As of this morning:
- New Cases: 399,602 (⬆︎ 1.03%) 👈🏻 uh oh
- New Deaths: 6,107 (⬆︎ .56%)
USA
- New Cases: 66,129 (⬆︎ .81%)
- New Deaths: 874 (⬆︎ .39%)
U.S. tops 60,000 daily coronavirus infections for first time since early August
New study shows Republican-leaning counties hardest hit in recent weeks
For the first time since early August, the number of newly reported coronavirus infections in the United States on Thursday topped 60,000. More than 36,000 people are hospitalized nationally with covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, amid a long-feared autumnal rise of infections and serious illnesses.
This is not a regional crisis, but instead one that is intensifying almost everywhere in the country. Forty-four states and the District of Columbia have higher caseloads than in mid-September. The virus is spreading in rural communities in the heartland, far from the coastal cities hammered early in the pandemic.
Wisconsin set a record Thursday when it surpassed 4,000 newly reported cases. Illinois also reported more than 4,000 cases, eclipsing records set during the state’s first wave in April and May. Ohio set a new high, as did Indiana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Montana, and Colorado. In El Paso, officials have ordered new restrictions and lockdowns amid a frightening coronavirus surge.
“We know that this is going to get worse before it gets better,” Wisconsin Department of Health Services secretary-designee Andrea Palm said at a briefing Thursday. “Stay home. Wear a mask. Stay six feet apart. Wash your hands frequently.”
Some hospitals in the Upper Midwest and Great Plains have become jammed with patients and are running low on intensive-care-unit beds. On Wednesday, Wisconsin opened a field hospital on the grounds of the Wisconsin State Fair Park outside Milwaukee and will eventually be able to treat more than 500 patients.
Montana reported a record 301 hospitalized covid-19 patients Thursday, with 98 percent of the inpatient beds occupied the day before in Yellowstone County, home to the city of Billings and the state’s most populous county.
During the past week, at least 20 states have set record seven-day averages for infections, and a dozen have hit record hospitalization rates, according to health department data analyzed by The Washington Post.
In the midst of all this, President Stoopid sticks with "Don't worry - let it run its course".
If we get a vaccine in the next 6 months, and it takes another 6 months to get it out to the 250 million people we have to get it out to, then at today's growth rate: 1,000,000 Dead Americans.
Doctors search for treatments for covid-19 ‘long-haulers’ with few guides
Covid-19 took its best shot at Edison Chiluisa in May, sending him to intensive care, but the disease is still not done with him. For the past four months, long after his release from the hospital, Chiluisa has been racked by lingering ailments: Paralyzing fatigue. Shortness of breath. A stutter he never had before.
“The disease, it wears on you — body, mind and spirit,” Chiluisa, a 51-year-old hospital worker, said recently. “You can be fine all day, and then all of a sudden, your body just shuts down. No explanation. No reason. It just shuts down.”
But unlike some “long-haulers” in the early part of the pandemic, who struggled to persuade anyone that symptoms of covid-19 could last for months, Chiluisa is being attended by a team of specialists.
He sees a pulmonologist, a cardiologist, a neurologist, a respiratory therapist and a physical therapist, and soon he will see a social worker for the toll the coronavirus has inflicted on his psyche.
Even as they continue to face the day-to-day medical demands of the pandemic, caregivers like Chiluisa’s are adjusting to the reality that, for many thousands of people, the long-term consequences of covid-19 may have to be managed for months, and possibly much longer.
Long-haulers “are in every country, in every language,” said Igor J. Koralnik, who started a program for covid-19 neurocognitive problems at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, one of numerous post-covid-19 clinics opening around the country. “It’s going to be a big problem. It’s not going to go away.”
Chiluisa’s care is coordinated by the Winchester Chest Clinic at Yale New Haven Hospital. The Center for Post-COVID Care operated by the Mount Sinai health-care system in New York City boasts clinical specialists from 12 disciplines on its website. Penn Medicine’s clinic in Philadelphia bills itself as a “post-covid assessment and recovery clinic.”
While doctors have accumulated many years of experience in the long-term management of diseases such as diabetes and renal failure, they have no such expertise in covid-19, which is barely 10 months old.
“The patients are very scared because nobody has very clear answers for them,” said Denyse Lutchmansingh, Chiluisa’s pulmonologist. “They are happy to feel heard. They are happy that people are trying to help them. But at the end of the day, [they would] like to be told for sure ‘this is what is going to happen to you, this is not what is going to happen to you.’ And that’s the part that’s difficult for us in medicine, because it’s not completely clear.”
So maybe we shouldn't be out there fucking around with people's health insurance.
I get it - we have to pay for stuff - but maybe we should be making sure people get the care they need and deserve first, and then we can we bitch about the cost, and then we can not use the power of the federal government to put bonus money in the pockets of insurance company execs who act like a bunch of MBA assholes looking to collect rent on our health and wellbeing.
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