's Vaccine Turnabout - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ron-desantis-covid.html

Florida vaccine pandemic policy effects politics us history

shared by Javier E on 23 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • While Florida was an early leader in the share of over-65 residents who were vaccinated, it had fallen to the middle of the pack by the end of July 2021. When it came to younger residents, Florida lagged behind the national average in every age group.
  • That left the state particularly vulnerable when the Delta variant hit that month. Floridians died at a higher rate, adjusted for age, than residents of almost any other state during the Delta wave, according to the Times analysis. With less than 7 percent of the nation’s population, Florida accounted for 14 percent of deaths between the start of July and the end of October.
  • Of the 23,000 Floridians who died, 9,000 were younger than 65. Despite the governor’s insistence at the time that “our entire vulnerable population has basically been vaccinated,” a vast majority of the 23,000 were either unvaccinated or had not yet completed the two-dose regimen.
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  • A high vaccination rate was especially important in Florida, which trails only Maine in the share of residents 65 and older. By the end of July, Florida had vaccinated about 60 percent of adults, just shy of the national average
  • Had it reached a vaccination rate of 74 percent — the average for five New England states at the time — it could have prevented more than 16,000 deaths and more than 61,000 hospitalizations that summer, according to a study published in the medical journal The Lancet.
  • in Florida, unlike the nation as a whole — and states like New York and California that Mr. DeSantis likes to single out — most people who died from Covid died after vaccines became available to all adults, not before.
  • Mr. DeSantis and his aides have said that his opposition was to mandates, not to the vaccinations themselves. They say the governor only questioned the efficacy of the shots once it became evident that they did not necessarily prevent infection — which prompted him to criticize experts and the federal government.
  • The governor had early success in following his instincts. In 2020, the state supplied its nearly 4,000 long-term care homes with Covid tests and isolated Covid patients, avoiding New York’s mistake of releasing Covid patients from hospitals to nursing homes where they infected others. Florida’s death rate in the pandemic’s first year, adjusted for age, was lower than all but 10 other states’.
  • Florida was also one of only four states to require schools to hold in-person classes in the fall of 2020, a move that Mr. DeSantis has said defied the nation’s public health experts
  • In fact, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, a federal infectious disease expert on former President Donald J. Trump’s task force, said repeatedly that summer and fall that schools could open safely with the right precautions. Nonetheless, facing strong opposition from teachers’ unions, nearly three-fourths of the nation’s 100 largest school districts offered only remote learning that fall.
  • At the same time, though, the governor was embracing more extreme views, including those of Dr. Scott W. Atla
  • Both he and Dr. Bhattacharya argued that people who were not at risk of severe consequences should not face Covid restrictions. If they were infected, they would develop natural immunity, which would eventually build up in the population and cause the virus to fade away, they said.
  • Many public health experts were alarmed by this strategy, which was articulated in a document known as the Great Barrington Declaration. They said it would be impossible to ring-fence the vulnerable, or even to clearly communicate to the public who they were. Besides older Americans, as many as 41 million younger adults were considered to be at high risk of severe disease if infected because of underlying medical conditions like obesity.
  • Dr. Atlas, however, argued that the virus was not dangerous to an overwhelming majority of Americans. Both he and Dr. Bhattacharya said the Covid death rate for everyone under 70 was very low. Dr. Atlas claimed that children had “virtually zero” risk of death.
  • As of this summer, more than 345,000 Americans under 70 have died of the virus, and more than 3.5 million have been hospitalized
  • The disease has killed nearly 2,300 children and adolescents, and nearly 200,000 have been hospitalized.
  • Mr. DeSantis gave him a platform at a series of public events in Florida at the end of the summer of 2020. He would go on to echo Dr. Atlas’s views, sometimes in modified form, throughout the pandemic.
  • Mr. DeSantis subsequently promoted the shots in 27 counties. Florida offered the vaccine to everyone 65 and older, an eligibility system simpler than an early one recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and adopted by many states, that prioritized essential workers and those over 75.
  • But his enthusiasm for shots waned fast, tracking the growing hostility toward them among the party’s conservative activists. In late February, when Mr. DeSantis hosted a gathering of such activists for the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, he boasted that Florida was an “oasis of freedom” in a nation led by misguided health authorities.
  • By the time all adults became eligible for the vaccines in April of that year, Mr. DeSantis was rarely promoting them.
  • “Some are choosing not to take it, which is fine,” he said in March, at a 100-minute public event on Covid in which he did not once urge people to get vaccinated. In dozens of appearances on Fox News in the first half of 2021, he was carefully neutral about shots, except for those over 65.
  • “Younger people are just simply at very little risk for this,”
  • A few months later, he told Fox News that he had concluded early on that Covid “was something that was risky for elderly people,” but that it posed minimal risks for people “who were in reasonably good health, who were, say, under 50.”
  • The data-driven governor also turned away from Covid case data.
  • In May 2021, Florida closed its 27 state-run testing centers. The next month, on orders from the governor’s office, the Health Department halted daily reports on infections and deaths, switching to weekly reports that drew less attention.
  • Both polls and political events showed that Republicans were not as excited as Democrats about the shots. At an Alabama political rally that August, Mr. Trump recommended the vaccine — and was booed. When a reporter asked Mr. DeSantis later that year if he had gotten a booster shot, he responded that he had gotten “the normal shot.”
  • After the highly contagious Delta variant began spreading in Florida that summer, Mr. DeSantis insisted that his approach had worked. Younger adults were driving the surge but “they’re not getting really sick from it or anything,” he said, adding: “They will develop immunity as a result of those infections.”
  • But they were getting sick. And vaccinations, which Mr. DeSantis suddenly began recommending again in late July, took weeks to confer protection
  • With hospitalizations rising, he began a campaign to offer monoclonal antibody treatments — a triage response to the pandemic’s frightening resurgence.
  • The drug cost vastly more than shots and required more medical staff to administer. Within about six weeks, the state had administered more than 90,000 treatments and probably kept 5,000 people out of the hospital, Dr. Rivkees said.
  • Mr. DeSantis accused the media in early August of “lying” about Covid patients’ flooding hospitals. Two weeks later, Mary C. Mayhew, head of the Florida Hospital Association, said: “There can be no question that many Florida hospitals are stretched to their absolute limits.”
  • “Our patients are younger and sicker,” Mr. Smith wrote. Of 17 patients on ventilators in intensive care on Aug. 13, 2021, more than half were younger than 55. Only one was vaccinated.
  • “People say that the decision about vaccination is a personal one and it doesn’t affect anyone else,” Mr. Smith wrote. “Tell that to the kids who lost their mom.”
  • When shots became available last year for children under 5, Florida did not preorder them because, Mr. DeSantis said, he did not consider them “appropriate.” Florida’s vaccination rates are well below the national average for children under 5. The state also trails in booster shots.
  • After Dr. Ladapo issued misleading claims about the risks of Covid shots for young men, the heads of the C.D.C. and the Food and Drug Administration sent a scathing four-page rebuttal. Such misinformation “puts people at risk of death or serious illness,” they said.
  • While the pandemic waned, leaving more than 80,000 Floridians and 1.13 million Americans dead, the governor continued to push policies that kept him at the vanguard of the anti-vaccine and anti-mandate conversation. A new state law, signed by Mr. DeSantis in May, bans government agencies, businesses and schools from requiring Covid testing, vaccination or mask wearing.
  • “Everything involving Covid — I think there needs to be major, major accountability,” he said in Iowa this month. “Because if there’s not, if you don’t have a reckoning, they are going to do it again.”
Javier E

The staggering scope of U.S. gun deaths goes far beyond mass shootings - Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...gun-deaths-per-year-usa

gun deaths effects impact analysis

shared by Javier E on 10 Jul 22 - No Cached
  • White men are six times as likely to die by suicide as other Americans. Black men are 17 times as likely to be killed with a gun fired by someone else.
  • Two different demographic groups bear the brunt of escalating gun violence and are most likely to die of a gunshot wound in America: young Black men and older White men.
  • The vast majority of gun deaths in America are either suicides or homicides, according to federal data, with accidental or undetermined gun deaths representing a small fraction of the overall share.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Monday’s rampage in Illinois marked the 15th time this year that four or more people were killed in a shootin
  • Of the 90,498 gun deaths in 2020 and 2021, 38,796 were homicides. Nearly 21,000 of those victims were Black men.
  • In 2020, while the overall crime rate nationwide fell, “that was not true for shootings,” Cook said. That year, he said, there was an “unparalleled” surge in people killed by firearms compared with 2019.
  • Solving more shootings, particularly nonfatal ones, “would interrupt the cycle of retaliation,” Cook said, and might improve local trust in the police. “That would be a productive use of money,” he said.
  • Police nationwide in 2020 “cleared” about half of all homicides, according to the FBI, which usually means that someone was arrested and charged or the case was closed another way, including the death of the attacker.
  • But three decades of research has established that people with mental illness are responsible for just a small percentage of interpersonal and gun violence.
  • “Anybody who shoots somebody else has a mental health challenge. Period,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said shortly after the Uvalde shooting in May.
  • It’s clear that many other factors are more closely associated with gun violence than mental illness. They include experiencing trauma and violence during childhood, being young and male, living in neighborhoods where violence is more prevalent, poor impulse control, poor anger control, and perhaps most of all, easy access to a firearm.
  • There is one major, well-established connection between mental illness and gun violence: suicide.
  • officials must help create environments where there is less trauma in the home, support families and strengthen services for children in schools.
  • In 1994, Duke University gun violence researcher Jeffrey W. Swanson calculated that if all active psychotic and mood disorders were eliminated overnight, interpersonal violence would be reduced by just 4 percent
  • “We don’t have gun control as much as we have people control,” he said. “We try to figure out the people who are so dangerous that we have to limit their access to guns.”
  • In many other countries, guns are tightly restricted, but the United States has taken a different route, he said.
  • people in Florida with serious mental illnesses, including some who were committed to a psychiatric facility involuntarily or for a short-term emergency hold, 0.9 percent were arrested for a violent crime involving a gun within seven years — about the same rate as the general population.
  • The 1998 MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment Study, which followed 951 people who had been released from three psychiatric facilities, found that 23 committed 67 acts of interpersonal gun violence — a rate of 2 percent — in the next year. Just 19 of those acts, committed by nine people, were against strangers.
  • The consistent invocations of mental health after massacres such as those in Buffalo, Uvalde and Highland Park are ways for officials to distance themselves from the horror of the event, to explain the unfathomable,
  • “It’s a tragedy that demands explanation, and the stigma of mental illness is something that fuels pseudo-explanations,” she said. “It’s a fake explanation. Why has this man done this terrible thing? The answer is because he’s mentally ill. How do you know he’s mentally ill? Because he’s done this terrible thing.”
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