Quick ReviewFuck pic.twitter.com/E0r2cXEBOD
— Liz Hsiao Lan Alper (@LizAlps) December 31, 2020
- OOH = Out Of Hospital
- ROSC = Return of Spontaneous Circulation
Thursday, December 31, 2020
PSA
via TikTok and Tweet from a doc in LA
Year End
Another year when I'll make a point of staying up til midnight New Year's Eve just to watch the old year die.
▼ click to embiggen ▼
Today's Tweet
Really not crazy about the violence, but sometimes these jokers have to be slapped down. Hard.
I’m done. I’m fucking done. 🤣🤣💀 the sound has to be on. Dave Matthews goes well with twisted tea. pic.twitter.com/DZEBKPswHb
— Empress Kush of the New Year ✨ (@CherryDank) December 30, 2020
COVID-19 Update
World
New Cases: 728,084 (⬆︎ .88%)
New Deaths: 15,121 (⬆︎ .84%) 🏆 New Record! 🎉
USA
New Cases: 234,550 (⬆︎ 1.17%)
New Deaths: 3,880 (⬆︎ 1.12%) 🏆 New Record! 🎉
I mentioned the other day that President Stoopid managed not to have anything to do with developing or producing the vaccines, and then decided (as usual) to stand in front of it and try to take credit for it.
And when his minions were sent out to answer questions about delays and the fact that vaccines are not being well-distributed or administered, they moved the goal posts - ie: "Gee whiz, we didn't mean we'd have 20 million people actually vaccinated by year's end. You must've misunderstood. We meant 20 million doses would be shipped - it's up to the states to set it all up for people to get jabbed in the arm..."
Yeah, except 20 million doses have not been shipped, and Americans are not being vaccinated in the numbers - nor at the pace necessary for a positive outcome.
The NYT graphics editor tries to put a happy face on it, but to date, only about 400,000 people per day are getting the first round of shots, which means we'll have the requisite 75% of Americans vaccinated just in time for the Mid-Term Elections in 2022.
TWENTY-TWENTY-FUCKING-TWO
We need to get that number up around 3 - 5 million per day to have any chance of getting out from under this thing, and even then, we're looking at June 2021 before we're even close to Herd Immunity levels.
Obviously, it's reasonable to expect the pace will pick up, but when the White House staff is down to skeleton crew levels, and the ones who're still there have no particular skills or the authority to do much, the effect is that they're basically dragging their feet.
Throw in the "president" saying it's not his job - he did his part - it's all up to the states now - and we'll be slipping further and further behind every day as we count down to January 20th.
My take: Republicans are holding out to the absolute bitter end. They're determined to let this play out in a Shock Doctrine kinda way, trying to make their point that the federal government is worthless by ham-stringing that government at every turn.
God how I hate me some
fuckin' Republicans
Wednesday, December 30, 2020
COVID-19 Update
World
We can helicopter some of them a couple of counties over (as they become critical, and before they absolutely require the bed), but beyond that, we have to change our thinking - the standard model (send the patient to where the care is) is about to become inoperable and we need to put that idea aside.
Colorado officials on Tuesday reported the first known case in the United States of a person infected with the coronavirus variant that has been circulating rapidly across much of the United Kingdom and has led to a lockdown of much of southern England.
Scientists have said the variant is more transmissible but does not make people sicker.
The Colorado case involves a man in his 20s, who is in isolation in Elbert County, about 50 miles southeast of Denver, and has no travel history, according to a tweet from the office of Gov. Jared Polis (D).
“The individual has no close contacts identified so far, but public health officials are working to identify other potential cases and contacts thorough contact tracing interviews,” the statement said.
A federal scientist familiar with the investigation said the man’s lack of known travel — in contrast with most confirmed cases outside the United Kingdom — indicates this is probably not an isolated case. “We can expect that it will be detected elsewhere,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the broader context of the announcement.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed as much in a statement Tuesday afternoon, saying additional cases with the new variant will be detected in the United States in coming days. The variant’s apparent increase in contagiousness “could lead to more cases and place greater demand on already strained health care resources,” the agency said in a statement.
Researchers have detected the more transmissible variant in at least 17 countries outside the United Kingdom, including as far away as Australia and South Korea, as of Tuesday afternoon. Officials in Canada had previously said they had identified two cases.
Although the U.K. variant appears more contagious, it is not leading to higher rates of hospitalizations or deaths, according to a report from Public Health England, a government agency. Nor is there any sign that people who were infected months ago with the coronavirus are more likely to be reinfected if exposed to the variant, according to the report. All available evidence indicates that vaccines, and immunity built up in the population, should be protective against this variant.
- New Cases: 624,091 (⬆︎ .76%)
- New Deaths: 13,791 (⬆︎ .77%)
USA
- New Cases: 194,860 (⬆︎ .99%)
- New Deaths: 3,398 (⬆︎ .99%)
Certain percentages are staying fairly consistent.
- Overall Serious/Critical = ½% of all cases
- Overall Death Rate = 3% of all cases which have been resolved
USAmerica Inc will go over 20 million cases some time today, and over 350,000 dead in the next day or two, going on to top 400,000 dead by the middle of next month.
The World will hit 100 million cases and 2 million dead some time mid-January.
And here's the cherry on top for USAmerica Inc:
There are approximately 100,000 Critical Care Beds staffed and available in the US. For the most part, there is a more-or-less adequate supply to meet the demand, even though we're straining the limits, especially considering the toll this fight is taking on the clinicians who spend practically every waking moment at the broken end of the bottle.
The problem - as usual - is a matter of distribution. Many hospitals are reporting they've maxed out already, and you can't just transfer an ICU bed (along with the requisite trained professionals) to Pokacuzzin County when the need arises, and transferring potentially hundreds or thousands of critical patients hundreds or thousands of miles to the nearest bed isn't even worth contemplating (because the patients require critical care en route, and if we could provide that critical care during the transfer, we wouldn't be transferring that patient in the first place).
We can helicopter some of them a couple of counties over (as they become critical, and before they absolutely require the bed), but beyond that, we have to change our thinking - the standard model (send the patient to where the care is) is about to become inoperable and we need to put that idea aside.
I don't pretend to know what we need to do. I do know that there are extraordinary people with extraordinary skill who do know how to do all of this, and the question is: Will we be able to put them in positions to help us pull it off, or will President Stoopid and Qult45 fuck this up like they've done everything else?
We're 3 weeks away from the Biden Administration, and about 10 days away from seeing the results of a Christmas Surge that could be pretty fucking epic.
A bit of good news - some people who've recovered from COVID-19 are still producing antibodies 6 months out. So post-infection immunity may turn out to be a thing.
The "new" novel coronavirus may not be such a big threat, but it bears watching cuz holy fuck, it gets around.
Colorado officials on Tuesday reported the first known case in the United States of a person infected with the coronavirus variant that has been circulating rapidly across much of the United Kingdom and has led to a lockdown of much of southern England.
Scientists have said the variant is more transmissible but does not make people sicker.
The Colorado case involves a man in his 20s, who is in isolation in Elbert County, about 50 miles southeast of Denver, and has no travel history, according to a tweet from the office of Gov. Jared Polis (D).
“The individual has no close contacts identified so far, but public health officials are working to identify other potential cases and contacts thorough contact tracing interviews,” the statement said.
A federal scientist familiar with the investigation said the man’s lack of known travel — in contrast with most confirmed cases outside the United Kingdom — indicates this is probably not an isolated case. “We can expect that it will be detected elsewhere,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the broader context of the announcement.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed as much in a statement Tuesday afternoon, saying additional cases with the new variant will be detected in the United States in coming days. The variant’s apparent increase in contagiousness “could lead to more cases and place greater demand on already strained health care resources,” the agency said in a statement.
Researchers have detected the more transmissible variant in at least 17 countries outside the United Kingdom, including as far away as Australia and South Korea, as of Tuesday afternoon. Officials in Canada had previously said they had identified two cases.
Although the U.K. variant appears more contagious, it is not leading to higher rates of hospitalizations or deaths, according to a report from Public Health England, a government agency. Nor is there any sign that people who were infected months ago with the coronavirus are more likely to be reinfected if exposed to the variant, according to the report. All available evidence indicates that vaccines, and immunity built up in the population, should be protective against this variant.
Tuesday, December 29, 2020
Today's Quote
To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together.
Barry Holstun Lopez (January 6, 1945 – December 25, 2020) was an American author, essayist, nature writer, and fiction writer whose work is known for its humanitarian and environmental concerns. In a career spanning over 50 years, he visited over 80 countries, and wrote extensively about distant and exotic landscapes including the Arctic wilderness, exploring the relationship between human cultures and nature. He won the National Book Award for Nonfiction for Arctic Dreams (1986) and his Of Wolves and Men (1978) was a National Book Award finalist. He was a contributor to magazines including Harper's Magazine, National Geographic, and The Paris Review.
National Book Award winner Barry Lopez was famous for chronicling his travels to remote places and the landscapes he found there. But his writings weren't simply accounts of his journeys — they were reminders of how precious life on earth is, and of our responsibility to care for it. He died on Christmas Day following a years-long battle with prostate cancer, his wife confirmed to NPR. He was 75.
Lopez spent more than 30 years writing his last book, Horizon, and you don't spend that much time on a project without going through periods of self doubt.
When I met him at his home last year, he told me when he was feeling defeated by the work, he'd walk along the nearby McKenzie River.
"Every time I did there was a beaver stick in the water at my feet. And they're of course, they're workers. So I imagined the beaver were saying 'What the hell's wrong with you? You get back in there and do your work.'"
Up in his studio, he had a collection of the sticks, and he showed me how they bore the marks of little teeth. It was a lesson for Lopez. "Everyday I saw the signs of: don't lose faith in yourself," he told me.
This was the world of Barry Lopez — a world where a beaver could teach you the most valuable lessons.
Lopez was born in New York, but his father moved the family to California when he was a child. He would eventually settle in Oregon, where he gained notice for his writing about the natural world. He won the 1986 National Book Award for his nonfiction work Arctic Dreams.
At the time, he told NPR how he approached the seemingly empty Arctic environment.
"I made myself pay attention to places where I thought nothing was going on," he said then. "And then after a while, the landscape materialized in a in a fuller way. Its expression was deeper and broader than I had first imagined that at first glance."
In Lopez's books, a cloudy sky contains "grays of pigeon feathers, of slate and pearls." Packs of hammerhead sharks in the Galapagos move "like swans milling on a city park pond"
Composer John Luther Adams was friend and collaborator of Lopez for nearly four decades He says Lopez's writing serves as a wake-up call.
"He surveys the beauty of the world and at the same time, the cruelty and violence that we humans inflict on the Earth and on one another, and he does it with deep compassion," Adams says
Lopez experienced that cruelty firsthand: As a child he was sexually abused by a family friend. He first wrote about it in 2013, and he later told NPR the experience made him feel afraid and shameful around other people. The animals he encountered in the California wilderness offered something different.
"They didn't say 'oh we know what you went through,'" he said. "I felt accepted by the animate world."
Lopez would spend his life writing about that world — in particular the damage done to it by climate change.
That hit home for Lopez this past September. Much of his property was burned in wildfires that tore through Oregon, partly due to abnormally dry conditions. His wife Debra Gwartney says he lost an archive that stored most of his books, awards, notes and correspondence from the past 50 years, as well as much of the forest around the home.
"He talked a lot about climate change and how it's so easy to think that it's going to happen to other people and not to you," she says. "But it happened to us, it happened to him personally. The fire was a blow he never could recover from."
When I spoke to Lopez last year, he said he always sought to find grace in the middle of devastation.
"It's so difficult to be a human being. There are so many reasons to give up. To retreat into cynicism or despair. I hate to see that and I want to do something that makes people feel safe and loved and capable."
In his last days, Lopez's family brought objects from his home to him in hospice. Among the items: the beaver sticks from his studio.
January 6, 1945 – December 25, 2020
National Book Award winner Barry Lopez was famous for chronicling his travels to remote places and the landscapes he found there. But his writings weren't simply accounts of his journeys — they were reminders of how precious life on earth is, and of our responsibility to care for it. He died on Christmas Day following a years-long battle with prostate cancer, his wife confirmed to NPR. He was 75.
Lopez spent more than 30 years writing his last book, Horizon, and you don't spend that much time on a project without going through periods of self doubt.
When I met him at his home last year, he told me when he was feeling defeated by the work, he'd walk along the nearby McKenzie River.
"Every time I did there was a beaver stick in the water at my feet. And they're of course, they're workers. So I imagined the beaver were saying 'What the hell's wrong with you? You get back in there and do your work.'"
Up in his studio, he had a collection of the sticks, and he showed me how they bore the marks of little teeth. It was a lesson for Lopez. "Everyday I saw the signs of: don't lose faith in yourself," he told me.
This was the world of Barry Lopez — a world where a beaver could teach you the most valuable lessons.
Lopez was born in New York, but his father moved the family to California when he was a child. He would eventually settle in Oregon, where he gained notice for his writing about the natural world. He won the 1986 National Book Award for his nonfiction work Arctic Dreams.
At the time, he told NPR how he approached the seemingly empty Arctic environment.
"I made myself pay attention to places where I thought nothing was going on," he said then. "And then after a while, the landscape materialized in a in a fuller way. Its expression was deeper and broader than I had first imagined that at first glance."
In Lopez's books, a cloudy sky contains "grays of pigeon feathers, of slate and pearls." Packs of hammerhead sharks in the Galapagos move "like swans milling on a city park pond"
Composer John Luther Adams was friend and collaborator of Lopez for nearly four decades He says Lopez's writing serves as a wake-up call.
"He surveys the beauty of the world and at the same time, the cruelty and violence that we humans inflict on the Earth and on one another, and he does it with deep compassion," Adams says
Lopez experienced that cruelty firsthand: As a child he was sexually abused by a family friend. He first wrote about it in 2013, and he later told NPR the experience made him feel afraid and shameful around other people. The animals he encountered in the California wilderness offered something different.
"They didn't say 'oh we know what you went through,'" he said. "I felt accepted by the animate world."
Lopez would spend his life writing about that world — in particular the damage done to it by climate change.
That hit home for Lopez this past September. Much of his property was burned in wildfires that tore through Oregon, partly due to abnormally dry conditions. His wife Debra Gwartney says he lost an archive that stored most of his books, awards, notes and correspondence from the past 50 years, as well as much of the forest around the home.
"He talked a lot about climate change and how it's so easy to think that it's going to happen to other people and not to you," she says. "But it happened to us, it happened to him personally. The fire was a blow he never could recover from."
When I spoke to Lopez last year, he said he always sought to find grace in the middle of devastation.
"It's so difficult to be a human being. There are so many reasons to give up. To retreat into cynicism or despair. I hate to see that and I want to do something that makes people feel safe and loved and capable."
In his last days, Lopez's family brought objects from his home to him in hospice. Among the items: the beaver sticks from his studio.
Once-And-For-All Is A Fantasy
I'll go out on the limb and predict that our little experiment in self-government will survive. Even if it barely survives, we will have survived, and that means we prevail - eventually - for now.
It won't be over though - the GOP is chock full of assholes who want to tear it all down and replace it with plutocracy, but this episode of the fever will peak, and then break, and then begin to dissipate.
Unfortunately this fight doesn't end once Biden and Harris are sworn in.
It didn't end when we elected Obama.
It didn't end when Agnew and then Nixon were forced out.
It never ends.
Because people like this current batch of Republicans are not about ideology or principle or "doing what's right for our country". They're about power and conquest and setting themselves up to rule. And they seem to think whoever gets to rule over USAmerica Inc will be the de facto King O' Da Woild.
News flash, fellas:
For 2,000 generations, better men than you have been trying to conquer the world.
And the world remains undefeated.
NYT: (pay wall)
Will Pence Do the Right Thing?
President Trump recently tweeted that “the ‘Justice’ Department and FBI have done nothing about the 2020 Presidential Election Voter Fraud,” followed by these more ominous lines: “Never give up. See everyone in D.C. on January 6th.”
The unmistakable reference is to the day Congress will count the Electoral College’s votes, with Vice President Mike Pence presiding. Mr. Trump is leaning on the vice president and congressional allies to invalidate the November election by throwing out duly certified votes for Joe Biden.
Mr. Pence thus far has not said he would do anything like that, but his language is worrisome. Last week, he said: “We’re going to keep fighting until every legal vote is counted. We’re going to win Georgia, we’re going to save America,” as a crowd screamed, “Stop the steal.”
And some Republicans won’t let up. On Monday, Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas and other politicians filed a frivolous lawsuit, which has multiple fatal flaws in both form and substance, in an attempt to force the vice president to appoint pro-Trump electors.
Mr. Trump himself has criticized virtually everyone’s view of the election, from that of the Supreme Court to the F.B.I. to Senator Mitch McConnell, but he has never attacked Mr. Pence, suggesting he has hopes for the vice president.
But as a matter of constitutional text and history, any effort on Jan. 6 is doomed to fail. It would also be profoundly anti-democratic and unconstitutional.
Both Article II of the Constitution and the 12th Amendment say that the votes of the Electoral College are to be opened by the “president of the Senate,” meaning the vice president. The Electoral Count Act, passed in 1887 to avoid chaotic counts like the one that followed the 1876 election, adds important details. It provides a detailed timeline to tabulate electoral votes, culminating with the final count to take place on Jan. 6, and it delineates the powers of the vice president.
He is to be the “presiding officer” (meaning he is to preserve order and decorum), open the ballot envelopes, provide those results to a group of tellers, call for any objection by members of Congress, announce the results of any votes on objections, and ultimately announce the result of the vote.
Nothing in either the text of the Constitution or the Electoral Count Act gives the vice president any substantive powers. His powers are ministerial, and that circumscribed role makes general sense: The whole point of an election is to let the people decide who will rule them. If an incumbent could simply maneuver to keep himself in office — after all, a maneuver to protect Mr. Trump also protects Mr. Pence — the most foundational precept of our government would be gravely undermined. In America, “we the people,” not “we, the vice president,” control our destiny.
The drafters of the Electoral Count Act consciously insisted on this weakened role for the vice president. They guarded against any pretense he might have to throw out a particular state’s votes, saying that the vice president must open “all certificates and papers purporting to be” electoral votes. They further said, in the event of a dispute, both chambers of Congress would have to disagree with a particular state’s slate of electoral votes to reject them. And they made it difficult for Congress to disagree, adding measures such as a “safe harbor” provision and deference to certification by state officials.
In this election, certification is clear. There are no ongoing legal challenges in the states of any merit whatsoever. All challenges have lost, spectacularly and often, in the courts. The states and the electors have spoken their will. Neither Vice President Pence nor the loyal followers of President Trump have a valid basis to contest anything.
To be sure, this structure creates awkwardness, as it forces the vice president to announce the result even when personally unfavorable.
After the close election of 1960, Richard Nixon, as vice president, counted the votes for his opponent, John Kennedy. Al Gore, in perhaps one of the more dramatic moments of our Republic’s short history, counted the votes and reported them in favor of George W. Bush.
Watching Mr. Gore count the votes, shut off all challenges and deliver the presidency to Mr. Bush was a powerful moment in our democracy. By the time he counted the votes, America and the world knew where he stood. And we were all lifted up when Mr. Gore, at the end, asked God to bless the new president and vice president and joined the chamber in applause.
Republican leaders — including Senators McConnell, Roy Blunt and John Thune — have recognized the outcome of the election, despite the president’s wrath. Mr. McConnell put it in clear terms: “The Electoral College has spoken. So today, I want to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden.”
Notably, Mr. Pence has been silent. He has not even acknowledged the historic win by Kamala Harris, the nation’s first female, first African-American and first Asian-American vice president.
He now stands on the edge of history as he begins his most consequential act of leadership. The question for Vice President Pence, as well as other members of Congress, is which side of history he wants to come down on. Can he show the integrity demonstrated by every previous presidential administration? The American people accept a graceful loser, but a sore loser never goes down well in the history books.
We urge Mr. Pence to study our first president. After the Revolutionary War, the artist Benjamin West reported that King George had asked him what General Washington would do now that America was independent. West said that Washington would give up power and go back to farming. King George responded with words to the effect that “if he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.”
Indeed, Washington did so, surrendering command of the army to Congress and returning to Mount Vernon for years until he was elected president. And he again relinquished power eight years later, even though many would have been happy to keep him president for life. Washington in this way fully realized the American Republic, because there is no Republic without the peaceful transfer of power.
And it’s now up to Mr. Pence to recognize exactly that. Like all those that have come before him, he should count the votes as they have been certified and do everything he can to oppose those who would do otherwise. This is no time for anyone to be a bystander — our Republic is on the line.
Paraphrasing: American democracy is never more than one or two election cycles away from extinction.
Embrace the suck. Stay in the fight.
Today's Tweet
Gotta love Fetterman
Fetterman: The good news I can report from Pennsylvania is that President Trump received 100% of the dead mother vote pic.twitter.com/1hJ5hWmzET
— Acyn Torabi (@Acyn) December 29, 2020
COVID-19 Update
World
Biden to address nation on pandemic as Fauci says coronavirus surge ‘has just gotten out of control’
President-elect Joe Biden plans to deliver an address on the coronavirus pandemic as the nation experiences what his chief medical adviser on the issue, Anthony S. Fauci, described Tuesday as a surge in cases “that has just gotten out of control in many respects.”
Biden’s remarks, planned Tuesday afternoon in Wilmington, Del., are expected to be his most extensive comments to date since early this month, when he laid out a plan for his first 100 days in office that included imploring all Americans to wear masks.
Fauci, appearing on CNN on Tuesday morning, lamented what he expects to be a post-holiday increase in cases and the strong possibility than January’s caseload will exceed even that of December. “You just have to assume it’s going to get worse,” Fauci said.
Fauci also acknowledged that the rollout of vaccines was not reaching as many Americans as quickly as the 20 million that Trump administration had pledged by the end of the month.
“We certainly are not at the numbers that we wanted to be at the end of December,” said Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “We are below where we want to be.”
But Fauci, who accepted Biden’s invitation to play an expanded role in his administration, expressed hope that by “showing leadership from the top,” Biden could make an impact — comments that appeared to be implicit criticism of President Trump, who has said little publicly about the crisis since Election Day.
“What he’s saying is that let’s take at least 100 days and everybody, every single person put aside this nonsense of making masks be a political statement or not,” Fauci said of Biden. “We know what works. We know social distancing works. We know avoiding congregant settings works. For goodness sakes, let’s all do it, and you will see that curve will come down.”
Separately Tuesday, Vice President-elect Kamala D. Harris plans to get vaccinated in Washington. Biden received his first shot last week.
In remarks earlier this month, Biden also pledged to distribute 100 million vaccine shots in his first 100 days in office and said he wanted to open as many schools safely during the period as possible. He has also promised to sign an executive order requiring masks to be worn on federal property.
On Monday, Celine Gounder, a member of Biden’s covid-19 advisory board, said during a television appearance that Biden is also considering invoking the Defense Production Act to increase production of coronavirus vaccines,
Appearing on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Grounder said Biden could invoke the wartime-production law “to make sure the personal protective equipment, the test capacity and the raw materials for the vaccines are produced in adequate supply.”
During his CNN appearance, Fauci said that getting children back to school safely should remain an imperative, despite rising caseloads.
“You can’t have one size fits all, but the bottom line, what I call default position, should be that wherever we are, try as best as we can to get the children back to school and to keep them in school and to have a plan to try and keep them as safe as possible,” he said.
About 200,000 new coronavirus cases have been reported daily in recent weeks, with a record high of 252,431 on Dec. 17.
The nation’s overall caseload surpassed 19 million Sunday, even as the holidays were expected to cause a lag in reporting. Hospitalizations have exceeded 100,000 since the start of December and hit a peak of 119,000 on Dec. 23. Deaths are averaging more than 2,000 a day, with the most ever reported — 3,406 fatalities — on Dec. 17.
- New Cases: 487,096 (⬆︎ .60%)
- New Deaths: 9,153 (⬆︎ .52%)
USA
- New Cases: 186,391 (⬆︎ .95%)
- New Deaths: 1,966 (⬆︎ .58%)
We're not getting consistent news from government about what's going on.
eg: Washington announced the vaccine, and said there'd be 20 million people vaccinated by year's end. Then we found out there's been a series of weird delays and SNAFUs (surprise surprise), and yesterday, they tried to spin it and say "No no, we meant there'd be 20 million doses shipped...and golly, we're trying - really we are..."
The only thing that's more prone to ClusterFuck-itis than big government is no government.
You put this thing in the hands of "private enterprise" - the way they've been doing with everything - and the rent-seekers and profit leeches will swarm the project like pigs to the trough.
So in the meantime, stay in your bunker. It could be another 6 months before we see improvement worthy of celebration.
Biden to address nation on pandemic as Fauci says coronavirus surge ‘has just gotten out of control’
President-elect Joe Biden plans to deliver an address on the coronavirus pandemic as the nation experiences what his chief medical adviser on the issue, Anthony S. Fauci, described Tuesday as a surge in cases “that has just gotten out of control in many respects.”
Biden’s remarks, planned Tuesday afternoon in Wilmington, Del., are expected to be his most extensive comments to date since early this month, when he laid out a plan for his first 100 days in office that included imploring all Americans to wear masks.
Fauci, appearing on CNN on Tuesday morning, lamented what he expects to be a post-holiday increase in cases and the strong possibility than January’s caseload will exceed even that of December. “You just have to assume it’s going to get worse,” Fauci said.
Fauci also acknowledged that the rollout of vaccines was not reaching as many Americans as quickly as the 20 million that Trump administration had pledged by the end of the month.
“We certainly are not at the numbers that we wanted to be at the end of December,” said Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “We are below where we want to be.”
But Fauci, who accepted Biden’s invitation to play an expanded role in his administration, expressed hope that by “showing leadership from the top,” Biden could make an impact — comments that appeared to be implicit criticism of President Trump, who has said little publicly about the crisis since Election Day.
“What he’s saying is that let’s take at least 100 days and everybody, every single person put aside this nonsense of making masks be a political statement or not,” Fauci said of Biden. “We know what works. We know social distancing works. We know avoiding congregant settings works. For goodness sakes, let’s all do it, and you will see that curve will come down.”
Separately Tuesday, Vice President-elect Kamala D. Harris plans to get vaccinated in Washington. Biden received his first shot last week.
In remarks earlier this month, Biden also pledged to distribute 100 million vaccine shots in his first 100 days in office and said he wanted to open as many schools safely during the period as possible. He has also promised to sign an executive order requiring masks to be worn on federal property.
On Monday, Celine Gounder, a member of Biden’s covid-19 advisory board, said during a television appearance that Biden is also considering invoking the Defense Production Act to increase production of coronavirus vaccines,
Appearing on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Grounder said Biden could invoke the wartime-production law “to make sure the personal protective equipment, the test capacity and the raw materials for the vaccines are produced in adequate supply.”
During his CNN appearance, Fauci said that getting children back to school safely should remain an imperative, despite rising caseloads.
“You can’t have one size fits all, but the bottom line, what I call default position, should be that wherever we are, try as best as we can to get the children back to school and to keep them in school and to have a plan to try and keep them as safe as possible,” he said.
About 200,000 new coronavirus cases have been reported daily in recent weeks, with a record high of 252,431 on Dec. 17.
The nation’s overall caseload surpassed 19 million Sunday, even as the holidays were expected to cause a lag in reporting. Hospitalizations have exceeded 100,000 since the start of December and hit a peak of 119,000 on Dec. 23. Deaths are averaging more than 2,000 a day, with the most ever reported — 3,406 fatalities — on Dec. 17.
Monday, December 28, 2020
Today's Tweet
The Taliban used to kidnap or kill me in my nightmares every night.
— Jason Kander (@JasonKander) December 28, 2020
Last night I dreamt it was the first day of school and I had a new literature teacher who loved baseball and didn’t assign seats. #PTSD treatment works.
COVID-19 Update
World (64 countries didn't report)
- New Cases: 410,131 (⬆︎ .51%)
- New Deaths: 7,084 (⬆︎ .41%)
USA (5 states didn't report)
- New Cases: 127,740 (⬆︎ .66%)
- New Deaths: 1,215 (⬆︎ .37%)
More evidence that USAmerica Inc is fast becoming the shithole country our esteemed leader so eloquently described others as being.
Cuz ain't that just the fucking way of things these days.
Mark Boucot learned the rural hospital he runs would be left out of the initial vaccine distribution a few days before covid-19 killed his first staff member.
It seemed hope would be slow to reach the Garrett County mountains, just like everything else.
The pandemic initially skirted this eastern edge of Appalachia, but arrived with a vengeance in November. Case rates soared to four times the state average. The small emergency room at Garrett Regional Medical Center, where Boucot is president, was hammered. Coronavirus patients consumed nearly half the hospital’s beds and all of its four-bay intensive care unit.
Isolated in the farthest stretch of Western Maryland, residents did what they could to prepare for the virus, even when the pandemic seemed impossibly far away. But their community was overwhelmed when it materialized. The region’s treasured independent streak didn’t help matters. Locals have been reluctant to distance themselves from family members, slow to admit they are weakened with infection, and — in seven out of 10 cases — unwilling to get a vaccine.
All spring, summer and into the fall, Garrett County saw the pandemic on national news but not at home. It welcomed tourists escaping virus-laden cities and spent federal aid on infrastructure and economic relief rather than testing sites or an intensive campaign to warn skeptics about the coronavirus.
But as Christmas approached and the first shipments of vaccine rolled into bigger towns and cities across the country, the small hospital in Oakland was in distress. Ten people had died in 10 days, doubling the death toll in a county of 29,000. The positivity rate was 17.75 percent, the state’s highest.
Ten percent of the hospital staff was out with the virus or quarantined, and the hospital was deploying third- and fourth-year nursing students from a nearby community college to help.
“I feel like we’re a bunch of rusty tools in the garage that no one cares about,” said Jeffrey Bernstein, a semiretired emergency room physician whose part-time schedule ballooned in December to more than 40 hours a week.
The hospital had provided coronavirus testing for the county since March, when the pandemic began. Now Boucot decided he no longer had the staff to both treat the sick and detect the infected.
The county had to create a new testing method, and settled on a new state-run site that operates two days a week on an isolated stretch near the airport, staffed by school nurses whose classroom buildings had been shut down a few weeks earlier.
“We had people laying around the lab testing area waiting,” Boucot said. “We’re overrun at this point. We can’t keep up with it.”
Garrett’s economy relies on agriculture, small business and tourism that draws Washington- and Baltimore-area residents to its wooded back country, state parks with waterfalls, ski resorts and Deep Creek Lake. The pandemic brought more people than ever to rent houses and buy vacation homes; county officials say 2020 set a record for both hotel taxes and real estate sales.
But some locals resented the stay-at-home orders and mask mandates, given the more-lax rules in neighboring counties in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Television news here comes from those states, and residents missed forceful warnings about the virus from Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) and others closer to Washington. Telework requirements and closed schools also caused greater hardship in Garrett than elsewhere, since fewer than 40 percent of households have reliable broadband.
While public health workers waited anxiously for the pandemic to hit, many others relied on Facebook and social media for virus-related information, plus their own observations that the county — with fewer than three dozen cases in four months — didn’t seem to have a covid-19 problem at all.
“It was something we saw on TV happening in other places,” said Becky Aiken, who manages the nurses for the public school system.
Garrett County Health Officer Bob Stephens said some visitors to businesses located along Interstate 68 acted “really nasty” when told to wear masks or leave. A few got physical; many were outraged.
“We have a lot of people who don’t believe covid is a serious thing,” Stephens said.
When cases started to rise in October, locals wanted to blame the tourists, even though Stephens insisted there was no evidence that they were responsible.
“Every time I talk to the health officer, every time, I ask him . . . Is there any data to show that the virus is being spread via the vacation industry in Garrett County?” Edwards said. “And every time I ask that, the answer is ‘no.’ ”
Stephens said outbreaks started in two nursing homes, where 150 people got sick in two weeks, and spread from there. It seems probable that the Autumn Glory festival in mid-October followed by Halloween fueled the spike, but it’s hard to tell, he added: “We went into this downward spiral because we couldn’t keep up with the contact tracing.”
By the end of November, the number of confirmed cases had more than tripled in just 18 days, to 755, helping to drive a statewide surge in virus cases that is disproportionately concentrated in three western counties.
The number of confirmed cases in Garrett probably understates the prevalence of the virus, officials said, given the stigma a positive test result holds in the community and the reluctance of people — in a county with one of the lowest median incomes in Maryland — to quarantine.
“Less people want to identify themselves as covid-positive, so they tend to avoid getting testing,” Boucot said. “There’s a little bit of an independent streak: ‘That’s private, that’s my business.’ And besides, if you’re out of work for two weeks, that’s it. You have no income.”
Public officials sounded alarms and encouraged people to avoid Thanksgiving dinners, but the conventional wisdom is that those warnings went unheeded. Family and social gatherings are now the primary infection sources in Garrett.
“A lot of people out here are more conservative-leaning and they’re not interested in the government telling people not to have family gatherings,” said longtime state Sen. George C. Edwards (R), whose son, Paul Clayton Edwards (R), chairs the Garrett County Board of Commissioners. “They say — well, I can’t tell you what they say, since it’s not printable.”
Familiar faces
Jeff Hinebaugh, director of emergency services at the hospital and a 35-year employee, was among those who fell ill. His symptoms stayed mild — no worse than a common cold — but he was nonetheless sidelined from the busy emergency room, left fretting at home about his depleted team.
“At what point is my staff going to crumble?” Hinebaugh said. “How in the world are we going to take care of our staff? How do we deal with the stress?”
Day after day, the emergency room was filled with familiar faces. Neighbors. Parents of friends. The dad from the soccer field. A co-worker.
“The last few months have been horrible,” Hinebaugh said. “When you’ve been here as long as I have, I know a lot of these people personally. They’re looking at my eyes. . . . They’re wanting to know, ‘Am I going to make it?’ And I don’t have an answer.”
The hospital, part of a two-hospital system run by Boucot and affiliated with West Virginia University, has 55 beds, 20 of which are reserved for maternity and short-term rehabilitation. In mid-December, 15 beds had covid patients. Every day, Chief Operating Officer Kendra Thayer scanned upcoming outpatient appointments and surgeries, looking for relief valves. Who was getting a knee surgery that could wait? Who could be treated at home with virtual specialists?
“We’re not going to put off someone who needs cancer treatment,” she said.
Several times each day, she visited the intensive care unit to see if anyone had improved enough to be transferred to a normal bed. Garrett Regional doesn’t have a pulmonologist or other specialists on-site; doctors rely on remote experts at West Virginia University Medicine. An iPad and speaker attached to a pole is wheeled into ICU bays so faraway doctors can to assess breathing and collaborate on treatment plans.
“It’s the things we don’t always do in a rural hospital, but we can with their assistance,” Thayer said of the virtual specialists. “Even when we lose someone, they say there’s nothing we could have done differently.”
It’s at least an hour by ambulance to someplace with specialized in-person care. Thayer doesn’t want members of the community to assume they’ll be transferred away if they’re sick; she worries it might deter people from seeking care.
“If we can keep them here, that’s really for the best,” she said.
It was in the tiny, quiet intensive care unit that Debra Wilt, a 30-year human resources employee at the hospital who loved to dance, died early in the morning of Dec. 12. Wilt, 59, was the first hospital staffer to die, and the third covid death in the ICU that week.
“Everybody knew and loved her,” Boucot said.
He directed his grieving employees to lower the state flag to half-staff in her honor. Not long before that, he’d told them to find time to assemble the usual Christmas decorations at the hospital entrance.Santa towered over the lobby, lights wrapped the concrete posts by the receiving bay, and garland draped the gift shop, where visitors were no longer allowed.
“It was important for us to demonstrate normalcy for the staff and the community,” Boucot said.
Jeff Hinebaugh, director of emergency services at the hospital and a 35-year employee, was among those who fell ill. His symptoms stayed mild — no worse than a common cold — but he was nonetheless sidelined from the busy emergency room, left fretting at home about his depleted team.
“At what point is my staff going to crumble?” Hinebaugh said. “How in the world are we going to take care of our staff? How do we deal with the stress?”
Day after day, the emergency room was filled with familiar faces. Neighbors. Parents of friends. The dad from the soccer field. A co-worker.
“The last few months have been horrible,” Hinebaugh said. “When you’ve been here as long as I have, I know a lot of these people personally. They’re looking at my eyes. . . . They’re wanting to know, ‘Am I going to make it?’ And I don’t have an answer.”
The hospital, part of a two-hospital system run by Boucot and affiliated with West Virginia University, has 55 beds, 20 of which are reserved for maternity and short-term rehabilitation. In mid-December, 15 beds had covid patients. Every day, Chief Operating Officer Kendra Thayer scanned upcoming outpatient appointments and surgeries, looking for relief valves. Who was getting a knee surgery that could wait? Who could be treated at home with virtual specialists?
“We’re not going to put off someone who needs cancer treatment,” she said.
Several times each day, she visited the intensive care unit to see if anyone had improved enough to be transferred to a normal bed. Garrett Regional doesn’t have a pulmonologist or other specialists on-site; doctors rely on remote experts at West Virginia University Medicine. An iPad and speaker attached to a pole is wheeled into ICU bays so faraway doctors can to assess breathing and collaborate on treatment plans.
“It’s the things we don’t always do in a rural hospital, but we can with their assistance,” Thayer said of the virtual specialists. “Even when we lose someone, they say there’s nothing we could have done differently.”
It’s at least an hour by ambulance to someplace with specialized in-person care. Thayer doesn’t want members of the community to assume they’ll be transferred away if they’re sick; she worries it might deter people from seeking care.
“If we can keep them here, that’s really for the best,” she said.
It was in the tiny, quiet intensive care unit that Debra Wilt, a 30-year human resources employee at the hospital who loved to dance, died early in the morning of Dec. 12. Wilt, 59, was the first hospital staffer to die, and the third covid death in the ICU that week.
“Everybody knew and loved her,” Boucot said.
He directed his grieving employees to lower the state flag to half-staff in her honor. Not long before that, he’d told them to find time to assemble the usual Christmas decorations at the hospital entrance.Santa towered over the lobby, lights wrapped the concrete posts by the receiving bay, and garland draped the gift shop, where visitors were no longer allowed.
“It was important for us to demonstrate normalcy for the staff and the community,” Boucot said.
'We'll take care of our own'
Part of the reason Garrett was among the last places in Maryland with a state-financed testing site is that no one asked for help until cases spiked.
“It’s a cultural thing,” Stephens, the health officer, said. “We’re in Appalachia. We’ll take care of our own.”
When it came to vaccines, however, Garrett officials were hoping to be first, only to learn the logistics of distributing the Pfizer-BioNTech drugs meant the small county would be left out.
“It seems counterintuitive,” said Edwards, the county commissioner. “It would seem that the area of the state that has the highest positivity and highest case rate would be first in line.”
But the vaccine was packaged in 975-dose batches that must be kept at subarctic temperatures until used. The hospital has only 250 front-line workers, so they had to wait for the Moderna vaccine, which came in smaller shipments and would not arrive for more than a week.
Once vaccines become available to the general public, Stephens and Boucot know they will have another battle. A health department survey conducted this fall suggested as few as three in 10 people would be willing to get vaccinated.
“We have trouble convincing people to get the regular flu vaccine, which is tried and tested,” Boucot said.
The job of persuading them will fall to people like Jessica Carey, an elementary school nurse who spends two days a week at the coronavirus testing site about 25 minutes from the hospital, past the one-runway airport and inside the shell of a building constructed for an economic development project that never arrived.
She and the other school nurses developed a plan with county health workers that involves Carey videotaping herself getting the shot and launching a blog diary about her experience over the following weeks.
“It’ll be a video walk-through of the entire process,” Carey said. “We’ll educate people, because there’s a lot of misinformation out there. We’ll have a Q& A, and talk about the side effects we’re having.”
The county health department, meanwhile, will ask all the primary-care doctors in the county to make a list of patients they think should get the vaccine first, then work on registering them to getting them to the testing and vaccination site.
“They know their patients, and we don’t,” Stephens said. “We have to rely on our partnerships, because none of the agencies can do it on their own.”
Part of the reason Garrett was among the last places in Maryland with a state-financed testing site is that no one asked for help until cases spiked.
“It’s a cultural thing,” Stephens, the health officer, said. “We’re in Appalachia. We’ll take care of our own.”
When it came to vaccines, however, Garrett officials were hoping to be first, only to learn the logistics of distributing the Pfizer-BioNTech drugs meant the small county would be left out.
“It seems counterintuitive,” said Edwards, the county commissioner. “It would seem that the area of the state that has the highest positivity and highest case rate would be first in line.”
But the vaccine was packaged in 975-dose batches that must be kept at subarctic temperatures until used. The hospital has only 250 front-line workers, so they had to wait for the Moderna vaccine, which came in smaller shipments and would not arrive for more than a week.
Once vaccines become available to the general public, Stephens and Boucot know they will have another battle. A health department survey conducted this fall suggested as few as three in 10 people would be willing to get vaccinated.
“We have trouble convincing people to get the regular flu vaccine, which is tried and tested,” Boucot said.
The job of persuading them will fall to people like Jessica Carey, an elementary school nurse who spends two days a week at the coronavirus testing site about 25 minutes from the hospital, past the one-runway airport and inside the shell of a building constructed for an economic development project that never arrived.
She and the other school nurses developed a plan with county health workers that involves Carey videotaping herself getting the shot and launching a blog diary about her experience over the following weeks.
“It’ll be a video walk-through of the entire process,” Carey said. “We’ll educate people, because there’s a lot of misinformation out there. We’ll have a Q& A, and talk about the side effects we’re having.”
The county health department, meanwhile, will ask all the primary-care doctors in the county to make a list of patients they think should get the vaccine first, then work on registering them to getting them to the testing and vaccination site.
“They know their patients, and we don’t,” Stephens said. “We have to rely on our partnerships, because none of the agencies can do it on their own.”
We've spent so much time and energy selling this cockamamy notion of the rugged individual and fierce independence, that people will accept self-annihilation before they'll even try to understand that they have to act in coordination with others - that in fact, that's what they've been doing all along. Coordinating with others and acting in concert is what our families and communities are all about in the first fucking place.
But as usual, politicians of a certain stripe have convinced them of the contradiction - that they never need anything from anyone, even though the fact is that a county like Garrett gets more from Annapolis than they pay in. It just never seeps into their thinking.
So they're fed the bullshit, and when something bad comes along, they may have to resist even acknowledging the calamity in an attempt to save themselves from having to face up to being hypocrites by admitting they need some help "from outsiders", or worse - taking instruction from, and submitting to "big gubmint".
Sunday, December 27, 2020
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