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bluekoenig

Why fighting the coronavirus depends on you - YouTube - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

politics US history crisis culture medicine health covid19 coronavirus

shared by bluekoenig on 24 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • bluekoenig on 24 Mar 20
     
    Here is a video about the Covid-19 epidemic that details the symptoms, how it's spreading, and how we can and should keep the disease from overwhelming the health system and causing unnecessary deaths. It's slightly out of date with some of its information but it still contains information valuable and universal about this epidemic. Avoidable deaths occur when the health system is overwhelmed by huge amounts of cases in short periods of time and can not care for those who are sick and could be saved as well as people who are in desperate need of hospital care for other reasons like car accidents or shootings. More avoidable deaths occur when more people get sick so the biggest thing that prevents them is preventing the spread of the disease. This means not leaving your home if you are sick or have had contact with someone who was sick, act as though you already have it even if you don't. Social distancing saves lives by preventing avoidable deaths and slowing the pandemic in a way that doesn't overwhelm hospitals with cases, it keeps those with a chance who would have died because they couldn't get medical help alive.
bluekoenig

As the Coronavirus Approaches, Mexico Looks the Other Way | The Dispatch - 0 views

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politics mexico history crisis culture coronavirus covid19 health medicine

shared by bluekoenig on 25 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • bluekoenig on 25 Mar 20
     
    Amid this Coronavirus crisis, Mexican citizens are unconcerned and looking the other way despite already having four deaths in their country. The problem stems from the lack of concern from the government and the president who don't see it as a huge issue, saying things like "you have to hug" and continuing to hold political rallies. Meanwhile, healthcare personnel are trying to warn both the president and the public about the true concerns with the virus and their lack of preparedness for the soon to occur explosion of cases. It's a wild thing to see compared to the reaction by the US government, which could arguably be an underreaction as well.
bluekoenig

How Coronavirus Racism Infected My High School | NYT Opinion - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

politics us history crisis culture coronavirus covid19 race descimination

shared by bluekoenig on 25 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • bluekoenig on 25 Mar 20
     
    While the Coronavirus poses a threat to our health a new infection is growing, racism related to the epidemic. Since the virus came to our country racism again Asian Americans has been on the rise. There have been reports of physical attacks and viral videos of verbal attacks and passive comments against Asian Americans that play into racial stereotypes and cause harm, even in our schools. There has been no help from the media or the countries leaders as they directly or indirectly play into these stereotypes and blame China and the Chinese for spreading the virus. Xenophobia has occurred with other epidemics before but that doesn't mean we shouldn't fight against bullying or discrimination based on race just because the virus originated in China.
bluekoenig

Coronavirus: Lessons From Past Epidemics | Retro Report - YouTube - 0 views

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politics US history crisis culture covid19 coronavirus health medicine retro report retroreport

shared by bluekoenig on 24 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • bluekoenig on 24 Mar 20
     
    This is a video from New York Times' series Retro Report about the Covid-19 outbreak and how other outbreaks were dealt with in the past, specifically the eradication of smallpox across the world. Doctors would hold public events and campaigns to spread awareness so those infected could be quarantined and treated accordingly. Doctors offered rewards for reported cases and walked around with pictures of those affected asking if community members saw anyone who looked like the picture. This helped especially with hidden cases, or cases that were unidentified that resulted in spreading in a community unaware of what the virus really was. The video also addresses how not to deal with epidemics or disease eradication with the antivaccination campaigns based in political or religious distrust in Africa and the Middle East that lead to the rise of polio. These epidemics and how they were addressed can help with the response to Covid-19 as we learn from history instead of ignoring it.
anniina03

Why Nobody Knows How Many Americans Have the Coronavirus - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...608521

politics us crisis policy trump

shared by anniina03 on 26 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • But experts believe that the United States still isn’t testing enough people to detect the outbreak’s true spread. The virologist Trevor Bedford has found evidence that the coronavirus began spreading in the United States in January. It has already infected approximately 87,000 Americans
  • The United States is a country soon to be overrun with sick people. As the positive tests for the new coronavirus have ticked upward, so, inevitably, will the deaths.
  • A study published this week by Imperial College London predicted that unless aggressive action is taken, the coronavirus could kill 2.2 million Americans in the coming months. A day after that study was published, its lead researcher developed a dry cough and fever. He had COVID-19.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • What’s happening here, in this country, was avoidable. Nearly every flaw in America’s response to the virus has one source: America did not test enough people for COVID-19.
  • If there is one thing about the novel coronavirus that you must understand, it’s that it is a firecracker with a long fuse. Here is what the explosion looks like: Every six days, the number of people infected by the disease doubles
  • Every six days that the country did not test, every six days that it did not act, the number of infected Americans doubled.
  • “If you don’t know where the disease is early in the epidemic, you have no hope of containing it,” Bhadelia said. “Even now, [testing is] that Achilles’ heel; it’s the crack that is making its way throughout our entire response.”
  • Testing should have answered the all-important question in any pandemic: How many people are sick right now? Had the nation known that, the systems that were put into place over years of pandemic planning could have powered on, protecting millions of Americans and containing the illness.
  • An invisible fuse sets off this burst of disease. If someone is infected with the coronavirus on Monday, she may start being contagious and infecting other people by Wednesday. But she may not start showing symptoms until Friday—meaning that she was spreading the virus before she even knew she had it. And in some cases, infected people take 14 days to start showing symptoms.
  • the CDC hit a disastrous roadblock, as it began to send test kits to public-health labs across the country. Two of the test’s reagents were fine, in most cases, but a third chemical initially deemed necessary for the test simply did not work. For the time being, every test for COVID-19 would have to be conducted by the CDC.As the CDC struggled to find a solution, other laboratories tried to bring their own tests online. They found themselves hamstrung by the FDA, which, though it repeatedly loosened the rules, could not move as fast as the coronavirus.
  • No one at the federal level was moving fast enough to actually deal with the looming disaster.
  • On February 26, the CDC confirmed what should have been clear much earlier: Community transmission in the United States had begun. The coronavirus was now spreading among Americans who had not traveled abroad or known a confirmed case. At least 60 people in the country now had the virus, according to the CDC’s totals at the time—and, as researchers and analysts soon realized, the true number was almost certainly much higher.
  • By the end of February, the disease had not only established itself in the United States. It had been circulating for close to six weeks. Seattle, on March 1, found itself in the same position as Wuhan did on January 1, with a growing coronavirus outbreak that was on the verge of exploding.
  • February was our chance to get this right. We lost that entire month. And we now live in a new era of work stoppages, overwhelmed hospitals, dead elders, and a wrecked economy.
Javier E

Report: Trump Privately Asks Why Government Can't Just Let COVID 'Wash Over' The Country - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...-coronavirus-wash-over-country

trump response pandemic

shared by Javier E on 12 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • The Washington Post reported on Saturday that during a Situation Room meeting on the pandemic in March, Trump asked White House coronavirus task force member Dr. Anthony Fauci, “Why don’t we let this wash over the country?”
  • Other unnamed officials said that Trump has “repeatedly” (in the Post’s words) asked the same question in the Oval Office.
  • Trump reportedly began mulling over the idea after hearing about the United Kingdom’s now-abandoned “mitigation” strategy that would let COVID-19 spread throughout the country with few movement restrictions imposed on the population in the hopes of building a “herd immunity” against the virus
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • However, a study by medical advisers to the British government found in mid-March that the strategy would “likely result in hundreds of thousands of deaths,” prompting the U.K. to drop the plan. The same study also predicted that 1.1 to 1.2 million Americans would die if the strategy were adopted in the U.S.
Javier E

Opinion | What We Pretend to Know About the Coronavirus Could Kill Us - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-fake-news.html

disinformation pandemic propaganda extremism conspiracy theory

shared by Javier E on 06 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • Public health experts like Dr. Emanuel tend to be cautious about predictions and transparent about what they don’t know. In the case of the coronavirus, that can cause a dearth of definitive information — and an opportunity for reckless information that’s partly true but politically skewed.
  • The dynamic is on display during the daily White House news conferences, where President Trump’s claims are often hedged or corrected by public health officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci.
  • much of the pernicious false news about the coronavirus operates on the margins of believability — real facts and charts cobbled together to formulate a dangerous, wrongheaded conclusion or news reports that combine a majority of factually accurate reporting with a touch of unproven conjecture.
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • armchair epidemiology, which Slate described as “convincing but flawed epidemiological analyses.”
  • The prime example is a Medium blog post titled “Covid-19 — Evidence Over Hysteria” by Aaron Ginn, a Silicon Valley product manager and “growth hacker” who argued against the severity of the virus and condemned the mainstream media for hyping it.
  • Conservative pundits, who’d spent weeks downplaying the seriousness of the virus, were drawn to Mr. Ginn’s conclusion that “shuttering the local economy is a distraction and arbitrary with limited accretive gain outside of greatly annoying millions and bankrupting hundreds of businesses.”
  • The Fox News political analyst Brit Hume tweeted the post, and then so did the anchors Bret Baier and Laura Ingraham. Within hours, the blog post was amplified across conservative media.
  • “I am seeing this playbook more and more,” Dr. Bergstrom said. “Secondhand data showing a crisis narrative that feels just a bit too well crafted. Mixing the truth with the plausible and the plausible with that which seems plausibly true in a week.”
  • Epidemiologists disagreed, pointing to some of Mr. Ginn’s assumptions as “unsubstantiated” and ignorant of “first-chapter-of-the-epidemiology-textbook stuff.”
  • After a 31-tweet thread from the infectious-disease expert Carl Bergstrom debunking Mr. Ginn’s data as cherry-picked, Medium took the post down, prompting a backlash in conservative spheres. More than two million people had already viewed it.
  • Mr. Ginn’s post, which seems informed by his reflexive skepticism of the mainstream media, filled two needs for readers: It offered a scientific-seeming explanation that real scientists would not provide. And it provided a political foil, the media.
  • This, according to Dr. Bergstrom, is what makes armchair epidemiology so harmful. Posts like Mr. Ginn’s “deplete the critical resource you need to manage the pandemic, which is trust,
  • “When people are getting conflicting messages, it makes it very hard for state and local authorities to generate the political will to take strong actions downstream.”
  • At first glance, the piece looked quite convincing. Mr. Ginn drew heavily from charts from the C.D.C., Johns Hopkins and the Financial Times. “You don’t need a special degree to understand what the data says and doesn’t say,” he claimed.
  • Dr. Bergstrom argues that the advances in available data make it easier than ever for junk-science peddlers to appear legitimate.
  • “Statistical analysis is a black box to most of us,” Dr. Bergstrom said. “And it’s like, ‘I can’t challenge a multilinear statistical regression because I don’t know what that is,’
  • “And so a form of authority gets imposed on a reader and we tend not to challenge data the way we’ve learned to challenge words.”
  • Mr. Evans is concerned that ultimately important nuance will be lost and pro-Trump pundits will use the news to exclusively scapegoat China and divert blame away from domestic failings. “What’s scary is how smart the false stuff is,” he said.
  • Covid-19 and the immediate threat to public health means that networks like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have been unusually decisive about taking down misinformation. “In a case of a pandemic like this, when we are seeing posts that are urging people not to get treatment,” Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, said recently, “that’s a completely different class of content versus the back-and-forth of what candidates may say about each other.”
  • The Trump administration and right-wing media watchdogs will weaponize changing facts about the virus, pointing to them as proof of a deep state bent on damaging the president or a media apparatus trying to swing an election
  • Others will try to pin the blame for the pandemic solely on the Trump administration
  • What we don’t know about Covid-19 will degenerate into ever more intricate conspiracies — some almost believable, some outrageous but all dangerous.
  • “We’re in a stream of ever-evolving data, and it’s being shaped around cognitive biases, partisanship and preferences embedded in our cultural identities,”
  • I called Mr. Pomerantsev because the information vacuum around the virus made me think of the title of his earlier book on Russia — “Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible.
  • In the absence of new, vetted information, reckless speculation takes its place, muddling our conception of the truth.
  • in crisis situations — especially early on — our desire for information exceeds our ability to accurately deliver it. Add to this the complexities of epidemiology: exponential growth; statistical modeling; and the slow, methodical nature of responsible science.
  • Together, they create the ideal conditions for distrust, bad-faith interpretations and political manipulation, the contours of which we’re only beginning to see.
  • “The really big question that haunts me is, ‘When do we return to reality?’” Mr. Pomerantsev mused over the phone from his own quarantine. “Or is it that in this partisan age absolutely everything is chopped, cut and edited to fit a different view? I’m waiting for society to finally hit up against a shared reality, like diving into the bottom of swimming pool. Instead we just go deeper.”
Javier E

Britain Just Got Pulled Back From the Edge - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...609520

UK pandemic response

shared by Javier E on 07 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • Starmer’s elevation is of deep importance on a number of levels. First, after years of appalling ineptitude and moral vacuity under Corbyn’s catastrophic leadership, Britain’s opposition will be led by a credible alternative prime minister whose competence, professionalism, and patriotism are unquestioned. The government can now be held to account.
  • Starmer, appearing on the BBC’s flagship political program, The Andrew Marr Show, broke with the Corbynite position, offering “constructive engagement” with the government. “We’ve all got a duty here to save lives and protect our country,” he said. A boring statement, but almost revolutionary after the Corbyn years.
  • The Queen is the only public figure able to personally link the current fight against the pandemic to the Second World War, the prior struggle that still defines the country, at least in its own perception. The message was well pitched, nodding to the young and old, frontline and staying-at-home. It cast her as a spiritual leader, more than merely figurative.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The National Health Service appears to be rising to the task, the military has been deployed, the BBC has found its voice after years of unease, and the political institutions—torn apart by the financial crash, Brexit, and Corbynism—have refound something of a common set of rules and purpose.
  • The establishment is back. And British politics has some measure of its old self back. Both will be needed again soon, for once this immediate medical crisis is over, an economic one will emerge. Real change may soon follow.
Javier E

New Zealand isn't just flattening its coronavirus curve. It's squashing it. - The Washi... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-a311-adb1344719a9_story.html

new zealand crisis response strategies

shared by Javier E on 08 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • It has been less than two weeks since New Zealand imposed a coronavirus lockdown so strict that swimming at the beach and hunting in bushland were banned
  • It took only 10 days for signs that the approach here — “elimination” rather than the “containment” goal of the United States and other Western countries — is working.
  • The number of new cases has fallen for two consecutive days, despite a huge increase in testing, with 54 confirmed or probable cases reported Tuesday. That means the number of people who have recovered, 65, exceeds the number of daily infections
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is adamant that New Zealand will complete four weeks of lockdown — two full 14-day incubation cycles — before letting up. She has, however, given the Easter Bunny special dispensation to work this weekend.
  • this heavily tourism-reliant country — it gets about 4 million international visitors a year, almost as many as its total population — did the previously unthinkable: It shut its borders to foreigners March 19.
  • Two days later, Ardern delivered a televised address from her office — the first time since 1982 that an Oval Office-style speech had been given — announcing a coronavirus response alert plan involving four stages, with a full lockdown being Level 4.
  • A group of influential leaders got on the phone with her the following day to urge moving to Level 4.
  • “It’s inevitable that we will have to shut down anyway, so we would rather it be sharp and short.”
  • On March 23, a Monday, Ar­dern delivered another statement and gave the country 48 hours to prepare for a Level 4 lockdown. “We currently have 102 cases,” she said. “But so did Italy once.”
  • with strict border control, restrictions could be gradually relaxed, and life inside New Zealand could return to almost normal.
  • From the earliest stages, Ar­dern and her team have spoken in simple language: Stay home. Don’t have contact with anyone outside your household “bubble.” Be kind. We’re all in this together.
  • there has been a sense of collective purpose. The police phone line for nonemergencies has been overwhelmed with people calling to “dob in,” as we say here, reporting others they think are breaching the rules.
  • The response has been notably apolitical. The center-right National Party has clearly made a decision not to criticize the government’s response — and in fact to help it.
  • After peaking at 89 on April 2, the daily number of new cases ticked down to 67 on Monday and 54 on Tuesday. The vast majority of cases can be linked to international travel, making contact tracing relatively easy, and many are consolidated into identifiable clusters.
  • The nascent slowdown reflected “a triumph of science and leadership,”
  • “Other countries have had a gradual ramp-up, but our approach is exactly the opposite,” he said. While other Western countries have tried to slow the disease and “flatten the curve,” New Zealand has tried to stamp it out entirely.
  • The government won’t be able to allow people free entry into New Zealand until the virus has stopped circulating globally or a vaccine has been developed
  • From that Wednesday night, everyone had to stay at home for four weeks unless they worked in an essential job, such as health care, or were going to the supermarket or exercising near their home.
  • Ardern has said her government is considering mandatory quarantine for New Zealanders returning to the country post-lockdown. “I really want a watertight system at our border,”
Javier E

The Paramount Leader is Ready for Sacrifice: Your Sacrifice | Talking Points Memo - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...y-for-sacrifice-your-sacrifice

class sacrifice elite response inequality pandemic

shared by Javier E on 08 May 20 - No Cached
  • From the start the debate over how to grapple with COVID19 divided along the luridly cartoonish class politics that are at the core of Trumpism. As the country trundled toward shutdown in March, press reports ran interviews with tycoons at their Florida estates and saying the costs to the economy were too great. As this article in Bloomberg News apply headlined one of these pieces:”Billionaires Want People Back to Work. Employees Aren’t So Sure.”
  • Again and again, the Trump Era forces us to the crudest and most unsubtle portrayals of the role of wealth and privilege in our society. But it’s no surprise since that is the essence of Trumpism.
  • beneath the “we’ve got to get back to work” mantra has always been a harsher subtext of “you get back to work and I’ll hang back in my south Florida compound and see how it goes.”
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • “Will some people be affected badly? Yes. But we have to get our country opened,” he said Tuesday.
  • Trump’s “warrior” turn meant something very different. He’s given up on arguing that anything will be safe or okay. Indeed, he appears to have ditched the idea that people are clamoring to get back to work. They just have to.
  • For Trump the ‘warrior’ talk isn’t about shared sacrifice. He is adding a cheap patina of valor to his demand that people endanger themselves and in some cases die to restore the greatest economy that ever was … the one he created, the one he thinks will get him reelected in November. This is less warrior than cannon fodder.
clairemann

AstraZeneca Says Vaccine 76% Effective After Its Spat With Public Health Regulators | H... - 0 views

www.huffpost.com/...lth_n_605c1113c5b65d1c28127544

Politics US crisis pandemic

shared by clairemann on 25 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • AstraZeneca updated an analysis of its COVID-19 vaccine on Wednesday, saying it was 76% effective at preventing the disease, after an extraordinary rebuke by top public health officials earlier this week.
  • The company said it analyzed data from more than 32,000 participants in a clinical trial and found the vaccine is 100% effective at preventing severe or critical cases of the coronavirus should patients be infected, a significant finding that will help blunt the effect of the pandemic worldwide. The vaccine was also 85% effective in patients 65 and older, a group among the most vulnerable to COVID-19.
  • In an unusual move, an independent panel published a late-night rebuke of those figures, alleging AstraZeneca had cherry-picked data that gave an “incomplete view” of the vaccine.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • “Decisions like this are what erode public trust in the scientific process,”
  • Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top infectious disease expert in the U.S., predicted Tuesday that the AstraZeneca shot would likely “turn out to be a good vaccine,” saying he hoped the company would combat any public mistrust of its inoculations.
delgadool

Fully vaccinated people in the U.S. now have more guidance from the C.D.C. on activitie... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...d19-CDC-guidelines-travel.html

politics Pandemic

shared by delgadool on 11 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • the agency continues to warn Americans against traveling in general.
  • “We know that after mass travel, after vacations, after holidays, we tend to see a surge in cases,” Dr. Walensky said Monday night on MSNBC. “And so, we really want to make sure — again with just 10 percent of people vaccinated — that we are limiting travel.”
  • To the frustration of airlines and others in the travel industry, the latest guidance comes as students and families are considering spring break plans almost a year after wide swaths of the United States first shut down, and a growing share of Americans tentatively book travel for later in the year.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • “As more people are vaccinated, they’ll look at ways to ease additional restrictions.”
  • The Biden administration said Tuesday that it is shipping 15.8 million additional vaccine doses to states, tribes and territories, with another 2.7 million first doses to pharmacies, Ms. Psaki said. Currently, there are 2.17 million vaccine shots being administered a day on average, she said.
  • In a Monday letter to President Biden’s coronavirus response coordinator, Jeffrey D. Zients, a coalition of travel and tourism trade groups asked to work with the White House on federal guidance for temporary virus “health credentials,” which could be used to securely and uniformly verify test results or vaccination status. Such guidance could also yield benefits beyond aviation, they argued.
aidenborst

US Coronavirus: A year after the pandemic was declared, US Covid-19 numbers are way too... - 0 views

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

politics US history crisis Culture Policy Pandemic covid-19 pandemic-recovery vaccine

shared by aidenborst on 11 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • More than 29 million cases have been reported in the US since the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus a pandemic one year ago.
  • The virus plunged America into grief and crisis.
  • Spikes in deaths drove some communities to call in mobile units to support their morgues.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • The US has lost more than 529,000 people to the virus, Johns Hopkins University data shows. It's more than the number of Americans killed in World War I and World War II combined. And the death toll is rising by the thousands each week.
  • Now, the country is at a pivotal point.
  • "While these trends are starting to head in the right direction, the number of cases, hospitalizations and deaths still remain too high and are somber reminders that we must remain vigilant as we work to scale up our vaccination efforts across this country," Walensky said.
  • So far, almost one in 10 Americans have been fully vaccinated -- a number that is still too low to suppress the spread of the virus. And some experts have warned another possible surge could be weeks away, fueled by a highly contagious variant spreading across the country.
  • "We must continue to use proven prevention measures to slow the spread of Covid-19," Walensky added. "They are getting us closer to the end of this pandemic."
  • For Americans who have been fully vaccinated, the new guidance released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention earlier this week marks a small first step toward a return to pre-pandemic life, the agency's director and other colleagues wrote in a JAMA Viewpoint article published Wednesday.
  • "What we have seen is that we have surges after people start traveling. We saw it after July 4, we saw it after Labor Day, we saw it after the Christmas holidays," Walensky said in the briefing. "Currently 90% of people are still unprotected and not yet vaccinated. So we are really looking forward to updating this guidance as we have more protection across the communities and across the population."
  • "With high levels of community transmission and the threat of SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern, CDC still recommends a number of prevention measures for all people, regardless of vaccination status," they wrote.
  • "As vaccine supply increases, and distribution and administration systems expand and improve, more and more people will become fully vaccinated and eager to resume their prepandemic lives," Walensky and CDC officials Drs. Sarah Mbaeyi and Athalia Christie wrote.
  • More than 62 million Americans have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, CDC data shows. Roughly 32.9 million are fully vaccinated.
  • As vaccination numbers climb, more state leaders are loosening the requirements for who can get a shot.
  • At least 47 states plus DC are allowing teachers and school staff to receive Covid-19 vaccines. By next Monday, teachers will be eligible in all 50 states.
  • In Georgia, officials announced the state will expand its vaccine eligibility starting March 15 to include people 55 and older as well as individuals with disabilities and certain medical conditions.
  • "Provided supply allows, vaccine eligibility is expected to open to all adults in April," Gov. Brian Kemp's office said in a statement.
  • Other states also announced expanded vaccine eligibility this week, including Alaska, who took it the furthest by making vaccines available to everyone living or working in the state who is at least 16. It's the first state in the nation to do so.
  • The guidance allows for indoor visitation regardless of the vaccination status of the resident or visitor, with some exceptions.
  • For example, visitations may be limited for residents with Covid-19 or who are in quarantine or for unvaccinated residents living in facilities where less than 70% of residents are fully vaccinated, in a county that has a Covid-19 positivity rate greater than 10%.
  • "CMS recognizes the psychological, emotional and physical toll that prolonged isolation and separation from family have taken on nursing home residents, and their families," CMS Chief Medical Officer Dr. Lee Fleisher said in a statement.
  • "That is why, now that millions of vaccines have been administered to nursing home residents and staff, and the number of COVID cases in nursing homes has dropped significantly, CMS is updating its visitation guidance to bring more families together safely."
yehbru

International Women's Day 2021: Safe water is what women want (opinion) - CNN - 0 views

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

politics women WHO water access International

shared by yehbru on 07 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Of the many indirect consequences of Covid-19, growing gender inequality is an area of grave concern where the world is falling grievously behind. While women labor at the frontlines, comprising 70% of the world's healthcare workers, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), they are also leaving the workforce at a much higher rate than men, and doing over three-quarters of all unpaid care work, including the care of children.
  • according to the WHO, 2.2 billion people don't have 2faccess to safe drinking water and, according to UN Water, 4.2 billion don't have a safe place to use the toilet.
  • As healthcare facilities are overburdened during this pandemic, one study projects that 2fwithin six months, the world could see up to an additional 57,000 maternal and 1.2 million child deaths.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • In fact, basic and simple hygiene practices during antenatal care, labor and birth can reduce the risk of infections, sepsis and death for infants and mothers by up to 25%, according to the WHO
  • Even before the pandemic, approximately 2f 810 women died every day 2f from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth -- 94% of these deaths occurred in low and lower middle-income countries, according to UN Women.
  • Around the world, women and children spend 200 million hours every day collecting water, according to UNICEF. This makes up an additional 266 million hours of time each day lost because they have no toilet at home.
  • According to the World Bank, 18% of the workforce in water and sanitation are women, yet they make up less than one in four managerial or engineering staff, resulting in policies and systems that aren't designed for women's needs.
Javier E

Opinion | As pediatricians, we say please don't use precious coronavirus vaccines on he... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...irus-vaccines-healthy-children

children pandemic vaccine policy

shared by Javier E on 13 May 21 - No Cached
  • As vaccination programs work their way through younger cohorts, the number of people needed to be vaccinated to prevent a death rapidly climbs. By the time young children are being considered, there are almost no deaths to prevent and only very small numbers of hospitalizations.
  • At that point, the rationale behind mass immunization shifts increasingly toward indirect protection, or herd immunity. With growing evidence that coronavirus vaccines prevent asymptomatic infection and onward transmission, an argument used to justify immunizing young children is that it would mean reaching herd immunity faster.
  • That approach can be useful with influenza or pneumonia, because children play a large role in their transmission. But young children do not appear to be important transmitters of covid. Population-based studies in Iceland showed that children younger than 10 were far less likely to be infected with the virus or transmit it to others. Similar results were found in Israel.
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  • Consider that in Israel, more than 60 percent of the adult population had received the Pfizer vaccine by last month, and covid had been virtually eradicated. There was a 98 percent reduction of covid in all age groups, yet no child under age 16 had been vaccinated.
  • Much discussion has focused on the percentage of individuals needed to be vaccinated to reach herd immunity, with most estimates in the range of 60 to 70 percent. Instead, the focus should be on those who are the most likely to transmit the virus; in the United States, with much of the elderly population vaccinated, that means young adults.
  • The universal vaccination of healthy children 2 to 11 years old simply shouldn’t be a priority and may ultimately prove unnecessary.
yehbru

Big Pharma launches campaign against Biden over Covid vaccine patent waiver - 0 views

www.cnbc.com/...vid-vaccine-patent-waiver.html

US Politics Biden Covid19 Vaccine Lobbying Patent Waiver

shared by yehbru on 02 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • The lobbying group that represents several top pharmaceutical companies last month quietly launched a campaign against President Joe Biden and his decision to back waiving intellectual property protections for Covid-19 vaccines.
  • Late last month it started running a digital ad campaign on Facebook and Google targeting Biden’s decision
  • Proponents of waiving patent protections say it allows poorer nations to ramp up production of the Covid vaccine.
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  • “Biopharmaceutical research companies are committed to achieving equitable access around the world to COVID-19 vaccines, and that is why we’re educating policymakers and the public about our ongoing efforts to increase vaccine supply for global demand, the risks of waiving intellectual property protections, and the need to address the real issues driving vaccine inequity.”
  • Another PhRMA post cites a Hill-HarrisX poll that shows that 57% of registered voters who took the survey are against the waiver.
  • Facebook’s ad library shows that PhRMA spent over $245,000 since late April and throughout May on digital spots
  • PhRMA spent just over $8.5 million on lobbying over the course of the first three months of 2021.
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The best way to get to the bottom of the Covid-19 lab leak theory (opinion) - CNN - 0 views

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US China Politics Covid19 Pandemic Origins

shared by yehbru on 31 May 21 - No Cached
  • On Wednesday, President Joe Biden called for an inquiry by US intelligence agencies into the true origins of Covid-19.
  • The "lab leak" explanation, which was panned and dismissed by a number of analysts, gained new life after the Wall Street Journal reported on a previously undisclosed US intelligence report revealing that three researchers from the Wuhan lab became so sick with Covid-19-like symptoms in November 2019 -- before official reports of the first outbreak -- that they had to seek hospita
  • The Biden administration should itself -- separate and apart from the World Health Organization -- lead a multilateral effort to investigate the origins of the virus.
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  • The lab leak theory has been judged by at least one US intelligence agency as the more likely explanation for Covid-19's origins, while two agencies think the virus was more likely spread to humans from an infected animal
  • An investigation into the true origins of the virus is essential not only for scientific reasons, but also because policymakers around the world need this knowledge to better prepare themselves for future pandemics.
  • It should be no surprise, then, that the WHO's own investigation into the origins of Covid-19 concluded that a lab leak was probably not the cause of the pandemic and that infection from natural sources was more likely. But investigators were only permitted to examine research conducted by Chinese state scientists and did not have full access to the data or facilities that would have allowed them to assess whether the virus that causes Covid-19 may have been present before cases of the disease were first confirmed in China in December 2019.
  • Beijing, for its part, considers the case closed and has argued that the attention should be turned to other countries for the role they may have played in the early days of the pandemic.
  • More specifically, the Biden administration is calling on the WHO to complete a second phase of its investigation in a way that allows "international experts the independence to fully assess the source of the virus and the early days of the outbreak."
  • Biden has been eager to redouble our engagement and work together with America's friends and allies around the world. Getting to the root cause of a pandemic that has already killed nearly 3.5 million people globally presents a golden opportunity to do just that.
yehbru

Opinion: The big problem with 'herd immunity' - CNN - 0 views

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US Covid19 Pandemic Herd Immunity

shared by yehbru on 31 May 21 - No Cached
  • The United States reached a significant milestone this week: More than 50% of adults have been fully vaccinated against Covid-19.
  • But in Mississippi, only 35% of adults are fully vaccinated. In Alabama, it's 37%. In Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Wyoming, they're all at or under 43%.
  • Estimates for achieving this nebulous goal vary widely, but states are clearly on different trajectories, and disparities in vaccination rates are sometimes even more stark at the local level.
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  • A new Kaiser Health News analysis of the 42 states reporting racial and ethnic breakdowns of vaccine recipients offers a compelling portrait of the challenges ahead. Some populations hit hardest by Covid-19 still have among the lowest vaccination rates: only 22% of Black Americans and 29% of Hispanics have been vaccinated nationwide, compared with 33% of White Americans. Vaccination rates for Black Americans trail that of Whites in nearly every state.
  • Take my home state of New Jersey, for example, where 60% of the adult population is fully vaccinated. This is one of the highest percentages of any state in the country, but the number doesn't reflect conditions across different communities
  • It will not be easy balancing the freedoms of the fully vaccinated with our duty to protect those who are still unvaccinated, but we must be up to the task.
  • Too often, though, we take a simplistic and myopic view of health and progress in America, touting national numbers while neglecting community needs at the local level.
yehbru

Fauci's emails during the pandemic's early days were published. Here's what they show a... - 0 views

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US Politics Covid19 Trump Fauci Biden

shared by yehbru on 02 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • BuzzFeed News published more than 3,200 pages of emails from Fauci's inbox after obtaining correspondence spanning from January to June 2020, and The Washington Post published excerpts from more than 860 pages of emails during March and April 2020. CNN also obtained a number of emails from February, but many were heavily redacted.
  • "This is White House in full overdrive and I am in the middle of it,
  • Fauci had worked under six US presidents including then-President Donald Trump before he became the public face of the federal response to Covid-19.
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  • Attacks from Trump's allies led to enhanced security. In August, Fauci told CNN's Sanjay Gupta he had to get security protection after his family received death threats and harassment.
  • To those who reached out fearful of what could be coming, Fauci was honest -- both about what experts knew and didn't know.
  • "I'm chronically fatigued, I don't get a lot of sleep," he said. "I'm constantly briefing, talking, doing things, hopefully getting the right cause out."
  • Their turbulent relationship stands in stark contrast to President Joe Biden's elevation of Fauci to chief medical adviser -- a role where he's been free to promote public health advice without scorn from the Oval Office.
yehbru

For Many Workers, Change in Mask Policy Is a Nightmare - The New York Times - 0 views

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US Politics Covid19 Vaccine Trump Biden

shared by yehbru on 02 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • That changed in mid-May after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised vaccinated Americans that they could go maskless in most indoor settings. The next week, the store told employees that they could no longer ask customers to cover their faces. So mask use plummeted, and the anxiety of Ms. Wainwright and other workers shot up.
  • “We just feel like we’re sitting ducks,
  • More than a dozen retail, hospitality and fast-food workers across the country interviewed by The New York Times expressed alarm that their employers had used the C.D.C. guidance to make masks optional for vaccinated customers.
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  • In liberal enclaves, where public support for masking has generally been high, many customers continue to wear masks whether or not they are required.
  • That compared with only 71 percent of Republicans who said they wore a mask outside the home at least most of the time, and just half said they thought masks were effective.
  • Vaccinated guests are allowed to walk around without masks, but there is no way to verify vaccination status and fewer than half of guests are wearing them, according to Mr. Kennon.
  • “Security won’t ask them to show a vaccine card,” he said. “It’s certainly stressful amongst my co-workers.”
  • By contrast, in Bethesda, Md., in a county where the vast majority voted for President Biden, mask-wearing appears to be largely unaffected by the C.D.C. shift.
  • “We had people walking in, not buying anything, just chewing gum with their mouths open — a ‘see if anyone stops me’ kind of dance,’” said Mr. Mason
  • “Many employers are following state guidance, which is throwing public health precautions out the window.”
  • A White House official acknowledged that it was reviewing the proposal but declined to comment further.
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