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nrashkind

UK coronavirus death toll under 20,000 would be 'good result', says health chief - Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...ays-health-chief-idUSKBN21F0HV

shared by nrashkind on 29 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • The United Kingdom will do well if it manages to keep the coronavirus death toll below 20,000, a senior health official said on Saturday after the deadliest day so far of the outbreak saw the number of fatalities rise to more than 1,000.
  • The number of confirmed cases stood at 17,089 on Saturday morning. The death toll rose by 260 in a day to 1,019
  • When asked if Britain was on the same trajectory as Italy, where the death toll has passed 9,000, Powis said that if the public adhered to the nationwide lockdown the total toll could be kept below 20,000.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • the seventh highest toll in the world behind Italy, Spain, China, Iran, France and the United States.
  • “If it is less than 20,000... that would be a good result though every death is a tragedy, but we should not be complacent about that,”
  • Prime Minister Boris Johnson became the first leader of a major power to announce a positive test result for coronavirus on Friday. He is self-isolating in Downing Street but still leading the UK response to the crisis.
  • Frontline medical staff in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are already being tested.
  • The minister for Scotland, Alister Jack, said on Saturday he had developed a temperature and a cough in the past 24 hours and was now working from home in isolation. He has not been tested for coronavirus.
  • Efforts were under way to keep building up the NHS’s ability to cope.
  • “At the moment, I am confident the capacity is there,”
  • “We have not reached capacity.”
  • Health workers, who remain in their cars, are tested by nurses who carry out swabs in the nose and mouth through the windows.
Javier E

Opinion | With Covid, Is It Really Possible to Say We Went Too Far? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...covid-lockdown-failure.html

covid response backlash revisionist history crisis culture policy

shared by Javier E on 16 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • In 2020, many Americans told themselves that all it would take to halt the pandemic was replacing the president and hitting the “science button.”
  • In 2023, it looks like we’re telling ourselves the opposite: that if we were given the chance to run the pandemic again, it would have been better just to hit “abort” and give up.
  • you can see it in Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera’s book “The Big Fail: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind,” excerpted last month in New York magazine under the headline “Covid Lockdowns Were a Giant Experiment. It Was a Failure.”
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  • we can’t simply replace one simplistic narrative, about the super power of mitigation policy, for another, focused only on the burdens it imposed and not at all on the costs of doing much less — or nothing at all.
  • Let’s start with the title. What is the big failure, as you see it?
  • McLean: I think it gets at things that had happened in America even before the pandemic hit. And among those things were, I think, a failure to recognize the limits of capitalism, a failure of government to set the right rules for it, particularly when it comes to our health care system; a focus on profits that may have led to an increase in the bottom line but created fragility in ways people didn’t understand; and then our growing polarization that made us incapable of talking to each other
  • How big is the failure? When I look at The Economist’s excess mortality data, I see the U.S. had the 53rd-worst outcome in the world — worse than all of Western Europe, but better than all of Eastern Europe.
  • McLean: I think one way to quantify it is to take all those numbers and then put them in the context of our spending on health care. Given the amount we spend on health care relative to other countries, the scale of the failure becomes more apparent.
  • o me, the most glaring example is the schools. They were closed without people thinking through the potential consequences of closing down public schools, especially for disadvantaged kids.
  • to compound it, in my view, public health never made the distinction that needed to be made between the vulnerabilities of somebody 70 years old and the vulnerabilities of somebody 10 years old.
  • In the beginning of the book you write, in what almost feels like a thesis statement for the book: “A central tenet of this book is that we could not have done better, and pretending differently is a dangerous fiction, one that prevents us from taking a much needed look in the mirror.”
  • This claim, that the U.S. could not have done any better, runs against your other claim, that what we observed was an American failure. It is also a pretty extreme claim, I think, and I wanted to press you on it in part because it is, in my view, undermined by quite a lot of the work you do in the book itself.
  • Would the U.S. not have done better if it had recognized earlier that the disease spread through the air rather than in droplets? Would it not have done better if it hadn’t bungled the rollout of a Covid test in the early months?
  • McLean: Everything that you mentioned — the point of the book is that those were set by the time the pandemic hit.
  • in retrospect, what we were doing was to try to delay as much spread as we could until people got vaccinated. All the things that we did in 2020 were functionally serving or trying to serve that purpose. Now, given that, how can you say that none of that work saved lives?
  • McLean: I think that the test failure was baked into the way that the C.D.C. had come to operate
  • But the big question I really want to ask is this one: According to the C.D.C., we’ve had almost 1.2 million deaths from Covid. Excess mortality is nearly 1.4 million. Is it really your contention that there was nothing we might’ve done that brought that total down to 1.1 million, for instance, or even 900,000?
  • McLean: It’s very — you’re right. If you went through each and every thing and had a crystal ball and you could say, this could have been done, this could have been moved up by a month, we could have gotten PPE …
  • When I came to that sentence, I thought of it in terms of human behavior: What will humans put up with? What will humans stand for? How do Americans act? And you’ve written about Sweden being sort of average, and you’ve written about China and the Chinese example. They lock people up for two years and suddenly the society just revolts. They will not take it anymore. They can’t stand it. And as a result, a million and a half people die in a month and a half.
  • Well, I would tell that story very differently. For me, the problem is that when China opened up, they had fully vaccinated just under two-thirds of their population over 80. So to me, it’s not a failure of lockdowns. It’s a failure of vaccinations. If the Chinese had only achieved the same elderly vaccination rate as we achieved — which by global standards was pretty poor — that death toll when they opened up would have been dramatically lower.
  • What do you mean by “lockdown,” though? You use the word throughout the book and suggest that China was the playbook for all countries. But you also acknowledge that what China did is not anything like what America did.
  • Disparities in health care access — is it a dangerous fiction to think we might address that? You guys are big champions of Operation Warp Speed — would it not have been better if those vaccines had been rolled out to the public in nine months, rather than 12
  • . But this isn’t “lockdown” like there were lockdowns in China or even Peru. It’s how we tried to make it safer to go out and interact during a pandemic that ultimately killed a million Americans.
  • McLean: I think that you’re absolutely right to focus on the definition of what a lockdown is and how we implemented them here in this country. And I think part of the problem is that we implemented them in a way that allowed people who were well off and could work from home via Zoom to be able to maintain very much of their lives while other people couldn’t
  • And I think it depends on who you were, whether you would define this as a lockdown or not. If you were a small business who saw your small business closed because of this, you’re going to define it as a lockdown.
  • n the book you’re pretty definitive. You write, “maybe the social and economic disasters that lockdowns created would have been worth it if they had saved lives, but they hadn’t.” How can you say that so flatly?
  • I think there are still open questions about what worked and how much. But the way that I think about all of this is that the most important intervention that anybody did anywhere in the world was vaccination. And the thing that determined outcomes most was whether your first exposure came before or after vaccination.
  • Here, the shelter-in-place guidelines lasted, on average, five to seven weeks. Thirty nine of the 40 states that had issued them lifted them by the end of June, three months in. By the summer, according to Google mobility data, retail and grocery activity was down about 10 percent. By the fall, grocery activity was only down about 5 percent across the country
  • Nocera: Well, on some level, I feel like you’re trying to have it both ways. On the one hand, you’re saying that lockdowns saved lives. On the other hand, you said they weren’t real lockdowns because everybody was out and about.
  • I don’t think that’s having it both ways. I’m trying to think about these issues on a spectrum rather than in binaries. I think we did interrupt our lives — everybody knows that. And I think they did have an effect on spread, and that limiting spread had an effect by delaying infections until after vaccination.
  • Nocera: Most of the studies that say lockdowns didn’t work are really less about Covid deaths than about excess mortality deaths. I wound up being persuaded that the people who could not get to the hospital, because they were all working, because all the doctors were working on Covid and the surgical rooms were shut down, the people who caught some disease that was not Covid and died as a result — I wound up being persuaded about that.
  • We’re in a pandemic. People are going to die. And then the question becomes, can we protect the most vulnerable? And the answer is, we didn’t protect the most vulnerable. Nursing homes were a complete disaster.
  • There was a lot of worry early on about delayed health care, and about cancer in particular — missed screenings, missed treatments. But in 2019, we had an estimated 599,600 Americans die of cancer. In 2020, it was 602,000. In 2021, it was 608,000. In 2022, it was 609,000.
  • Nocera: See, it went up!But by a couple of thousand people, in years in which hundreds of thousands of Americans were dying of Covid.
  • Nocera: I think you can’t dispute the excess mortality numbers.I’m not. But in nearly every country in the world the excess mortality curves track so precisely with Covid waves that it doesn’t make sense to talk about a massive public health problem beyond Covid. And when you add all of these numbers up, they are nowhere near the size of the footfall of Covid. How can you look back on this and say the costs were too high?
  • Nocera: I think the costs were too high because you had school costs, you had economic costs, you had social costs, and you had death.
  • McLean: I think you’re raising a really good point. We’re making an argument for a policy that might not have been doable given the preconditions that had been set. I’m arguing that there were these things that had been put in place in our country for decades leading up to the pandemic that made it really difficult for us to plant in an effective way, from the outsourcing of our PPE to the distrust in our health care system that had been created by people’s lack of access to health care with the disparities in our hospital system.
  • How would you have liked to see things handled differently?Nocera: Well, the great example of doing it right is San Fran
  • I find the San Francisco experience impressive, too. But it was also a city that engaged in quite protracted and aggressive pandemic restrictions, well beyond just protecting the elderly and vulnerable.
  • McLean: But are we going to go for stay-at-home orders plus protecting vulnerable communities like San Francisco did? Or simply letting everybody live their lives, but with a real focus on the communities and places like nursing homes that were going to be affected? My argument is that we probably would’ve been better off really focusing on protecting those communities which were likely to be the most severely affected.
  • I agree that the public certainly didn’t appreciate the age skew, and our policy didn’t reflect it either. But I also wonder what it would mean to better protect the vulnerable than we did. We had testing shortages at first. Then we had resistance to rapid testing. We had staff shortages in nursing homes.
  • Nocera: This gets exactly to one of our core points. We had spent 30 years allowing nursing homes to be owned by private equity firms that cut the staff, that sold the land underneath and added all this debt on
  • I hear you saying both that we could have done a much better job of protecting these people and that the systems we inherited at the outset of the pandemic would’ve made those measures very difficult, if not impossible, to implement.
  • But actually, I want to stop you there, because I actually think that that data tells the opposite story.
  • And then I’m trying to say at the same time, but couldn’t we have done something to have protected people despite all of that?
  • I want to talk about the number of lives at stake. In the book, you write about the work of British epidemiologist Neil Ferguson. In the winter of 2020, he says that in the absence of mitigation measures and vaccination, 80 percent of the country is going to get infected and 2.2 million Americans are going to die. He says that 80 percent of the U.K. would get infected, and 510,000 Brits would die — again, in the abs
  • In the end, by the time we got to 80 percent of the country infected, we had more than a million Americans die. We had more than 200,000 Brits die. And in each case most of the infections happened after vaccination, which suggests that if those infections had all happened in a world without vaccines, we almost certainly would have surpassed two million deaths in the U.S. and almost certainly would’ve hit 500,000 deaths in the U.K.
  • In the book, you write about this estimate, and you endorse Jay Bhattacharya’s criticism of Ferguson’s model. You write, “Bhattacharya got his first taste of the blowback reserved for scientists who strayed from the establishment position early. He co-wrote an article for The Wall Street Journal questioning the validity of the scary 2 to 4 percent fatality rate that the early models like Neil Ferguson’s were estimating and that were causing governments to panic. He believed, correctly as it turns out, that the true fatality rate was much lower.”
  • Nocera: I know where you’re going with this, because I read your story about the nine pandemic narratives we’re getting wrong. In there, you said that Bhattacharya estimated the fatality rate at 0.01 percent. But if you actually read The Wall Street Journal article, what he’s really saying is I think it’s much lower. I’ve looked at two or three different possibilities, and we really need some major testing to figure out what it actually is, because I think 2 percent to 4 percent is really high.
  • He says, “if our surmise of 6 million cases is accurate, that’s a mortality rate of 0.01%. That is ⅒th the flu mortality rate of 0.1%.” An I.F.R. of 0.01 percent, spread fully through the American population, yields a total American death toll of 33,000 people. We have had 1.2 million deaths. And you are adjudicating this dispute, in 2023, and saying that Neil was wrong and Jay was right.
  • hird, in the Imperial College report — the one projecting two million American deaths — Ferguson gives an I.F.R. estimate of 0.9 percent.
  • Bhattacharya’s? Yes, there is some uncertainty around the estimate he offers. But the estimate he does offer — 0.01 percent — is one hundred times lower than the I.F.R. you yourselves cite as the proper benchmark.
  • Nocera: In The Wall Street Journal he does not say it’s 0.01. He says, we need to test to find out what it is, but it is definitely lower than 2 to 4 percent.
  • Well, first of all, the 2 percent to 4 percent fatality rate is not from Neil Ferguson. It’s from the W.H.O.
  • But I think that fundamentally, at the outset of the pandemic, the most important question orienting all of our thinking was, how bad could this get? And it turns out that almost all of the people who were saying back then that we shouldn’t do much to intervene were extremely wrong about how bad it would be
  • The argument then was, more or less, “We don’t need to do anything too drastic, because it’s not going to be that big a deal.” Now, in 2023, it’s the opposite argument: “We shouldn’t have bothered with restrictions, because they didn’t have an impact; we would have had this same death toll anyway.” But the death toll turned out to be enormous.
  • Now, if we had supplied all these skeptics with the actual numbers at the outset of the pandemic, what kind of audience would they have had? If instead of making the argument against universal mitigation efforts on the basis of a death toll of 40,000 they had made the argument on the basis of a death toll of more than a million, do you think the country would’ve said, they’re right, we’re doing too much, let’s back off?
  • McLean: I think that if you had gone to the American people and said, this many people are going to die, that would’ve been one thing. But if you had gone to the American people and said, this many people are going to die and a large percentage of them are going to be over 80, you might’ve gotten a different answer.
  • I’m not arguing we shouldn’t have been trying to get a clearer sense of the true fatality rate, or that we shouldn’t have been clearer about the age skew. But Bhattacharya was also offering an estimate of fatality rate that turned out to be off by a factor of a hundred from the I.F.R. that you yourselves cite as correct. And then you say that Bhattacharya was right and Ferguson was wrong.
  • And you, too, Joe, you wrote an article in April expressing sympathy for Covid skeptics and you said ——Nocera: This April?No, 2020.Nocera: Oh, oh. That’s the one where I praised Alex Berenson.You also cited some Amherst modeling which said that we were going to have 67,000 to 120,000 American deaths. We already had, at that point, 60,000. So you were suggesting, in making an argument against pandemic restrictions, that the country as a whole was going to experience between 7,000 and 60,000 additional deaths from that point.
  • when I think about the combination of the economic effects of mitigation policies and just of the pandemic itself and the big fiscal response, I look back and I think the U.S. managed this storm relatively well. How about each of you?
  • in this case, Congress did get it together and did come to the rescue. And I agree that made a ton of difference in the short term, but the long-term effects of the fiscal rescue package were to help create inflation. And once again, inflation hits those at the bottom of the socioeconomic distribution much harder than it does those at the top. So I would argue that some of what we did in the pandemic is papering over these long-term issues.
  • I think as with a lot of the stuff we’ve talked about today, I agree with you about the underlying problems. But if we take for granted for a moment that the pandemic was going to hit us, when it did, under the economic conditions it did, and then think about the more narrow context of whether, given all that, we handled the pandemic well. We returned quickly to prepandemic G.D.P. trends, boosted the wealth of the bottom half of the country, cut child poverty in half, pushed unemployment to historical lows.
  • What sense do you make of the other countries of the world and their various mitigation policies? Putting aside China, there’s New Zealand, Australia, South Korea — these are all places that were much more aggressive than the U.S. and indeed more than Europe. And had much, much better outcomes.
  • Nocera: To be perfectly honest, we didn’t really look, we didn’t really spend a lot of time looking at that.
  • McLean: But one reason that we didn’t is I don’t think it tells us anything. When you look at who Covid killed, then you have to look at what the pre-existing conditions in a country were, what percentage of its people are elderly. How sick are people with pre-existing conditions?
  • I just don’t think there’s a comparison. There’s just too many factors that influence it to be able to say that, to be able to compare America to any other country, you’d have to adjust for all these factors.
  • But you do spend a bit of time in the book talking about Sweden. And though it isn’t precisely like-for-like, one way you can control for some of those factors is grouping countries with their neighbors and other countries with similar profiles. And Sweden’s fatality rate in 2020 was 10 times that of Norway, Finland and Iceland. Five times that of Denmark. In the vaccination era, those gaps have narrowed, but by most metrics Sweden has still done worse, overall, than all of those countries.
  • On the matter of omniscience. Let’s say that we can send you back in time. Let’s put you both in charge of American pandemic response, or at least American communication about the pandemic, in early 2020. What would you want to tell the country? How would you have advised us to respond?
  • McLean: What I would want is honesty and communication. I think we’re in a world that is awash in information and the previous methods of communication — giving a blanket statement to people that may or may not be true, when you know there’s nuance underneath it — simply doesn’t work anymore
  • o I would’ve been much more clear — we think masks might help, we don’t know, but it’s not that big of an ask, let’s do it. We think the early data coming out of Italy shows that these are the people who are really, really at risk from Covid, but it’s not entirely clear yet. Maybe there is spread in schools, but we don’t know. Let’s look at this and keep an open mind and look at the data as it comes in.
redavistinnell

Taiwan earthquake death toll likely to exceed 100 | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...eath-toll-likely-to-exceed-100

taiwan earthquake death toll

shared by redavistinnell on 08 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Taiwan earthquake death toll likely to exceed 100
  • The official death toll from the quake had risen to 38 by Monday, but more than 100 people were still missing.
  • Rescue efforts were focused on the wreckage of the 17-storey building, where 117 people were listed as missing and suspected to be buried deep under the rubble.
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  • The mayor of Tainan, William Lai, said during a visit to a funeral home that rescue efforts had entered the “third stage”.
  • Rescuers continued to scramble over the twisted wreckage of the building as family members waited for news of missing relatives. Lin Tong-meng said he had been waiting at the site for word of his 11- and 12-year-old nephews.
  • The president-elect, Tsai Ing-wen, said there needed to be a “general sorting out” of old buildings to ensure they were able to cope with earthquakes. “There needs to be a continued strengthening of their ability to deal with disasters,” she said.
  • The Chinese president, Xi Jinping, conveyed his condolences to the victims, the state news agency Xinhua reported late on Sunday, and repeated Beijing’s offer to provide help.
Javier E

Genoa Bridge Collapse Throws Harsh Light on Benettons' Highway Billions - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...italy-autostrade-benetton.html

corruption italy

shared by Javier E on 06 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • The Benettons made occasional, bipartisan political donations but those did not explain the company’s influence. Autostrade could perform perfectly legal favors for politicians, like modernizing a stretch of local highway.
  • Several scholars say the skewed relationship resulted in a case of “regulatory capture,” the political scientists’ term for the situation when a watchdog bends to the interests of a company it is supposed to supervise.
  • When a center-left government took power in 2006, Autostrade’s contract came under scrutiny. The government blocked the company from selling itself to Abertis, a Spanish toll road operator, then signaled that Autostrade needed to be reined in
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  • “The problem was not the merger itself,” Antonio Di Pietro, then the minister of infrastructure and transport, said in a statement, “but concession rules that are too favorable toward the motorway operator, so much so that they led to the bad habit of automatic tariff hikes.”
  • The government approved a new law to encourage efficiency and lower tolls, except it never took effect. In 2008, the center-left government fell. The new conservative government of Silvio Berlusconi, a media tycoon, took power and amended the new law to stipulate annual increases in tolls right through to the end of the contract
  • Though it aided all of Italy’s toll road operators, Autostrade, the biggest, was the biggest beneficiary.
  • Beyond fixing blame for the bridge collapse, a central question of the Morandi tragedy is what happened to safety inspections. The answer is that the inspectors worked for Autostrade more than for the state.
  • For decades, Spea Engineering, a Milan-based company, has performed inspections on the bridge. If nominally independent, Spea is owned by Autostrade’s parent company, Atlantia, and Autostrade is also Spea’s largest customer. Spea’s offices in Rome and elsewhere are housed inside Autostrade.
  • One former bridge design engineer for Spea, Giulio Rambelli, described Autostrade’s control over Spea as “absolute.”“They even approve promotions inside of Spea,
  • Such potential conflicts are prohibited in other countries where Autostrade operates. In Chile, for instance, regulations block a private toll operator from hiring a company it owns to conduct inspections, according to Mariana Rocha, a spokeswoman at the country’s Ministry of Public Works.
  • Mr. Fonderico, the administrative law professor from Luiss Guido Carli University, said the ministry actually lacked the expertise to carry out its oversight role, particularly on a bridge as vexing as the Morandi. Over time, he said, the government behaved more like its first priority was cooperating with Autostrade, rather than regulating it.
  • Though the relationship between Autostrade and the government is now defined by pure hostility, a divorce is unlikely.The reason? If the company’s contract were terminated early, the state would need to pay Autostrade the remaining value of the contract, a sum that could exceed $17 billion.“The company would take the state to court,” Mr. Ponti said, “and it would win.”
Javier E

'Climate grief': The growing emotional toll of climate change - 0 views

www.nbcnews.com/...al-toll-climate-change-n946751

climate climate change grief young psychology

shared by Javier E on 20 May 19 - No Cached
  • “The emotional reaction of my kids was severe,” she told NBC News. “There was a lot of crying. They told me, 'We know what’s coming, and it’s going to be really rough.’
  • is taking a toll on mental health, especially among young people, who are increasingly losing hope for their future. Experts call it “climate grief,” depression, anxiety and mourning over climate change.
  • The U.N. report said the worst effects — such as the flooding of coastal areas caused by rising sea levels, drought, food shortages and more frequent and severe natural disasters — could arrive as soon as 2040
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  • anxiety is rising in the U.S. over the climate. Sixty-two percent of people surveyed said they were at least “somewhat” worried about the climate, up from 49 percent in 2010. The rate of those who described themselves as “very” worried was 21 percent, about double the rate of a similar study in 2015. Only 6 percent said humans can and will reduce global warming.
  • it’s not just a science abstraction anymore. I’m increasingly seeing people who are in despair, and even panic. “
  • Good Grief offers a 10-step program to help people deal with collective grief — issues that affect a whole society, like racism, mass shootings and climate grief.
  • The steps encourage participants to confront their climate fears and sadness and acknowledge that they are part of the problem as polluters in a carbon-fueled system, but also find the motivation and strength to be part of the solution.
  • Bill McKibben, a climate activist for over 30 years who runs the climate advocacy organization 350.org, said groups like Good Grief can be an effective way to deal with climate grief.
  • We can’t just be individuals, we need to join together and be a movement," he said in an interview. "It makes you less grief-stricken. The best antidote to feeling powerless is activism. It doesn’t make you less sad, but adds hope, solidarity and love."
  • Even though the latest U.N. report was a "kick in the stomach" for him, he cautioned that those experiencing existential grief over climate change are not its main victims. “It’s poor communities with flimsy homes that are washing away,”
  • Almost all of the young people interviewed for this article said they were struggling with the ethical implications of having children.
  • “I’m definitely not having kids,” said Marcela Mulholland, 21, a student at the University of Florida in Orlando and a participant in the Uplift session. “I don’t have hope that we will avoid climate catastrophe.
  • ordan said she used to talk with her kids about becoming parents someday. “I’d say, ‘You’ll be such a good dad.’ Now, it feels wrong. They don’t talk about it anymore either,”
  • “It’s culturally acceptable to talk about all kinds of anxieties, but not the climate,” said Van Susteren, the climate psychiatrist. “People need to talk about their grief. When you do nothing, it just gets worse.”
  • The Yale survey found that 65 percent of those surveyed discuss global warming “never” or “rarely.”
  • “Think about it, do you always understand what is really bothering you deep down?” she said. “The constant barrage of news that the world is ending takes a toll.”
  • Cindy Chung, 17, of Bayonne, New Jersey, is an activist with iMatter, a network of high school students who advocate for environmental measures on a local level. She struggles to understand how people, especially adults, can continue with business as usual.
  • “It wasn’t our choice to be born into a doomed world,” she said. “All this terrible stuff can happen by 2030, and I won’t even be 30 years old. It’s so frightening.”
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

'You Can't Trust Anyone': Russia's Hidden Covid Toll Is an Open Secret - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...covid-russia-death.html

russia secret pandemic death rate international comparison

shared by Javier E on 11 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • Deaths from all causes, shown for selected European countries and the U.S., is the most reliable way to compare mortality during the pandemic across countries.
  • Russian scientists had developed a Covid vaccine widely seen as one of the best in the world — but the Kremlin has put a greater emphasis on using the Sputnik V shot to score geopolitical points rather than on immunizing its own population.
  • Asked to sum up 2020 at his year-end news conference in December, Mr. Putin rattled off statistics showing that Russia’s economy had suffered less than that of many other countries. Indeed, even as Europe introduced lockdowns in the fall and winter, Russians were largely free to pack nightclubs, restaurants, theaters and bars.
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  • the pandemic killed about one in every 400 people in Russia, compared with one in every 600 in the United States.
  • In the United States, with more than twice the population of Russia, such “excess deaths” since the start of the pandemic have numbered about 574,000
  • a far different story is told by the official statistics agency Rosstat, which tallies deaths from all causes. Russia saw a jump of 360,000 deaths above normal from last April through December, according to a Times analysis of historical data. Rosstat figures for January and February of this year show that the number is now well above 400,000.
  • The low official toll has contributed to the obliviousness of Russians to the virus’s dangers in some cases — and to their profound distrust of the government’s messaging regarding the pandemic in others
  • Last October, a poll found that most Russians did not believe the government’s tally of coronavirus cases: Half of those who did not believe the tally thought it was too high, while half thought it was too low.
  • In February, another poll found that 60 percent of Russians said they were not planning to get Russia’s Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine, and that most believed the coronavirus to be a biological weapon.
  • one thing was certain, she said: She will not get vaccinated, even after seeing Covid’s devastation up close. After all, if she cannot trust her mother’s state-issued death certificate, why should she trust the Russian government about the safety of the vaccine?
  • For all the death, there has been minimal opposition in Russia — even among Mr. Putin’s critics — to the government’s decision to keep businesses open last winter and fall. Some liken it to a Russian stoicism, or fatalism, or the lack of an alternative to keeping the economy running given minimal aid from the state.
  • “This nation has seen so many traumas,” Mr. Raksha said. “A people that has been through so much develops a very different relationship to death.”
  • Mr. Raksha, the demographer, noted that the elevated mortality that accompanied the chaos and poverty of the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, was deadlier than the overall toll of the pandemic.
  • “You can choose between continuing to live your life, carefully, or to wall yourself up and stop living,” Mr. Dolonko said. “Unlike you” — Westerners — “Russians know what it means to live in extreme conditions.”
  • The deaths during the pandemic have been tragic, he said, but he believes they have mostly occurred in people who were of a very advanced age or had other health problems, and were not all related to the virus. Mr. Dolonko, 62, says he wears a mask in crowded places and frequently washes his hands — and regularly goes to gallery openings and shows
  • A website tracking coronavirus deaths in the Orthodox Church lists seven members of the clergy in the Samara region; Father Sergiy knew several of them well. He said he figured Russia had lifted its coronavirus restrictions because there was no end in sight to the pandemic. He quoted Dostoyevsky: “Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!”“We are growing used to living in a pandemic,” Father Sergiy said. “We are growing used to the deaths.”
ethanshilling

Uruguay Death Toll Soars as Virus Slams South America - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...uguay-covid-south-america.html

pandemic south america

shared by ethanshilling on 14 May 21 - No Cached
  • For most of the past year, Uruguay was held up as an example for keeping the coronavirus from spreading widely as neighboring countries grappled with soaring death tolls.
  • As of Wednesday, at least 3,252 people had died from Covid-19, according to the Uruguayan Health Ministry, and the daily death toll has been about 50 during the past week.
  • Six out of the 11 countries with the highest death rates per capita are in South America, a region where the pandemic is leaving a brutal toll of growing joblessness, poverty and hunger.
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  • The country with the second-highest death rate per capita is nearby Paraguay, which also had relative success in containing the virus for much of last year but now finds itself in a worsening crisis.
  • On March 1, Uruguay had 76 Covid-19 patients in intensive care units. This week, medical professionals were caring for more than 530, according to Dr. Julio Pontet, president of the Uruguayan Society of Intensive Care Medicine who heads the intensive care department at the Pasteur Hospital in Montevideo, the capital.
  • “It is still too early to reach the conclusion that we’ve already started to improve, we’re in a high plateau of cases,” Dr. Pontet said.
Javier E

'Erase Gaza': War Unleashes Incendiary Rhetoric in Israel - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...israel-gaza-war-rhetoric.html

rhetoric israel gaza war culture politics history crisis

shared by Javier E on 15 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly,” said Yoav Gallant, the defense minister, two days after the attacks, as he described how the Israeli military planned to eradicate Hamas in Gaza.
  • “We’re fighting Nazis,” declared Naftali Bennett, a former prime minister.
  • “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible — we do remember,” said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, referring to the ancient enemy of the Israelites, in scripture interpreted by scholars as a call to exterminate their “men and women, children and infants.”
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  • Inflammatory language has also been used by journalists, retired generals, celebrities, and social media influencers, according to experts who track the statements. Calls for Gaza to be “flattened,” “erased” or “destroyed” had been mentioned about 18,000 times since Oct. 7 in Hebrew posts on X,
  • The cumulative effect, experts say, has been to normalize public discussion of ideas that would have been considered off limits before Oct. 7: talk of “erasing” the people of Gaza, ethnic cleansing, and the nuclear annihilation of the territory.
  • Itamar Ben-Gvir, a right-wing settler who went from fringe figure to minister of national security in Mr. Netanyahu’s cabinet, has a long history of making incendiary remarks about Palestinians. He said in a recent TV interview that anyone who supports Hamas should be “eliminated.”
  • The idea of a nuclear strike on Gaza was raised last week by another right-wing minister, Amichay Eliyahu, who told a Hebrew radio station that there was no such thing as noncombatants in Gaza. Mr. Netanyahu suspended Mr. Eliyahu, saying that his comments were “disconnected from reality.”
  • Mr. Netanyahu says that the Israeli military is trying to prevent harm to civilians. But with the death toll rising to more than 11,000, according to the Gaza health ministry, those claims are being met with skepticism, even in the United States,
  • Such reassurances are also belied by the language Mr. Netanyahu uses with audiences in Israel. His reference to Amalek came in a speech delivered in Hebrew on Oct. 28 as Israel was launching the ground invasion. While some Jewish scholars argue that the scripture’s message is metaphoric not literal, his words resonated widely, as video of his speech was shared on social media, often by critics
  • “These are not just one-off statements, made in the heat of the moment,”
  • “When ministers make statements like that,” Mr. Sfard added, “it opens the door for everyone else.”
  • “Erase Gaza. Don’t leave a single person there,” Mr. Golan said in an interview with Channel 14 on Oct. 15.
  • “I don’t call them human animals because that would be insulting to animals,” Ms. Netanyahu said during a radio interview on Oct. 10, referring to Hamas
  • In the West Bank last week, several academics and officials cited Mr. Eliyahu’s remark about dropping an atomic bomb on Gaza as evidence of Israel’s intention to clear the enclave of all Palestinians — a campaign they call a latter-day nakba.
  • On Saturday, the Israeli agriculture minister, Avi Dichter, said that the military campaign in Gaza was explicitly designed to force the mass displacement of Palestinians. “We are now rolling out the Gaza nakba,” he said in a television interview. “Gaza nakba 2023.”
  • The rise in incendiary statements comes against a backdrop of rising violence in the West Bank. Since Oct. 7, according to the United Nations, Israeli soldiers have killed 150 Palestinians, including 44 children, in clashes.
  • the use of inflammatory language by Israeli leaders is not surprising, and even understandable, given the brutality of the Hamas attacks, which inflicted collective and individual trauma on Israelis.
  • “People in this situation look for very, very clear answers,” Professor Halperin said. “You don’t have the mental luxury of complexity. You want to see a world of good guys and bad guys.”
  • “Leaders understand that,” he added, “and it leads them to use this kind of language, because this kind of language has an audience.”
  • Casting the threat posed by Hamas in stark terms, Professor Halperin said, also helps the government ask people to make sacrifices for the war effort: the compulsory mobilization of 360,000 reservists, the evacuation of 126,000 people from border areas in the north and south, and the shock to the economy.
  • It will also make Israelis more inured to the civilian death toll in Gaza, which has isolated Israel around the world, he added. A civilian death toll of 10,000 or 20,000, he said, could seem to “the average Israeli that it’s not such a big deal.”
  • In the long run, Mr. Sfard said, such language dooms the chance of ending the conflict with the Palestinians, erodes Israel’s democracy and breeds a younger generation that is “easily using the language in their discussion with their friends.”
  • “Once a certain rhetoric becomes legitimized, turning the wheel back requires a lot of education,” he said. “There is an old Jewish proverb: ‘A hundred wise men will struggle a long time to take out a stone that one stupid person dropped into the well.’”
annabelteague02

U.S. surpasses China, Italy in coronavirus cases; California sees spike as well - Los A... - 0 views

www.latimes.com/...-california-sees-spike-as-well

coronavirus death tolls number of cases

shared by annabelteague02 on 27 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • The United States has surpassed Italy and China in having the most confirmed coronavirus cases, according to a global case tracker run by Johns Hopkins University.
  • overwhelm hospitals in the coming days and weeks.
  • As of Thursday afternoon, the United States was reporting more than 82,400 cases, above China’s tally of more than 81,700 and Italy’s count of more than 80,500.
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  • The U.S. has reported more than 1,100 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins.
  • annabelteague02 on 27 Mar 20
     
    US surpasses China and Italy in Corona cases, with a death toll of 1,100, as of yesterday
nrashkind

Italy coronavirus death toll surges past 10,000; lockdown extension likely - Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...extension-likely-idUSKBN21F0R5

shared by nrashkind on 29 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • The death toll from an outbreak of coronavirus in Italy barrelled past 10,000 on Saturday, a figure that made an extension of a national lockdown almost certain.
  • Officials said 889 more people died in the previous 24 hours, the second highest daily tally since the epidemic emerged on Feb. 21, and that total fatalities reached 10,023.
  • Confirmed cases rose by about 6,000 to 92,472, the second-highest number of cases in the world behind the United States.
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  • Officials said the numbers would have been worse without a national lockdown.
  • Italy, the first Western country to introduce severe restrictions on movement after uncovering the outbreak five weeks ago, has since increasingly tightened them, and hopes that they would be eased from next Friday were fading fast.
  • Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte told a news conference after the figures were released that he had approved a new package of 4.7 billion euros ($5.24 billion) of measures to help those worst hit, including shopping vouchers and food packages.
  • Italy’s minister for southern regions expressed concerns about potential social tensions and civil unrest in poorer areas if, as expected, the epidemic moves south.
  • “I am afraid that the worries that are affecting large sections of the population over health, income and the future, with the continuation of the crisis, will turn into anger and hatred,”
  • Minister Giuseppe Provenzano told La Repubblica newspaper on Saturday.
  • Michele Emiliano, governor of the southern Puglia region, downplayed played fears of civil unrest in the south but said the lockdown may have to be extended until mid-May.
Javier E

Defying Trump, Talk Radio Keeps Downplaying COVID-19 - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...609523

right-wing media expertise reaction science

shared by Javier E on 06 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • On April 2—four days after Trump changed course and extended social-distancing requirements until the end of April—Limbaugh, citing an article in the British magazine The Spectator, suggested that the “coronavirus is being listed as a cause of death for many people who are not dying because of it.” The next day he alleged that models suggesting hundreds of thousands of Americans could die from the virus are “just as bad and just as unreliable as climate change models.” He went on to accuse the mainstream media of “hyping huge [potential] death tolls” as they had in 1991, when they warned of “all these body bags [the] U.S. military was gonna [need] because the U.S. military had no way to beat Saddam Hussein” in the Gulf War.
  • The government’s social-distancing requirements, these pro-Trump talkers insist, are likely more harmful than the virus itself. “Ten million people have lost their jobs,” Limbaugh announced on April 2. “That’s not enough for people like Bill Gates. That’s not enough for people who want to shoot down the entire country.”
  • Over the weekend, both Ingraham and Levin circulated a Federalist article headlined “Why Severe Social Distancing Might Actually Result In More Coronavirus Deaths.” On April 1, Beck urged policy makers to “start putting hard dates on some of these [social-distancing] measures because we have got to get back to work … A forced economic recession isn’t a gamble that I signed up for.”
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  • they have different incentives than he does. Conservative talkers answer to their conservative audience, which, according to polls, remains more skeptical than Democrats of government restrictions on movement. Trump must worry about public opinion as a whole, which strongly favors government-imposed social distancing
  • Trump must also balance his habitual suspicion of government experts against the fact that Americans trust those experts—in particular, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci—far more than they trust him in the battle against COVID-19.
  • Over the past week, this populist distrust of scientific experts has suffused conservative talk radio’s downplaying of the COVID-19 threat. “The ‘experts’ are routinely wrong on issues big and small—on wearing masks, on reusable grocery bags … virus modeling and treatments,” Ingraham tweeted on April 3. “So when experts issue edicts, remember their often spectacular record of failure.” On April 1, Beck urged politicians “to stop relying on flawed modeling data to make these decisions” and instead “listen to the people in your local communities.
  • pulists attack economic elites; right-wing populists attack cultural elites
  • In recent years, as progressives have championed the scientific consensus that climate change poses a grave danger, many conservatives have come to see scientists as yet another collection of snobs using the veneer of expertise to impose its liberal ideology on the country.
  • A 2019 Pew Research Center poll found that while a large majority of Democrats believed that scientists were better than other people “at making good policy decisions about scientific issues,” a large majority of Republicans disagreed.
  • Conservative talk radio, by contrast, is built on distrust of experts. Left-wing populists attack economic elites; right-wing populists attack cultural elites
  • On April 5, Levin warned that “the media, ‘experts,’ and Democrats are trying to make it impossible for the president to even consider rational options for opening parts of the economy.” On April 3, Ingraham declared, “The ‘experts’ aren’t capable of thinking beyond the virus to an even worse death spiral affecting millions of lives here and abroad.”
  • for conservative talkers, the prospect that Americans without elite credentials have discovered a cure that has eluded scientific elites is part of what makes hydroxychloroquine so enticing. “I don’t think you need to have 12 years of residency or whatever,” Limbaugh declared
  • Limbaugh, Ingraham, Levin, and Beck are trying to balance their loyalty to Trump with their distrust of credentialed experts, especially those venerated by the mainstream media. That, so far, they’re largely choosing the latter suggests that liberals may be overestimating Trump’s influence.
anonymous

U.S. Is Sending 1 Million COVID Vaccines To Mexico : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...ico-border-cities-resort-spots

shared by anonymous on 04 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • One million Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccines are heading to Mexico from the U.S. with most of the shots set to service resort areas and spots along the border.
  • The batch of vaccines is part of the 25 million excess doses the White House announced on Thursday would be shipped to other countries around the world.
  • In a bid to boost the country's economy, Assistant Health Secretary Hugo López-Gatell said much of those 1 million vaccines will be sent to Caribbean resort hotspots such as Cancún, Pacific coast resorts like Los Cabos, and cities along the U.S. border.
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  • According to government data, Mexico has given more than 23.2 million adults in the country at least one shot of a COVID-19 vaccine.
  • Government officials have indicated that the actual death toll from the pandemic is likely far higher, according to The Associated Press., with a preliminary assessment suggesting more than 350,000 excess deaths — 54% above the official toll.
yehbru

Dr. Jerome Adams: US surgeon general contradicts Trump on Covid-19 death toll - CNNPoli... - 0 views

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

Politics US Trump Biden Covid19

shared by yehbru on 03 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • US Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams on Sunday said he has "no reason to doubt" the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Covid-19 death toll, contradicting President Donald Trump's claim that the agency has "exaggerated" its numbers.
  • "From a public health perspective, I have no reason to doubt those numbers,
  • "In many areas of the country, the hospital beds are stretched. People are running out of beds, running out of trained personnel who are exhausted right now," Fauci said
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  • Dr. Anthony Fauci, a member of the White House's coronavirus task force, also pushed back against the President's claim on Sunday when asked about it, telling ABC News that "the deaths are real deaths.
  • "It's about the hospitalizations, the capacity. These cases are having an impact in an array of ways and people need to understand there's a finish line in sight, but we've got to keep running toward it."
  • Trump and Fauci have had an at-times rocky relationship during the pandemic, with the top infectious disease expert occasionally criticizing the President's actions related to the crisis and Trump openly trashing Fauci and suggesting in early November that he might fire him after the election.
  • "In 6% of the death certificates that list Covid-19, only one cause or condition is listed," the statement added. "The underlying cause of death is the condition that began the chain of events that ultimately led to the person's death. In 92% of all deaths that mention Covid-19, Covid-19 is listed as the underlying cause of death."
  • Cases have skyrocketed after the Thanksgiving holiday, and while impacts from Christmas and New Year's celebrations are still unfolding, at least 123,639 people nationwide were in the hospital with the virus on Saturday, marking 32 consecutive days that the number of hospitalizations has exceeded 100,000, according to the Covid Tracking Project.
  • Adams, when pressed Sunday about his projection in December that there would be 20 million Americans vaccinated by the end of 2020, defended the administration's handling of the rollout, even as just 4 million people in the US have been given a shot.
anonymous

Demand Overwhelms Some U.S. Vaccine Registration Sites - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...covid-19-coronavirus

shared by anonymous on 10 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • As states try to scale up vaccine rollouts that have been marred with confusion and errors, the online registration sites — operated by a welter of agencies and using a range of technologies — are crucial.
  • There are many, many more people who want to be vaccinated than there are opportunities to get the shot.
  • “The registration system worked as designed, but there is far greater demand than available supply at this time,”
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  • Beaumont Health, which operates several hospitals in the Metro Detroit area, had recently announced plans to offer residents 65 and older vaccinations, and about 25,000 people tried to gain access to the online portal simultaneously
  • Both of the vaccines being used across the country require patients to receive two doses spaced weeks apart, so the process of administering second shots to Americans has only just begun.
  • Even in states where online registration seemed to go well, some people were stuck with long waits.
  • At least 151,000 people in the United States have been fully vaccinated against Covid-19, according to a New York Times survey of all 50 states.
  • County officials had said they would have a limited number of slots for people 65 and older. The available slots were filled in 20 minutes,
  • Some states, including Florida, Louisiana and Texas, have already expanded who is eligible for the vaccine, even though many in the first priority group recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — health care workers and residents of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities — have not yet received a shot.
  • about 6.7 million people had received a first dose of a vaccine. That falls far short of the goal federal officials set to give at least 20 million people their first shots before the end of 2020.
  • On Friday, the transition team for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. announced a plan to accelerate vaccinations that includes reversing course and releasing nearly all available doses. That would provide more people with first doses but raise the risk that second doses would not be administered on time; however, ramped up vaccine production is expected to keep enough in the pipeline for timely second doses
  • The tally of fully vaccinated people is an undercount because some states did not provide that information.
  • Some states’ expansions have led to frantic and often futile efforts by older people to get vaccinated. After Florida opened up vaccinations to anyone 65 and older last month, the demand was so great that new online registration portals quickly overloaded and crashed, people spent hours on the phone trying to secure appointments and others waited overnight at scattered pop-up sites offering shots on a first-come first-served basis.
  • Vaccines alone will not be enough to get ahead of the virus: It will take years to inoculate enough people to limit its evolution. In the meantime, social distancing, mask-wearing and hand-washing — combined with aggressive testing, tracking and tracing — might buy some time and avert devastating spikes in hospitalizations and deaths along the way.
  • The rapid spread of the new variants is a reminder of the failings and missteps of major countries to contain the virus earlier.
  • Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease expert, told performing arts professionals at a virtual conference on Saturday that he believed that theaters and other venues could reopen “some time in the fall of 2021,” depending on the vaccination rollout, and suggested that audiences might still be required to wear masks for some time.
  • A week after the first case of a highly contagious coronavirus variant first identified in Britain was found in New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Saturday that the state had found three additional cases.
  • The other case appears to be unrelated to those to Saratoga Springs and was traced back to a man in his 60s living in Massapequa, in Nassau County, Mr. Cuomo added. The man first tested positive for the coronavirus on Dec. 27.The travel history of those who tested positive for the variant in New York was unclear.
  • Pope Francis said in a soon-to-be-televised interview that he would be vaccinated against the coronavirus as early as next week, calling it a lifesaving, ethical obligation and the refusal to do so suicidal.
  • On Saturday, 1,035 people died of the coronavirus in Britain, a day after health officials reported the highest daily death toll since the pandemic started, with 1,325 deaths. Britain has been the worst-hit country in Europe, with nearly 80,000 deaths.
  • In a separate decision put in effect Thursday, face masks, long deemed ineffective by Swedish health officials, are now being recommended for use during rush hour on public transport, although they will not be mandatory.
  • On Friday, Britain suffered its deadliest daily toll since the beginning of the pandemic, with 1,325 deaths. On Saturday, the toll was 1,035 lives.— Elian Peltier
lmunch

New Data Triples Russia's Covid-19 Death Toll - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ia-coronavirus-death-toll.html

politics pandemic Russia

shared by lmunch on 29 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • the state statistical agency in Moscow has announced new figures indicating that the death toll from Covid-19 is more than three times as high as officially reported.
  • Russia has reported more than 3 million cases of infection, making it the world’s fourth-hardest-hit country, but only 55,827 deaths, fewer than in seven other countries.
  • This is still far fewer than the more than 334,000 deaths caused by Covid-19 in the United States but means that Russia has suffered more fatalities as a result of the pandemic than European countries like Italy, France and Britain, whose poor record has been regularly cited by Russian state media as proof of Russia’s relative triumph.
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  • more than 81 percent of the increased number of deaths in 2020 was “due to Covid,” which would mean that the virus had killed more than 186,000 Russians so far this year.
  • Proekt reported that Mr. Putin had in reality divided his time between his residence near Moscow and a villa in Sochi, a resort town on the Black Sea, building two identically appointed offices for video linkups to disguise his whereabouts. The Kremlin denied the report.
lmunch

US coronavirus death toll surpasses 350,000 as experts anticipate post-holiday surge | ... - 0 views

www.foxnews.com/...toll-350000-post-holiday-surge

Trump Pandemic culture

shared by lmunch on 03 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The coronavirus death toll in the United States surpassed 350,000 early Sunday, as experts anticipate another surge in cases and fatalities stemming from Christmas and New Year’s holiday gatherings. Data compiled by Johns Hopkins University showed the U.S. passed the threshold early Sunday morning. More than 20 million people in the country have been infected.
  • Top officials in charge of the federal government’s Operation Warp Speed had set a goal of vaccinating 20 million Americans by the end of 2020. But according to a count by Bloomberg News, as of Saturday night nearly 4.3 million vaccines had been administered in the U.S. to 1.3% of the population.
  • Additionally, three states -- Florida, Colorado, and California -- have reported cases of the new COVID-19 variant first seen in the United Kingdom. The strain is said to be more contagious and prompted travel bans and further restrictions in Britain.
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  • President Trump, however, countered that the coronavirus numbers are "far exaggerated," as he criticized the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's "ridiculous method of determination" in a Sunday morning tweet.
  • Meanwhile, influenza disease has been linked to between 140,000-810,000 hospitalizations and between 12,000-61,000 deaths annually since 2010, according to estimates from the CDC. Between 2019 and 2020, an estimated 22,000 people died in the U.S. after contracting influenza, and an estimated 400,000 people were hospitalized with the disease.
Javier E

9/11, COVID, and Us. - 0 views

mailchi.mp/...911-covid-and-us

people americans serious nature vice culture politics

shared by Javier E on 11 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • On March 30, the COVID death toll in America eclipsed the toll of 9/11. Here is what I wrote:   When all is said and done, the novel coronavirus will be the equivalent of multiple 9/11’s. Maybe two of them. Maybe five. Maybe thirty. We’ll see. God help us, we’re going to see.
  • People on the internet made fun of me for being alarmist, because “only” 2,977 Americans had died from the virus. Turns out I wasn’t being dark enough. We are closing in on the equivalent of 67 September 11’s.
  • Think about how you felt on that day, which was the greatest intelligence failure in American history. And imagine angry you would have been if 66 more of them had followed. Imagine what sort of accountability you would have demanded for the people in charge.
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  • 2. This Is Us
  • When we talk about accountability, we’re talking about our president, Donald Trump. That’s proper. He is the man who made the government’s decisions on how to handle the pandemic. The death toll belongs to him.
  • as always, it’s easy to mistake the symptom for the disease.
  • After 9/11, America rallied together under a single banner. Republicans and Democrats linked arms. George W. Bush’s approval rating was in the 90s. Both left and right moved out of their comfort zones: Liberals became more hawkish; conservatives began paying attention to the idea of multiculturalism. These shifts weren’t permanent, but they showed that both sides saw their blind spots and knew they had to correct for them.
  • these moves—call them gestures, if you’re cynical—were born of the realization that what had happened to America was important. That 9/11 mattered. And that a serious country takes serious events seriously.
  • Garrett Graff has a good piece in the Atlantic about how our nation’s capacity for grief today is different than it was 19 years ago and he mostly blames the pandemic itself and the ways in which it has warped our rituals
  • Then there’s Donald Trump. He is not just to blame for the government’s response to the coronavirus, but for trying to incite half the country into believing that the coronavirus is a hoax and that the Americans taking the virus seriously are the enemy.
  • But I don’t blame Trump for all of the division. Because his people—like the guy in that video—aren’t NPC’s. They have minds of their own. They chose to follow his lead. In the same way that some large percentage of Americans wanted Donald Trump, there’s a large percentage who wanted not to rally around each other, but to turn on each other. To retreat into fantasy land. To choose to be unserious.
  • The worst thing about this anniversary is that, for the first time in 19 years, we have been confronted with incontrovertible evidence that we are a different people than we were on 9/11. A much—much—worse people.
Javier E

Opinion | How Fox News may be destroying Trump's reelection hopes - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...roying-trumps-reelection-hopes

fox news trump 2020

shared by Javier E on 28 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • For Trump, Fox News has two functions: With some exceptions, it largely functions as his “shameless propaganda outlet,” as Margaret Sullivan put it, aggressively inflating his successes and faithfully pushing his messages. When Fox occasionally departs from this role, Trump rages at it as a form of deep betrayal.
  • Yet for precisely this reason, Fox also functions as a kind of security blanket: It persuades Trump that he’s succeeding, which provides an effective reality distortion field against outside criticism.
  • Trump repeatedly failed to act to tame the spread, even though that would have helped him politically, due to a pathological refusal to admit earlier error and “overly rosy assessments and data" from Fox News:Another self-imposed hurdle for Trump has been his reliance on a positive feedback loop. Rather than sit for briefings by infectious-disease director Anthony S. Fauci and other medical experts, the president consumes much of his information about the virus from Fox News Channel and other conservative media sources, where his on-air boosters put a positive spin on developments.
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  • When the coronavirus death toll approached 100,000, this fact was largely absent from Fox prime-time programming. Now that it’s approaching 150,000, Fox personalities are claiming the original lockdowns were a plot to harm Trump and that things are actually going far better than expected thanks to his towering leadership.
  • studies suggest misinformation from Fox and other right-wing media outlets might be making audiences more prone to believing coronavirus conspiracy theories. Meanwhile, even as too-rapid reopenings are a big reason the coronavirus is surging again, his Fox propagandists continue to push the idea that hesitation to reopen schools is pure politics.
  • Yet according to Trump’s own advisers, these failures are now putting his reelection at risk.
  • Meanwhile, Trump is mainlining from Fox a daily picture of the protests that is highly distorted and narcotically numbing.
  • This is surely why Trump is sending in law enforcement in the first place — he believes inciting violent civil conflict will help his reelection. As one GOP strategist candidly tells the Times, Republicans are hoping to define Democrats “as being on the side of the anarchists in Portland.”
  • The crucial point here is that what Trump sees on Fox is surely persuading him that he’s succeeding in doing just that.
  • Fox personalities are claiming that electing Joe Biden will make civil violence “a staple of American life everywhere.” They are relentlessly doctoring Biden quotes to paint him as anti-police. And they are suggesting that Trump’s Mount Rushmore speech, which conflated protests with “far-left fascism” to justify sending in more law enforcement, represented the greatest oratory since Cicero.
  • But in the Fox narrative of the protests, there is no room for any acknowledgement that Trump is functioning as a primarily inciting and destructive force, or that this fact might be further alienating the educated white suburban voters who are supposed to find Trump’s authoritarian displays reassuring.
  • a recent Yahoo News-YouGov poll found that a larger percentage of suburban voters say the country will become less safe if Trump wins (48 percent) than say the same about Biden (37 percent). Among women, it’s even worse for Trump (50 percent and 33 percent, respectively).
maxwellokolo

Death toll at Oakland warehouse fire rises to 24 - 0 views

www.latimes.com/...kland-fire-20161204-story.html

shared by maxwellokolo on 04 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • maxwellokolo on 04 Dec 16
     
    The death toll from the fire that raced through an Oakland warehouse during a music concert rose to 24 as searchers continued sift through the ruin of one of the deadliest fires in modern California history. It could take another two days for the search for victims to end, frustrating frantic family and friends awaiting word about the fate of their loved ones.
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