Data is beautiful. And following our "president's" lead - what's with those fucked up red states?
This is a really crazy visualization pic.twitter.com/km36MFCXxx
— Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) October 12, 2020
Oct 13, 2020
Today's Tweet
Data is beautiful. And following our "president's" lead - what's with those fucked up red states?
COVID-19 Update
World
- New Cases: 275,424 (⬆︎ .73%)
- New Deaths: 3,761 (⬆︎ .35%)
USA
- New Cases: 45,791 (⬆︎.57%)
- New Deaths: 316 (⬆︎.14%)
Last month, in an interview, Dr Fauci said he thinks a vaccine for COVID-19 will be ready by the end of 2020.
But once a vaccine has passed muster, it then has to be mass produced, distributed and administered to at least 150 million Americans and about 2 ½ - 3 billion people worldwide.
That's an undertaking of proportions that we've literally never seen before.
The question on everybody's mind is, "When can we get back to normal?". But the answer is something we're not fond of contemplating.
"We may not completely eliminate [the coronavirus], but if you get it down to such a very low level, and enough of the population is protected—either by a vaccine or by previously having been infected—then you'll develop a degree of herd immunity that you won't have an outbreak," Fauci said. He added that it's "reasonable" such a situation could occur by the end of 2021 or in the spring of 2022. However, Fauci stressed that there has to be a combination of both vaccinations and adherence to public health measures, such as wearing a mask and frequently washing one's hands. Fauci said that the "intensity of the public-health measures would depend on the level of infection in the community."
Straight Line Projections - given today's low Growth Rate
- A year from now: 370,000 dead Americans
- By April 2022: 450,000 dead Americans
J&J pauses COVID-19 vaccine trials due to unexplained illness in participant
Johnson & Johnson said on Monday it had temporarily paused its COVID-19 vaccine candidate clinical trials due to an unexplained illness in a study participant, delaying one of the highest profile efforts to contain the global pandemic.
The participant’s illness is being reviewed and evaluated by an independent data and safety monitoring board as well as the company’s clinical and safety physicians, the company said in a statement.
J&J, which reports quarterly financial results on Tuesday morning, said that such pauses are normal in big trials, which can include tens of thousands of people. It said the “study pause” in giving doses of the vaccine candidate was different from a “regulatory hold” required by health authorities. The current case is a pause.
However, J&J’s move follows a similar one by AstraZeneca. In September, the British group paused late-stage trials of its experimental coronavirus vaccine, developed with the University of Oxford, due to an unexplained illness in a British study participant.
Both candidates are based on a so-called adenovirus, a harmless modified virus that instructs human cells to produce vaccine proteins, and both are part of the U.S. government’s Operation Warp Speed programme to support vaccine development.
“This could be a second case of adenoviral vaccine to spur safety concerns,” said Bryan Garnier analyst Olga Smolentseva.
J&J on Sept. 22 became the fourth Warp-Speed participant to enter the final stage of testing on humans, with the aim of enrolling 60,000 volunteers in the United States and abroad.While Astra’s trials in Britain, Brazil, South Africa and India have resumed, the U.S. trial is still on hold, pending a regulatory review.
Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of infectious diseases at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, said by email that “Everybody is on the alert because of what happened with AstraZeneca,” adding that it could take a week to gather information.
“It would have to be a serious adverse event. If it was something like prostate cancer, uncontrolled diabetes or a heart attack - they wouldn’t stop it for any of those reasons. This is likely to be a neurological event,” he said.
Last month, J&J said its experimental COVID-19 vaccine produced a strong immune response against the novel coronavirus in an early-to-mid stage clinical trial. This prompted the company to start the large scale trial, with results expected by the end of this year or early 2021.
J&J declined to elaborate on the illness due to privacy concerns. It did say that some participants in studies get placebos, and it was not always clear whether a person suffering a serious adverse event in a clinical trial received a placebo or the treatment.
Stat News reported the pause earlier in the day citing a document sent to outside researchers, which stated that a “pausing rule” had been met, the online system used to enroll patients in the study had been closed and the data and safety monitoring board would be convened.
I guess "the good news" is that we're able to start talking about getting on the other side of this thing.
The bad news remains that we've got a bunch of inveterate liars crooks and losers in charge of moving us forward.
Oct 12, 2020
Keep This In Mind
The truth about The Wall Street Supply Side Economy:
You are always 3 bad months away from becoming homeless.
You are never 3 good months away from becoming a millionaire.
Today's Quote
Thomas Jefferson has kinda fallen from grace in light of the BLM thing, and while his failings and contradictions have to be acknowledged (he often spoke as an enlightened progressive but behaved like a regenerately racist asshole), I have to see him at once as a flawed man of his time and as a man who wanted all of us to evolve beyond the brutality of those times.
- letter to Samuel Kercheval, July 12, 1816.
Re-Confirming
Another thoroughly shitty reminder that 1) it's worse than we think, and 2) Cult45 is purposefully keeping info from us that we have a right to know.
Analysis Finds True US Pandemic Death Toll Is Much Higher Than 200,000
BU researchers: number of pandemic-related deaths is 36 percent higher than reported, with disadvantaged communities hit even harder than thought
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced last week that the United States had passed a grim milestone: over 200,000 Americans have now died from COVID-19. But research from Boston University School of Public Health finds that the true number of losses could be much higher.
That analysis, available on medRxiv ahead of peer-reviewed publication, took a close look at the number of US deaths between February and September 2020 that are characterized as in excess of the number of deaths that would be expected in a normal year. Researchers discovered that for every 100 excess deaths directly attributed to COVID-19, there were another 36 excess deaths—also likely caused by COVID-19, but in a less obvious manner.
BU researchers, who teamed up with collaborators from the University of Pennsylvania and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, found more of these additional deaths in US counties that have greater income inequality, high percentages of non-Hispanic Black residents, less home ownership, and high population density. The data suggest that higher mortality rates are inextricably linked with socioeconomic disadvantage and structural racism.
Looking at where the most excess deaths occured is a better measure of the pandemic’s disproportionate effect on communities than simply tallying up the total number of COVID-19–related deaths, according to study lead author Andrew Stokes, a BU School of Public Health assistant professor of global health. “Excess deaths include COVID deaths that were ascribed to other causes, as well as the indirect consequences of the pandemic on society,” he says.
Boston University's publication, The Brink:
Analysis Finds True US Pandemic Death Toll Is Much Higher Than 200,000
BU researchers: number of pandemic-related deaths is 36 percent higher than reported, with disadvantaged communities hit even harder than thought
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced last week that the United States had passed a grim milestone: over 200,000 Americans have now died from COVID-19. But research from Boston University School of Public Health finds that the true number of losses could be much higher.
That analysis, available on medRxiv ahead of peer-reviewed publication, took a close look at the number of US deaths between February and September 2020 that are characterized as in excess of the number of deaths that would be expected in a normal year. Researchers discovered that for every 100 excess deaths directly attributed to COVID-19, there were another 36 excess deaths—also likely caused by COVID-19, but in a less obvious manner.
BU researchers, who teamed up with collaborators from the University of Pennsylvania and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, found more of these additional deaths in US counties that have greater income inequality, high percentages of non-Hispanic Black residents, less home ownership, and high population density. The data suggest that higher mortality rates are inextricably linked with socioeconomic disadvantage and structural racism.
Looking at where the most excess deaths occured is a better measure of the pandemic’s disproportionate effect on communities than simply tallying up the total number of COVID-19–related deaths, according to study lead author Andrew Stokes, a BU School of Public Health assistant professor of global health. “Excess deaths include COVID deaths that were ascribed to other causes, as well as the indirect consequences of the pandemic on society,” he says.
Indirect consequences could include people being afraid to go to the hospital for another condition for fear of catching the coronavirus or a number of other issues caused or exacerbated by COVID-19’s economic and mental health impacts, such as loss of health insurance after layoffs, inability to afford medications after pay cuts, or the skyrocketing rates of depression in America’s adults, a condition that negatively impacts many aspects of health.
COVID-19 Update
World
- New Cases: 277,998
- New Deaths: 3,879
USA
- New Cases: 41,935
- New Deaths: 325
Another casualty of the coronavirus pandemic: Trust in government science
In another era, what happened Wednesday might have been viewed simply as good news. Two companies, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals and Eli Lilly, have independently developed therapeutic drugs, called monoclonal antibodies, that in preliminary testing appear to reduce symptoms for coronavirus patients. They applied for emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration.
The positive development immediately became entangled in election-year politics, with President Trump repeatedly making false and exaggerated claims about the new therapeutics. He called them a cure, which they’re not. He said he was about to approve them — a premature promise given that the FDA’s career scientists are charged with reviewing the applications.
This has been the 2020 pattern: Politics has thoroughly contaminated the scientific process. The result has been an epidemic of distrust, which further undermines the nation’s already chaotic and ineffective response to the coronavirus.
The White House has repeatedly meddled with decisions by career professionals at the FDA, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other science-based agencies. Many of the nation’s leading scientists, including some of the top doctors in the administration, are deeply disturbed by the collision of politics and science and bemoan its effects on public health.
“I’ve never seen anything that closely resembles this. It’s like a pressure cooker,” Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in an interview.
Trust has been damaged by White House intrusions and the FDA’s own mistakes. Earlier this year, the agency granted emergency authorization to hydroxychloroquine, the malaria drug wrongly touted by Trump as a treatment for covid-19, then reversed course when it became clear the medication could cause dangerous complications. In August, FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn drew sharp criticism for inaccurately describing the benefits of convalescent plasma, statements for which he later apologized.
Millions of Americans have embraced some version of a conspiracy theory that imagines the pandemic as a wildly exaggerated threat, or even an outright hoax, pushed by politically motivated scientists and the mainstream media to undermine the president. This is a form of science denial that leads many people to refuse to wear masks or engage in social distancing.
Scientists, meanwhile, worry that the politicization of the regulatory process could undermine the rollout of a vaccine even if it is approved by career professionals at the FDA. This is shaping up as a communications challenge for the government: Many people will want to know who, exactly, is greenlighting a vaccine.
“If the public health professionals, if Dr. Fauci, if the doctors tell us that we should take it, I’ll be the first in line to take it. Absolutely,” Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), the Democratic nominee for vice president, said in Wednesday’s debate with Vice President Pence. “But if Donald Trump tells us that we should take it, I’m not taking it.”
Moments later Pence said it is “unconscionable” for Harris “to undermine public confidence in a vaccine.” He added, “Stop playing politics with people’s lives.”
The scolding by Pence was remarkable given that Trump has repeatedly framed the vaccine effort in terms of the November election — including just hours before Wednesday’s vice-presidential debate, when he came close to accusing his own government’s scientists of trying to delay a vaccine.
“We’re going to have a great vaccine very, very shortly. I think we should have it before the election, but frankly the politics gets involved. And that’s okay. They want to play their game. It’s going to be right after the election. But we did it,” Trump said in a video taped at the White House and posted on social media.
Trump said it was a blessing that he had fallen sick with covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, and implied that no one would have recognized the potential of the laboratory-brewed antibodies without his insight. But medical experts point out that the president was given a suite of drugs, including a powerful steroid, and it is impossible to know what role the antibodies may have played in his recovery, or even if he is fully recovered.
The president said these antibodies would soon be available to everyone in the country — another falsehood. Regeneron has said it could produce about 300,000 doses by the end of the year. That is roughly how many new cases of the coronavirus are being reported nationally every week.
Two administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters said the White House has pushed Hahn to approve the monoclonal antibodies. The applications are being handled by the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, which is led by career scientists. Hahn could potentially short-circuit the normal review process, but in a keynote address to the Food and Drug Law Institute conference Tuesday he said decisions are made by civil service professionals.
Still, Hahn has to answer to Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, who in turn has to answer to Trump, who is vigorously pushing a false narrative about the imminent end to the pandemic.
“I’m telling you, we have a cure. More than just a therapeutic. We have a cure,” Trump said Friday on Rush Limbaugh’s syndicated radio show.
Scientists are not naive enough to think they can operate in a politics-free zone. But Trump and his allies have continued to deliver messages at odds with the guidance from the administration’s own experts. The result is a government that chronically sends mixed messages, adding to the incoherence of the response to the pandemic.
Fauci, who did not directly criticize President Trump or other administration officials, noted the historically unfortunate timing of the pandemic overlapping with the 2020 election. The vaccine “kind of slipped into the timing of a very politically charged season at a time when there’s extraordinary divisiveness that seems to permeate our society at every level,” he said.
Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said it would be “a tragedy” if the nation turned its back on a safe and effective vaccine, and “we won’t be able to put this behind us even though we have the scientific tools to do that. That is an absolutely terrible outcome for a technologically advanced society.”
On Friday, Collins addressed the potential breakthrough with monoclonal antibodies and lamented that the issue already has a political tinge.
“If you’re looking for a therapeutic success story, this I think is shaping up very well. But now it is overshadowed,” Collins said. “If it does get approved for scientific reasons, everyone will be suspicious that it is because of political manipulation. And that makes me sad. I’m absolutely confident that FDA will not allow that to happen.”
Fauci and Collins have reason to worry: Polls show trust in a potential vaccine has plunged. A Pew Research poll in September found that only 21 percent of respondents said they would definitely get a coronavirus vaccine if it were available immediately, down from 42 percent in May.
Johnna Munsen, a 20-year-old college student who lives in Los Angeles, said in an interview she wants a vaccine for herself and her parents, who are in their 50s. But she said she has been alarmed by Trump’s repeated predictions that a vaccine would be available by the Nov. 3 election, and by his assertions during the presidential debate that his scientists were wrong in saying it would take longer.
“If it gets pushed to coincide with the election, I don’t know that I would trust the safety of it,” Munsen said.
The vaccine approval process “should be based on the highest quality science and discussion, and involve a thoughtful balancing of benefits and risks,” said Aaron Kesselheim, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “But there are substantial concerns it is being hopelessly tarnished by impulsive comments from somebody who is only thinking about his personal political implications.”
To try to counter such concerns, medical experts emphasize the nation’s long-standing, rigorous process of clearing vaccines, starting with randomized clinical trials and including reviews by independent data and safety monitoring boards and a panel of outside advisers to the FDA. They say the system is set up to protect it from political or financial interference. They insist any nefarious effort to push through an unsafe or ineffective vaccine would be blatantly obvious, and would surely fail.
Vaccine makers, which include large pharmaceutical firms and biotechnology companies, have powerful corporate incentives to avoid producing and selling a flawed or dangerous product, medical experts point out.
Still, even those who are expressing confidence in the process worry about public opinion. Mistrust — toward Congress, Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry, the news media — has been endemic in the United States for many years.
More recently, it has been weaponized by Trump as part of his populist appeal and his argument that there is a “deep state” opposing him.
Democrats, meanwhile, have also responded to the crisis in ways that could undermine the FDA, agency backers say. North Carolina Democratic Senate candidate Cal Cunningham said last month he would be hesitant to take a vaccine approved before Election Day, though he later softened his comments.
New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) said recently he would commission an expert panel to review the FDA vaccine decision, something his office characterizes as a way to bolster public confidence. But Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, called the idea of states reviewing FDA decisions “ridiculous.”
Topol on Friday directed his consternation at Trump’s hyping of monoclonal antibodies as a cure for covid-19: “It’s ruined in a way, because he says he’s going to get it out before the election. This was the most promising thing in the hopper, a glowing opportunity. Now, it’s contaminated.”
The nation has long relied on an unseen army of government professionals — scientists, doctors, engineers, technicians, statisticians — to safeguard public safety amid a freewheeling market-based economy. But trust in government expertise has shown itself to be fragile.
An Axios-Ipsos poll in mid-September found more than 40 percent of Americans have either not very much trust in the FDA or none at all to look out for their interests.
The implications of such falling trust “are potentially dire,” wrote seven former FDA commissioners in a recent Post op-ed that called on the Trump administration to stop meddling in the FDA’s sensitive decisions.
Inside the agency, officials realize they have a daunting challenge. They have to persuade the public that, even in a crisis atmosphere in which a vaccine is desperately needed, the procedures supervised by the FDA are sufficiently sturdy that they can withstand the political pressures in an election year.
“The most important thing that I think I can do . . . in the coming months is to help generate trust, regain trust in vaccines,” Peter Marks, the FDA career official who oversees vaccines, said at a virtual meeting held by the advocacy group Friends of Cancer Research recently. “Vaccines have saved public health previously. They will save it again. We just are going to have to believe in them.”
Vaccine development is happening globally. In the United States, four companies have started Phase 3 trials, the final phase, involving 30,000 to 50,000 volunteers each: AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Moderna and Pfizer. AstraZeneca’s trial remains on hold in the United States as regulators try to determine whether a serious side effect experienced by a participant in Britain was caused by the vaccine. Another company, Novavax, has begun a late-stage trial in Britain and is scheduled to start one this month in the United States.
These are randomized trials in which participants don’t know if they’ve been given the vaccine candidate or a placebo. The data are reviewed by independent groups — the data safety monitoring boards — when a certain number of people in the trial get covid-19. If more of the people who became infected come from the placebo arm of the trial, in a statistically significant way, that is a signal the vaccine is working.
The FDA has said a vaccine must be at least 50 percent effective to win approval, although a higher protective effect is greatly desired.
But this process can’t be rushed. For ethical reasons, researchers can’t intentionally expose volunteers to the coronavirus. The participants have to go about their ordinary lives. Researchers monitor the volunteers who received the vaccine candidate to make sure there are no side effects.
If the data safety monitoring board concludes that the vaccine candidate is effective and safe, it will alert the manufacturer, which would then decide whether to seek a standard licensing approval or emergency use authorization from the FDA. Given the urgency of the coronavirus crisis, the FDA is expected to clear the first coronavirus vaccines on an expedited, emergency basis.
But before the agency makes a decision, it will consult with its own panel of outside experts in a public meeting, FDA officials have said.
Such guardrails, and other parts of the regulatory process, make it hard — though not impossible — for the White House to subvert the FDA’s judgment. When Trump officials recently objected to the planned release of an FDA guidance detailing rigorous standards for the vaccine, agency officials made clear they would stick to the criteria and had, in fact, already conveyed them to vaccine makers.
It is hard for the FDA to win widespread public confidence amid the “steroidal level” of today’s political pressure, said Daniel Carpenter, a professor of government at Harvard University and an expert on the FDA.
“You have a deeply polarized electorate, an authoritarian president who wants to use the levers of government to give himself an advantage electorally and a pandemic in the middle of the campaign,” Carpenter said.
Fauci said scientists, such as Collins and himself, and others in the scientific community would be watching the approval process closely.
“If someone tries to mess with that, politically, it will be obvious,” he said. “And then you will hear the shouts go up.”
Oct 11, 2020
COVID-19 Update
There's pretty good evidence that the next wave is beginning.
World
- New Cases: 355,911
- New Deaths: 5,074
USA
- New Cases: 50,876
- New Deaths: 635
Kristin Urquiza called it an honest obituary. Her dad was dead, and she knew whom to blame.
America’s leaders bungled their response to the coronavirus pandemic, she wrote, and they let covid-19 kill her father.
The obituary — part memorial, part protest — was shared, retweeted and passed from one mourning family to the next.
Angela Kender saw it just before bed, and right then made a plan to confront her state’s lawmakers with pictures of local virus victims, including her mother. An old friend sent it to Fiana Tulip. She was furious about her mom’s death; maybe she could channel her rage like Urquiza had. And Rosemary Rangel Gutierrez’s sisters told her about the obituary after their father died. She sounds like you, they said.
Now, months after they first met online, their fury has intensified as an infected President Trump downplays the virus that devastated their families.
“This man is the most dangerous person on the planet,” Urquiza said this week after Trump told Americans on video not to be afraid of covid-19. “I’m counting down the minutes until his referendum comes on November 3rd and we can end this nightmare and protect ourselves and our families.”
The loose support group Urquiza formed has tightened into organized activism. They have pushed politicians, especially Republicans, to enact more serious public health measures. This week, across the country, they have led vigils, memorials and funeral processions to grieve the more than 213,000 lives lost in the United States. The national week of mourning is likely the largest collective recognition of the country’s coronavirus toll.
Powerful grass-roots groups often have started this way, even before the days of organizing through social media. They began with personal anguish, with individuals grieving their dead alone, trying to transform their anger into action, policy or change. It’s the story of Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, of the Sandy Hook Promise and Never Again MSD, of Black Lives Matter and Mothers of the Movement.
Urquiza named her group Marked by Covid. She founded it in the days after her father died, with some of his last words to her reverberating. He said he felt betrayed by Arizona’s governor and Trump, politicians he once supported. Urquiza, 39 and a recent graduate of a master’s program in public policy, decided then she would be the voice of a constituency that grows larger by the day: Americans who have lost loved ones to the pandemic and who are fed up with their elected officials.
“I hope that my small actions can start a movement,” she said in July, less than two weeks after her dad died.
It’s too early to know how influential the group, or others like it, will become. Some of Urquiza’s fellow organizers joined her as a way to process loss, and it’s unclear how Marked by Covid will define itself when the pandemic ends. But part of Urquiza’s ambitious vision is to advocate for policies that address the racial and economic inequalities exacerbated by the virus.
Urquiza and Marked by Covid have attracted national attention and more than 50,000 followers across their social media accounts. More than 1,000 people have donated $30,000 to the group, Urquiza said, and they’re using the money to place more honest obituaries online and in newspapers.
The Joe Biden campaign has taken notice. Urquiza spoke at the Democratic National Convention in August, appears in anti-Trump ads and sat in the front row at the first presidential debate, as Biden’s guest. She and her group have advocated for mask mandates and for a nationwide, data-driven response to the pandemic.
The network is made up of people still grieving as they organize get-out-the-vote campaigns, hold demonstrations and call out policy decisions in withering obituaries and editorials.
“We’re there,” she said in August. “It’s a movement.”
Less visible is how she and her new comrades got to this point, the moments of private agony that fuel them.
‘A storm full of lightning and thunder’
It was mid-May, mid-pandemic and Arizona was reporting more new cases of the coronavirus every day. Urquiza was pleading with her father.
Yes, she said, exasperated on the phone, Gov. Doug Ducey had just let his stay-at-home order expire, but, no, that didn’t mean it was suddenly safe to go out.
But Mark Anthony Urquiza, “Black Jack” to friends and family, had a ready reply: If it’s not safe, then why is the governor telling us it’s okay to go shopping, to go out to eat?
Her father trusted his state’s Republican leader, and he trusted Trump, too; he had voted for them both.
A gregarious man and karaoke enthusiast, he was eager to join his friends at a bar near his home in Phoenix. Around the same time, Ducey gave an interview to a local radio station.
“I want to encourage people to get out and about, to take a loved one to dinner, to go retail shopping,” Ducey said. “If you don’t have an underlying health condition, it’s safe out there.”
Two weeks later, the coughing started. On June 16, Urquiza’s father went to the hospital and tested positive. Over the next 10 days, he reassured his daughter that he’d be fine, sending her photos of his hospital food and GIFs of a person jogging.
“This will be me,” the onetime high school track star wrote. “I’m going to get out of this.”
Then the messages stopped. In intensive care, he was put on a ventilator. Four days later, Mark Urquiza died. He was 65.
The Mexican American son of migrant farmworkers, Mark Urquiza was born and raised in Arizona and worked in the fields as a kid. He was a fierce patriot, his daughter said, who admired Trump for his business acumen and his fiscal policies. During the pandemic, when Urquiza’s manufacturing job was deemed essential, he was proud to go to work and support the stumbling economy.
As Urquiza watched him struggle against the virus on video chat, from her house in San Francisco more than 600 miles away, she felt her rage building. She thought of Arizona’s expired stay-at-home order and the lack of a mask mandate. She remembered one of the last texts her dad sent her: “I feel sideswiped,” he wrote about his support of Trump and Ducey.
“My dad thought he was doing the right thing and he was shortly thereafter in the hospital fighting for his life,” Urquiza said. “His government failed him and is failing us.”
The grief came at her in powerful waves. When they began to recede, her fury remained.
“I feel like a storm full of lightning and thunder that is ready to come pouring down on the Arizona desert,” she said.
Less than two months later, Urquiza was at the Democratic convention, delivering a scathing address.
“Thank you Kristin Urquiza for that incredible speech tonight,” commented one member of a Facebook group for bereaved loved ones. Another wrote: “She spoke for so many of us!”
‘See what is being lost’
Following along from St. Louis, Kender saw Urquiza amplify a message she had tried to spread in Missouri: People are dying, and our leaders aren’t doing enough.
Kender, whose mother died of the virus in June, traveled to the statehouse in August to meet the lawmakers gathering for a special session. They weren’t there to talk about the pandemic, or the nearly 1,500 Missourians it had by then killed, but Kender wanted to make sure they couldn’t ignore it.
Standing inthe Jefferson City capitol, Kender unfurled a banner covered in the faces of state residents whose deaths she said were preventable. Among them: Gaye Griffin-Snyder, Kender’s mom, who was infected during an outbreak at her nursing home.
“Covid families have had enough,” she said then, addressing the Republican-dominated legislature and Gov. Mike Parson, who has refused to adopt a statewide mask mandate. “I want you to see what is being lost,” Kender, 35, said. ”These are not just numbers, these are humans of all ages, of all levels of health. See these faces, recognize this could be your face and do something to protect us.”
Griffin-Snyder grew up in a deeply conservative home but joined the civil rights movement in the 1960s. She later became a professional counselor.
Multiple sclerosis forced her into a nursing home when she was just 69. Two years later, after the coronavirus invaded, Kender found herself channeling her mother’s willingness to speak out.
“This is not who I am," Kender said, “but this is who I am becoming.”
She plans to advocate for people who survived covid-19 but who may suffer its effects for the rest of their lives, and for the legions of health-care workers saddled with the trauma of serving on the pandemic’s front lines.
Since Griffin-Snyder died June 6, new coronavirus cases in Missouri have soared from about 200 a day then to more than 1,300 in recent weeks. Kender has watched the numbers rise, waiting for Parson to require masks. Even after contracting the virus himself in September, Parson did not require masks.
“I’m going to continue speaking,” she said. "I’m going to continue doing everything I can to bring attention to the horrible choices being made.”
‘Like she would have done’
Tulip’s mother died in Dallas on the Fourth of July, one of her family’s favorite holidays. That day, with fireworks crackling around her house in Brooklyn, Tulip began thinking of freedom.
Freedom was the right that anti-mask activists claimed they were exercising when they refused to cover their faces. But it was this idea of freedom, Tulip thought, that accelerated the spread of the coronavirus, that propelled it into the rehab clinic where Isabelle Papadimitriou was a respiratory therapist, that led to it sickening and killing her.
“I got angry so fast,” Tulip said. "I couldn't cry anymore. I started writing.”
She took to Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, scouring her timelines for people posting memes about the ineffectiveness of masks or conspiracy theories about the country’s death toll.
“Your decision killed my mother,” she wrote to one man, who had said that leaders pushing for social distancing measures “want this nation to be sheep” and he would “choose to die free.”
“Enjoy your freedom,” Tulip replied.
It felt, she said, like a frenetic crusade.
“I think I was trying to save my mom because I couldn’t accept that she was gone,” Tulip said. “I had to reconcile that I wasn’t saving my mom; I was saving others — like she would have done.”
Once a bank teller, Papadimitriou, 64, switched careers in her 30s because she wanted to help people breathe. She was healthy and working when she was infected, but in a matter of days, she was treating herself at home and struggling for air. She died a week after she recognized her symptoms.
When a friend sent Tulip the obituary that Urquiza had written, she saw a way to focus her energy. She wanted to address Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who didn’t mandate face coverings until July 2 and whose administration she blamed for the growing number of virus deaths.
The two women started messaging on Facebook.
“The way you’ve been sharing your dad’s story is beautiful,” Tulip wrote. “Only hope I can do the same for my mom.”
“I can’t tell you how much it means to me to know that what I’m doing is helping you,” Urquiza replied. “Sending energy your way. We are not alone. And we will not allow them to be numbers.”
They agreed to work together, and Tulip soon published her own “honest obituary” that criticized the “carelessness of politicians who undervalue healthcare workers.”
Tulip, 40, and her husband were both laid off during the pandemic, and she spends her days caring for her young daughter, working with Marked by Covid and pushing for a memorial to virus victims in Brooklyn. She recently started working with Beat Abbott, a group raising money for the governor’s eventual challenger in 2022, and she has taken her activism to TikTok, where one video has been viewed more than 200,000 times.
“I hate that my mom’s death is political," Tulip said. "But it is.”
‘A voice that I haven’t had before’
Juan Carlos Rangel and his wife, Rosa, went to one of Brownsville’s free coronavirus testing sites in June. Their daughter Rosemary Rangel Gutierrez told them they might have to wait in line, so they showed up before dawn. They knew they needed a test; another daughter at home had tested positive.
But they were turned away. Too many people, not enough tests.
Looking back at that moment, Gutierrez, who lives four hours north in San Antonio, now sees an ominous sign of what was to come for Brownsville and the surrounding Rio Grande Valley.
There were too many sick people, not enough resources, and running through it all, Gutierrez believed, was the state government’s neglect of a community that is overwhelmingly Hispanic.
“There’s no way he can deny knowing the health demographics of the valley,” Gutierrez said of Abbott, who is a Republican. “It seems like neglect to not have enough testing, to not have enough hospital staff.”
By the time Gutierrez’s parents tested positive, her sister’s condition had deteriorated. She passed out at home, gasping for air. Rangel rushed her to the hospital. Three days later, he was hospitalized, too.
The facility was overwhelmed. Gutierrez’s family was in the middle of a burgeoning national virus hot spot. Gutierrez’s sister was released on July 1, but Rangel was still struggling. By Gutierrez’s 33rd birthday a week later, Rangel couldn’t get enough air to sing “Happy Birthday” with his daughter. Instead, she taught him sign language.
“I love you,” he signed to her on video chat.
Two days later, his heart stopped as doctors tried to intubate him. On July 12, his kidneys began to fail. Gutierrez said goodbye to her father on WhatsApp. Two hours later, he died. Rangel was 60 years old.
Rangel loved to fish, metal detect, build and tinker. He taught Gutierrez to weld and inspired her to become a mechanical engineer. He was one of more than 2,500 Texans to die before Abbott issued a mask mandate.
“I saw that as he was willing to sacrifice 2,500 people before taking action,” Gutierrez said.
When sisters pointed out what Urquiza was doing, the two women connected. Urquiza introduced her to Tulip, and the three felt an immediate kinship.
“It’s a little odd,” Gutierrez said. “You meet people because you lost someone, and you’re trying to make a difference in the world. At the same time, we’re all grieving and we have anxieties about it, but we’re pushing through, and we won’t be silenced.”
Gutierrez wrote Marked by Covid’s third honest obituary, criticizing the president and the Texas governor.
“Trump and Abbott lose no sleep while people of color, unable to breathe, are suffocated by the virus each and every day,” Gutierrez wrote.
The virus has killed more than 16,000 people in Texas, the third highest total in the country. Hispanics account for 55 percent of those fatalities but make up 40 percent of the state’s population — a disparity that persists nationwide.
“I care about the people of the valley. I care about the Hispanic community. And as long as we’re disproportionately affected, I need to be raising my voice,” Gutierrez said. “The honest obituary has given me a voice that I haven’t had before.”
She said she intends to be a watchdog, tracking the allocation of government pandemic relief resources to the Rio Grande Valley.
“This is not a partisan issue," Gutierrez said. "This is a human issue.”
‘A seat at the table’
Urquiza and her partner, Christine Keeves, are still shaping the future of Marked by Covid. They’re looking ahead, to a time when response becomes recovery, and they want to ensure that the people the pandemic has most affected play a role in shaping those policies.
“I want us to have a seat at the table,” Urquiza said.
She wants her group to represent families of the fallen, front-line workers and those who survived the disease but may never fully recover. The country needs to take care of them, she said, and Marked by Covid will help ensure that happens, just as activists drove Congress to finance the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund.
But in the short term, Urquiza said she’ll continue working with people like Kender, Tulip and Gutierrez. She recently volunteered to be a surrogate for the Biden campaign and has partnered with a liberal health-care advocacy group in the lead-up to the election.
Then, after Nov. 3, she’ll go home. She’ll spend the holidays in Arizona with her mother, doing all the stuff she’s put on hold: sort through her dad’s things, reminisce, laugh, cry and grieve.
There hasn’t been much time for any of that, and there haven’t been many places Urquiza can go to escape the pandemic and her packed schedule. But recently, she walked from the home she shares with Keeves through San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park until it opened onto the AIDS Memorial Grove. Cairns and inscriptions, ferns and dogwoods remember those lost in that last great public health disaster.
She lingered, watching other visitors come and go.
Some day, she thought, there’ll be a place like this for her.
"Conservatives" are conditioning us to accept a role of subservience. They're running this shitty little game on us because their project is all about tearing down our tradition of democratic self government, and replacing it with plutocracy.
The GOP has to be swept from power - denied any further access to it - and if necessary, literally physically beaten down until there's nothing left but a greasy spot on the rug.
Oct 10, 2020
A Video
America still has friends - and they want us to get this fuckin' thing done.
Boris Hiestand (@BorisHiestand):
Boris Hiestand (@BorisHiestand):
Thank you to everyone out there helping us keep the faith - whether it's by holding our hands as we fret - or our heads as we puke - or by poking us with a stick to make sure we stay awake and moving.
We're workin' on it, guys. I promise.
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