Apr 4, 2021
Today's Today
Christians wish to remind you that studying, adhering to, observing and/or participating in godless pagan rituals is a sin, and that they want you to stop persecuting them as they celebrate the reanimation of a Jewish zombie on this, the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Vernal Equinox. Thank you.
Apr 3, 2021
Fitting In
We are not just raw materials or malfunctioning pieces that have to be bent and shaped in order to smash-fit us into the machinery of civilization.
like Mom always said:
conform and be dull
COVID-19 Update
World
USA
Vaccination Scorecard
As coronavirus infections and vaccinations surge, hope collides with dread
When Laura Forman arrived at work a few weeks ago, something was missing. The refrigerated truck for bodies that had overflowed Kent Hospital’s morgue during the covid-19 surge was gone.
“Coming up to the hospital and seeing that space where it had been, I cried,” said Forman, the physician who heads the Warwick, R.I., hospital’s emergency department. “It was the most powerful symbol of hope.”
But this week, hope gave way, yet again, to concern. The number of coronavirus infections is rising again — in Rhode Island and across the nation. It is clouding the success of the U.S. vaccination program and the welcome announcement Friday that fully vaccinated people can travel with little risk to themselves. . .
“We’ve been watching the numbers really carefully, and the difference over the last week has been palpable for us,” Forman said. “It’s worry at this point. It’s worry about our community. It’s worry about our families, because most of us have unvaccinated kids and family at home.”
The virus that has kept an entire planet toggling between hope and dread for the past 14 months is having one last go at the United States. The spread of highly contagious new variants of the virus, coupled with prematurely relaxed safety precautions in some places, has set off new alarms, all the way up to President Biden.
“You look out the front window and it’s raining,” said Nirav Shah, director of Maine’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, “but from the back window, it’s sunny. And your house is literally on the cusp of the storm and you don’t know which way it’s going to go — stormy, or is it going to be sunny? That’s sort of where we are in covid.”
The virus that has cleaved us into categories of vulnerability has found one more division in society — the vaccinated vs. the unvaccinated. More than 100 million Americans are enjoying the relative security that comes with at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine. The rest are still waiting.
Three days after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) lifted his state’s mask mandate and restaurant occupancy limits in early March, Houston waitress Tracy McKenna said she served a customer who complained about her soda and food tasting odd. Problems with taste and smell are telltale signs of covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.
Four days later, McKenna, who is not vaccinated, had trouble breathing and tested positive for the coronavirus. The symptoms advanced to a severe cough and fatigue. McKenna’s partner and toddler also contracted the virus.
“What little protections we had were out the window,” McKenna, 41, said in an interview conducted over Twitter because of her symptoms. “I was/am incredibly frustrated, because I was already putting myself at risk dealing with people who couldn’t care less about me, and now there would be a lot more of them.”
In Wellington, Fla., nurse and lactation consultant Deborah Montgomery has no such frustration. She was fully vaccinated in early February.
“I kind of felt a little guilty that I was able to get it so easily because I’m a health-care worker,” said Montgomery, who is also a union delegate at her hospital, Palms West, in Loxahatchee, Fla. “I have 100 percent relief. Knowing that I’m not going to transmit this to any of my little, itty-bitty patients that I take care of, or that I’m going to take it from one room to another room. I don’t’ worry about taking it home to my family.”
On Friday the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it had concluded that people who are two weeks beyond their final shot of vaccine can travel with little risk of covid-19 infection. But because of the rising case load, the health agency said it still is not recommending that people do so.
It was inevitable that some people would receive vaccines ahead of others, even with the shots now being distributed at a rate of about 2.9 million per day. A panel of experts, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, recommended the priorities adopted by the federal government, pushing health-care workers and vulnerable nursing home residents and staff members to the front of the line.
But it was not a given that, with the end so tantalizingly near, the country would face the possibility of another major surge in infections. That is the result of the growth of highly transmissible variants of the virus, including one first detected in Britain that is now responsible for 26 percent of U.S. infections, along with some governors’ decisions to throw open places where people can gather indoors and rescind mask requirements. Those moves came despite numerous pleas from federal officials that it was too early.
“This is a pivotal moment for our country,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said at Friday’s White House coronavirus briefing. “As I said before, we are taking unprecedented actions to vaccinate the public as quickly as possible, and millions are being vaccinated each and every day. We are better equipped than ever before to take on this serious challenge, but we must remain vigilant.”
As that progress occurs, infections and hospitalizations are increasing. The seven-day rolling average of cases, considered the most reliable barometer of infections, reached 66,009 on Thursday, according to reports from state health departments analyzed by The Washington Post.
On Friday, Walensky said the seven-day average of new hospital admissions in the United States was nearly 4,950 per day.
Case counts are rising sharply in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Minnesota, West Virginia and elsewhere. In Rhode Island, where Forman is preparing for another spike, the rate of positive tests ticked up from 2 percent last week to 2.4 percent this week, according to state data. That is still well below the crisis level the state reached in December, but the numbers are heading the wrong way.
Other states, including California, Texas, Georgia, Arkansas and Arizona, are experiencing declines in case counts, some of them substantial.
Almost nowhere is the crisis worse than in Michigan, which has seen its seven-day average rise from 1,030 on Feb. 21 to 5,663 on March 31. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) recently asked the Biden administration to surge vaccine doses to the hard-hit state and other hot spots. One local official said the vaccination effort is lacking in intensity.
“This is the worst emergency crisis that we’ve been in in our lifetime,” said Pamela Pugh, who was the chief public health officer for the city of Flint during the height of the city’s water crisis and is a longtime resident of Saginaw. “They say that we’re in a race for time, [but] we can’t say that, we can’t know that and then distribute the vaccine in the way that we have.”
Likewise, Austin Mayor Steve Adler, a Democrat who has been in a legal brawl with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) to preserve his city’s mask mandate, said Abbott, the governor, is confusing the public.
“Communication and messaging is really important, and that’s why I was real frustrated when the governor said ‘We have to remove our mask mandate, but I still urge everyone to wear masks,’ ” Adler said. “In my mind, that’s a contradictory message to people. They don’t know what to believe at that point.”
A spokeswoman for Abbott, Renae Eze, said in a statement, “People have ‘learned and mastered’ how to protect themselves and loved ones from coronavirus and ‘do not need the government to tell them how to do so.’ ”
“If they refuse to bless any normal behavior, people are either going to make it up for themselves, or go to the weird side,” she said, referring to conspiracy theories. “For CDC to have some authority, they should be the ones who give everyone a Plan B.”
“One way to frame that message is to say, ‘We wish everybody would do x y z, but since people, even our own friends, are not going to go along with that, we have to have ways to do that as safely as possible,’ ” Lanard said.
‘Am I making the right choice?’ (a family struggles with conflicting information)
Glen Nowak, director of the Center for Health and Risk Communication at the University of Georgia and a former media relations director at the CDC, said that in public health, one foot is always on the gas pedal and the other on the brake.
“There’s a lot of caution about what to say, and that’s probably driven by fear,” Nowak said. “If you’re not cautious, and something bad happens, people will hold you responsible for that. If I warn you and something doesn’t happen, that’s not as bad as if I don’t warn you and something bad does happen.”
Walensky acknowledged the difficulties Friday.
“Providing guidance in the midst of a changing pandemic and its changing science is complex,” she said.
In Rhode Island, Forman said she will watch closely and hope for vaccinations to outrun the virus. At this point, she believes, no one can be blamed for the way they respond to a grueling, once-in-a-century crisis.
“A year into this, we’ve spent so much time, all of us, trying to be thoughtful and [respect] the need to balance safety with the need for connection and the need for sanity. So I think one of the things I’ve learned for myself is I can’t judge anyone else for the decisions they are making.”
New Cases: 638,004 (⬆︎ .49%)
New Deaths: 10,426 (⬆︎ .37%)
USA
New Cases: 70,024 (⬆︎ .22%)
New Deaths: 1,001 (⬆︎ .18%)
Vaccination Scorecard
Total Vaccinations: 101.8 million (⬆︎ 2.21%) 👀 Woo-Hoo!
Total Eligible Population: 38.1%
Total Population: 30.7%
The story of these last 15 months is an up-n-down Ride-the-Vomit-Comet kinda thing.
And we ain't done yet.
WaPo: (pay wall)
As coronavirus infections and vaccinations surge, hope collides with dread
When Laura Forman arrived at work a few weeks ago, something was missing. The refrigerated truck for bodies that had overflowed Kent Hospital’s morgue during the covid-19 surge was gone.
“Coming up to the hospital and seeing that space where it had been, I cried,” said Forman, the physician who heads the Warwick, R.I., hospital’s emergency department. “It was the most powerful symbol of hope.”
But this week, hope gave way, yet again, to concern. The number of coronavirus infections is rising again — in Rhode Island and across the nation. It is clouding the success of the U.S. vaccination program and the welcome announcement Friday that fully vaccinated people can travel with little risk to themselves. . .
“We’ve been watching the numbers really carefully, and the difference over the last week has been palpable for us,” Forman said. “It’s worry at this point. It’s worry about our community. It’s worry about our families, because most of us have unvaccinated kids and family at home.”
The virus that has kept an entire planet toggling between hope and dread for the past 14 months is having one last go at the United States. The spread of highly contagious new variants of the virus, coupled with prematurely relaxed safety precautions in some places, has set off new alarms, all the way up to President Biden.
“You look out the front window and it’s raining,” said Nirav Shah, director of Maine’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, “but from the back window, it’s sunny. And your house is literally on the cusp of the storm and you don’t know which way it’s going to go — stormy, or is it going to be sunny? That’s sort of where we are in covid.”
The virus that has cleaved us into categories of vulnerability has found one more division in society — the vaccinated vs. the unvaccinated. More than 100 million Americans are enjoying the relative security that comes with at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine. The rest are still waiting.
Three days after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) lifted his state’s mask mandate and restaurant occupancy limits in early March, Houston waitress Tracy McKenna said she served a customer who complained about her soda and food tasting odd. Problems with taste and smell are telltale signs of covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.
Four days later, McKenna, who is not vaccinated, had trouble breathing and tested positive for the coronavirus. The symptoms advanced to a severe cough and fatigue. McKenna’s partner and toddler also contracted the virus.
“What little protections we had were out the window,” McKenna, 41, said in an interview conducted over Twitter because of her symptoms. “I was/am incredibly frustrated, because I was already putting myself at risk dealing with people who couldn’t care less about me, and now there would be a lot more of them.”
In Wellington, Fla., nurse and lactation consultant Deborah Montgomery has no such frustration. She was fully vaccinated in early February.
“I kind of felt a little guilty that I was able to get it so easily because I’m a health-care worker,” said Montgomery, who is also a union delegate at her hospital, Palms West, in Loxahatchee, Fla. “I have 100 percent relief. Knowing that I’m not going to transmit this to any of my little, itty-bitty patients that I take care of, or that I’m going to take it from one room to another room. I don’t’ worry about taking it home to my family.”
On Friday the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it had concluded that people who are two weeks beyond their final shot of vaccine can travel with little risk of covid-19 infection. But because of the rising case load, the health agency said it still is not recommending that people do so.
It was inevitable that some people would receive vaccines ahead of others, even with the shots now being distributed at a rate of about 2.9 million per day. A panel of experts, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, recommended the priorities adopted by the federal government, pushing health-care workers and vulnerable nursing home residents and staff members to the front of the line.
But it was not a given that, with the end so tantalizingly near, the country would face the possibility of another major surge in infections. That is the result of the growth of highly transmissible variants of the virus, including one first detected in Britain that is now responsible for 26 percent of U.S. infections, along with some governors’ decisions to throw open places where people can gather indoors and rescind mask requirements. Those moves came despite numerous pleas from federal officials that it was too early.
“This is a pivotal moment for our country,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said at Friday’s White House coronavirus briefing. “As I said before, we are taking unprecedented actions to vaccinate the public as quickly as possible, and millions are being vaccinated each and every day. We are better equipped than ever before to take on this serious challenge, but we must remain vigilant.”
As that progress occurs, infections and hospitalizations are increasing. The seven-day rolling average of cases, considered the most reliable barometer of infections, reached 66,009 on Thursday, according to reports from state health departments analyzed by The Washington Post.
On Friday, Walensky said the seven-day average of new hospital admissions in the United States was nearly 4,950 per day.
Case counts are rising sharply in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Minnesota, West Virginia and elsewhere. In Rhode Island, where Forman is preparing for another spike, the rate of positive tests ticked up from 2 percent last week to 2.4 percent this week, according to state data. That is still well below the crisis level the state reached in December, but the numbers are heading the wrong way.
Other states, including California, Texas, Georgia, Arkansas and Arizona, are experiencing declines in case counts, some of them substantial.
Almost nowhere is the crisis worse than in Michigan, which has seen its seven-day average rise from 1,030 on Feb. 21 to 5,663 on March 31. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) recently asked the Biden administration to surge vaccine doses to the hard-hit state and other hot spots. One local official said the vaccination effort is lacking in intensity.
“This is the worst emergency crisis that we’ve been in in our lifetime,” said Pamela Pugh, who was the chief public health officer for the city of Flint during the height of the city’s water crisis and is a longtime resident of Saginaw. “They say that we’re in a race for time, [but] we can’t say that, we can’t know that and then distribute the vaccine in the way that we have.”
Likewise, Austin Mayor Steve Adler, a Democrat who has been in a legal brawl with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) to preserve his city’s mask mandate, said Abbott, the governor, is confusing the public.
“Communication and messaging is really important, and that’s why I was real frustrated when the governor said ‘We have to remove our mask mandate, but I still urge everyone to wear masks,’ ” Adler said. “In my mind, that’s a contradictory message to people. They don’t know what to believe at that point.”
A spokeswoman for Abbott, Renae Eze, said in a statement, “People have ‘learned and mastered’ how to protect themselves and loved ones from coronavirus and ‘do not need the government to tell them how to do so.’ ”
Uhh - 'scuse me, ma'am, but - uhh - yeah - not so much
Jody Lanard, a physician who worked for nearly two decades as a pandemic communications adviser to the World Health Organization, said public health authorities need to acknowledge that they are sending mixed messages, some good and some bad.
“If they refuse to bless any normal behavior, people are either going to make it up for themselves, or go to the weird side,” she said, referring to conspiracy theories. “For CDC to have some authority, they should be the ones who give everyone a Plan B.”
“One way to frame that message is to say, ‘We wish everybody would do x y z, but since people, even our own friends, are not going to go along with that, we have to have ways to do that as safely as possible,’ ” Lanard said.
‘Am I making the right choice?’ (a family struggles with conflicting information)
Glen Nowak, director of the Center for Health and Risk Communication at the University of Georgia and a former media relations director at the CDC, said that in public health, one foot is always on the gas pedal and the other on the brake.
“There’s a lot of caution about what to say, and that’s probably driven by fear,” Nowak said. “If you’re not cautious, and something bad happens, people will hold you responsible for that. If I warn you and something doesn’t happen, that’s not as bad as if I don’t warn you and something bad does happen.”
Walensky acknowledged the difficulties Friday.
“Providing guidance in the midst of a changing pandemic and its changing science is complex,” she said.
In Rhode Island, Forman said she will watch closely and hope for vaccinations to outrun the virus. At this point, she believes, no one can be blamed for the way they respond to a grueling, once-in-a-century crisis.
“A year into this, we’ve spent so much time, all of us, trying to be thoughtful and [respect] the need to balance safety with the need for connection and the need for sanity. So I think one of the things I’ve learned for myself is I can’t judge anyone else for the decisions they are making.”
Apr 2, 2021
Today's Message
We have to develop a relationship with ourselves as we grow up, but religion relies on self-infantilization - on instigating and reinforcing the deliberate insistence that we must refuse to be the adult in that relationship.
This is the first time I've ever heard a preacher articulate that.
The function of the Christ is not to rescue the sinners, but to empower you, and to call you to be more deeply and fully human than you've ever realized there was the potential within you to be.
Maybe salvation needs to be conveyed in terms of enhancing your humanity rather than rescuing you from it.
Today's Deep Thought
Let's burn Wall Street to the ground and see if anybody outside the top 1/2 % even notices a change.
C'mon, guys - you're always saying what a good thing disruption can be -
how 'bout we try a little "creative destruction"?
In Their Own Words
You'll never convince me with that tired stale bullshit about "honor and tradition" and blah blah blah.
Alexander Stephens
Vice President of the Confederate States of America
"We recognize the fact of the inferiority stamped upon that race of men by the Creator, and from the cradle to the grave, our Government, as a civil institution, marks that inferiority."
"It would grant me much relief to learn your sons were engaged matrimonially to other white men if I was previously faced with the spectre of those same sons wedding negro women, slave or free, and siring negro sons that could presume to claim inheritance of your namesakes and property, or worse, equality with your purer grandchildren."
Jefferson Davis
President of the Confederate States of America
"The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence."
Gen. Robert E. Lee
Army of Northern Virginia, CSA
"I’ve never heard of any other cause than slavery”
Col. John S. Mosby
43rd Battalion (Mosby's Rangers), Virginia Cavalry, CSA
"This fight is against slavery; if we lose it, you will be made free."
Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest
3rd Tennessee Cavalry, CSA
(first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan)
COVID-19 Update
World
USA
Vaccination Scorecard
A decline in testing may be masking the spread of the virus in some U.S. states
Declines in coronavirus testing in many states in the South and the Great Plains are making it harder to know just how widely the virus may be spreading in those states, even as restrictions are lifted and residents ease back into daily life, experts say.
States in both regions are reporting few new cases relative to their population, compared with harder-hit states like Michigan or New York. But they are also testing far fewer people.
Kansas, for example, is now testing about 60 people a day for every 100,000 in population, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University, and Alabama only a bit more. The picture is similar in Iowa, Mississippi and elsewhere.
By contrast, New York is averaging 1,200 tests a day per 100,000, and Rhode Island 1,677 per 100,000.
Testing has been falling in Kansas since Jan. 1, even though hospitalizations were at their highest level of the pandemic then, according to Tami Gurley, co-chair of the virus task force at the University of Kansas Medical Center. The state is now doing fewer tests relative to its population than any state except Idaho.
The tests they are doing in these low-rate states are finding virus.
Twelve percent of Kansas’ coronavirus tests are coming back positive. Alabama’s positivity rate is 12.8 percent. The rate in Idaho is 27.3 percent, the highest in the country. In New York, it’s just 3.5 percent.
So in the states that are doing relatively little testing, it’s possible that their daily case counts are low in part because asymptomatic or mild-symptom cases are going undetected.
Ms. Gurley says she is closely following hospitalizations, as a better indicator of the spread of the virus than new-case reports.
“We think that people are more focused on getting vaccines than getting tested,” she said. “It certainly makes it harder to figure out where we are going. We feel like we are at the point of another uptick in cases.”
Many states in the South and Midwest have relaxed their restrictions, including mask mandates, even though the national data signals that another surge in cases may be coming, according to Edward Trapido, an epidemiologist and associate dean for research at the Louisiana State University School of Public Health.
And many states are shifting resources away from testing to bolster vaccination efforts and meet President Biden’s goal of making all adult Americans eligible for a shot by May 1.
As a result, Dr. Trapido said, in many places these days, only the sickest patients are seeking out a coronavirus test.
“As vaccines have become widespread, people are becoming comfortable about not being tested,” he said. “There is a natural experiment going on. It’s a battle between getting people vaccinated and keeping the percent positive low. When I see a slight change in the curve upward, I get alarmed.”
Ms. Gurley said the shift in emphasis away from testing and toward vaccination may stem in part from widespread public fatigue with pandemic precautions and the political imperative in many states to reopen swiftly.
If all you want to do is prevent deaths from the virus, that may make sense, she said, but “if your end goal is to prevent spread, then we need more testing.”
Opinion: Here’s why Michigan’s covid spike is so scary
Rising coronavirus infection rates nationwide prompted Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to confess on Monday to a sense of “impending doom.” The state most responsible for such alarms right now might be Michigan. The CDC on Tuesday said Michigan led all states in new cases per 100,000 in the previous week. And hospitalizations had surged 53 percent, with 2,144 adults hospitalized, compared with a week earlier.
Cases are multiplying faster than they were last fall, when Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) instituted a “pause to save lives,” with measures that included stopping in-person high school classes and banning indoor dining. That intervention prevented more than 100,000 covid cases, a University of Michigan study estimated. No similar measures have been launched in the Wolverine State this time, but it isn’t too late for the governor, with the help of Michiganders, to rein in the rapidly increasing threat.
Is there something about Michigan this is prompting the spike in infections? No, it’s the same dynamics happening elsewhere. They just seem to be happening in Michigan first. Restaurants and bars are pushing their permitted 50 percent maximum capacity (capped at 300 patrons). Much of the clientele in those restaurants appears to young people — and young people are increasingly among the hospitalized in Michigan. From March 5 to March 27, more than half of all covid cases in Michigan were people under age 39. Anecdotally, I can report that people here have lately become much more casual about wearing masks.
It feels as though we haven’t learned the lessons of 2020. Or that the sense of coronavirus vaccines coming to the rescue has made us forget those lessons.
This time around, there are coronavirus variants involved. In mid-January, Michigan recorded its first case of B.1.1.7., the so-called U.K. variant. Although Michigan has had the highest per capita case rate of the variant for the past month, it has been observed in every state in the country except Oklahoma, its share of reported cases rising 7.5 percent daily. The proportion of U.S. coronavirus cases caused by this variant could thus double in just over a week.
Despite official optimism about vaccination programs nationwide, the country is still nowhere near the 70 to 90 percent inoculation rate needed to achieve the “herd immunity” needed to kill off the pandemic. Full vaccine coverage in Michigan is about 16.4 percent — similar to the national average. And there’s little room for error.
Vaccine hesitancy in Michigan is higher than the national average, according to a U.S. Bureau Census survey last month: Seventeen percent of Americans 18 and older say they “probably” or “definitely” won’t get vaccinated, compared with 25 percent of Michiganders. Vaccine hesitancy in Michigan is more common among people age 40 to 54, as well as Black residents, according to the survey.
Worse, inequity has marked the state’s vaccination program. Whether as a result of insufficient supplies, inadequate outreach or vaccine hesitancy — or a combination of all three — vaccination among Michigan’s Black residents is lagging badly. The Atlantic noted last month that first doses had been administered to 61 percent of Michiganders age 65 to 74, and 62 percent of those 75 and older, but just 28 percent of Black residents 65 and older had received at least one shot. The communities hit hardest by the pandemic starting last spring are yet again more vulnerable to this surge.
Michigan has retained its mask mandate, but in other ways the state has aggressively reopened since the beginning of the year. Gyms reopened on Jan. 16 (the day the first B.1.1.7 case was discovered). Eat-in dining reopened on a limited basis on Feb. 1. High school sports — connected to several outbreaks across the state — have been allowed to continue.
Whitmer faced dangerous threats last spring for her forceful measures to combat the pandemic last year. With coronavirus infections increasing in Michigan and many other states, she and other governors urgently need to consider putting the brakes on reopening. Guidelines should be established that firmly tie activities allowed — traveling, going to the gym, eating in a restaurant — to specific vaccination rates. That would create the kind of benchmarks that both explain what the “right thing” is and incentivize public officials and the public to make it happen.
If there is good news about the current outbreak, it is a truly silver lining: Older Michiganders, the most vulnerable population throughout the pandemic, are experiencing far lower rates of hospitalizations. That has happened because of the extraordinary push to vaccinate them first. Vaccines by the tens of millions will be distributed in the coming weeks. We just have to hold on — and not abandon measures and behaviors that kept people safe until now, in Michigan and all across the country.
New Cases: 701,061 (⬆︎ .54%)
New Deaths: 11,770 (⬆︎ .42%)
USA
New Cases: 76,786 (⬆︎ .25%)
New Deaths: 952 (⬆︎ .17%)
Vaccination Scorecard
Total Vaccinations: 99.6 million (⬆︎ 2.05%)
Total Eligible Population: 37.3%
Total Population: 30.0%
The uptick threatens to derail our progress - or at least delay our movement through the pandemic and towards recovery - and we're not doing ourselves any favors by not keeping our guard up, or by letting parts of the process flag.
NYT: (pay wall)
A decline in testing may be masking the spread of the virus in some U.S. states
Declines in coronavirus testing in many states in the South and the Great Plains are making it harder to know just how widely the virus may be spreading in those states, even as restrictions are lifted and residents ease back into daily life, experts say.
States in both regions are reporting few new cases relative to their population, compared with harder-hit states like Michigan or New York. But they are also testing far fewer people.
Kansas, for example, is now testing about 60 people a day for every 100,000 in population, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University, and Alabama only a bit more. The picture is similar in Iowa, Mississippi and elsewhere.
By contrast, New York is averaging 1,200 tests a day per 100,000, and Rhode Island 1,677 per 100,000.
Testing has been falling in Kansas since Jan. 1, even though hospitalizations were at their highest level of the pandemic then, according to Tami Gurley, co-chair of the virus task force at the University of Kansas Medical Center. The state is now doing fewer tests relative to its population than any state except Idaho.
The tests they are doing in these low-rate states are finding virus.
Twelve percent of Kansas’ coronavirus tests are coming back positive. Alabama’s positivity rate is 12.8 percent. The rate in Idaho is 27.3 percent, the highest in the country. In New York, it’s just 3.5 percent.
So in the states that are doing relatively little testing, it’s possible that their daily case counts are low in part because asymptomatic or mild-symptom cases are going undetected.
Ms. Gurley says she is closely following hospitalizations, as a better indicator of the spread of the virus than new-case reports.
“We think that people are more focused on getting vaccines than getting tested,” she said. “It certainly makes it harder to figure out where we are going. We feel like we are at the point of another uptick in cases.”
Many states in the South and Midwest have relaxed their restrictions, including mask mandates, even though the national data signals that another surge in cases may be coming, according to Edward Trapido, an epidemiologist and associate dean for research at the Louisiana State University School of Public Health.
And many states are shifting resources away from testing to bolster vaccination efforts and meet President Biden’s goal of making all adult Americans eligible for a shot by May 1.
As a result, Dr. Trapido said, in many places these days, only the sickest patients are seeking out a coronavirus test.
“As vaccines have become widespread, people are becoming comfortable about not being tested,” he said. “There is a natural experiment going on. It’s a battle between getting people vaccinated and keeping the percent positive low. When I see a slight change in the curve upward, I get alarmed.”
Ms. Gurley said the shift in emphasis away from testing and toward vaccination may stem in part from widespread public fatigue with pandemic precautions and the political imperative in many states to reopen swiftly.
If all you want to do is prevent deaths from the virus, that may make sense, she said, but “if your end goal is to prevent spread, then we need more testing.”
Opinion: Here’s why Michigan’s covid spike is so scary
Rising coronavirus infection rates nationwide prompted Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to confess on Monday to a sense of “impending doom.” The state most responsible for such alarms right now might be Michigan. The CDC on Tuesday said Michigan led all states in new cases per 100,000 in the previous week. And hospitalizations had surged 53 percent, with 2,144 adults hospitalized, compared with a week earlier.
Cases are multiplying faster than they were last fall, when Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) instituted a “pause to save lives,” with measures that included stopping in-person high school classes and banning indoor dining. That intervention prevented more than 100,000 covid cases, a University of Michigan study estimated. No similar measures have been launched in the Wolverine State this time, but it isn’t too late for the governor, with the help of Michiganders, to rein in the rapidly increasing threat.
Is there something about Michigan this is prompting the spike in infections? No, it’s the same dynamics happening elsewhere. They just seem to be happening in Michigan first. Restaurants and bars are pushing their permitted 50 percent maximum capacity (capped at 300 patrons). Much of the clientele in those restaurants appears to young people — and young people are increasingly among the hospitalized in Michigan. From March 5 to March 27, more than half of all covid cases in Michigan were people under age 39. Anecdotally, I can report that people here have lately become much more casual about wearing masks.
It feels as though we haven’t learned the lessons of 2020. Or that the sense of coronavirus vaccines coming to the rescue has made us forget those lessons.
This time around, there are coronavirus variants involved. In mid-January, Michigan recorded its first case of B.1.1.7., the so-called U.K. variant. Although Michigan has had the highest per capita case rate of the variant for the past month, it has been observed in every state in the country except Oklahoma, its share of reported cases rising 7.5 percent daily. The proportion of U.S. coronavirus cases caused by this variant could thus double in just over a week.
Despite official optimism about vaccination programs nationwide, the country is still nowhere near the 70 to 90 percent inoculation rate needed to achieve the “herd immunity” needed to kill off the pandemic. Full vaccine coverage in Michigan is about 16.4 percent — similar to the national average. And there’s little room for error.
Vaccine hesitancy in Michigan is higher than the national average, according to a U.S. Bureau Census survey last month: Seventeen percent of Americans 18 and older say they “probably” or “definitely” won’t get vaccinated, compared with 25 percent of Michiganders. Vaccine hesitancy in Michigan is more common among people age 40 to 54, as well as Black residents, according to the survey.
Worse, inequity has marked the state’s vaccination program. Whether as a result of insufficient supplies, inadequate outreach or vaccine hesitancy — or a combination of all three — vaccination among Michigan’s Black residents is lagging badly. The Atlantic noted last month that first doses had been administered to 61 percent of Michiganders age 65 to 74, and 62 percent of those 75 and older, but just 28 percent of Black residents 65 and older had received at least one shot. The communities hit hardest by the pandemic starting last spring are yet again more vulnerable to this surge.
Michigan has retained its mask mandate, but in other ways the state has aggressively reopened since the beginning of the year. Gyms reopened on Jan. 16 (the day the first B.1.1.7 case was discovered). Eat-in dining reopened on a limited basis on Feb. 1. High school sports — connected to several outbreaks across the state — have been allowed to continue.
Whitmer faced dangerous threats last spring for her forceful measures to combat the pandemic last year. With coronavirus infections increasing in Michigan and many other states, she and other governors urgently need to consider putting the brakes on reopening. Guidelines should be established that firmly tie activities allowed — traveling, going to the gym, eating in a restaurant — to specific vaccination rates. That would create the kind of benchmarks that both explain what the “right thing” is and incentivize public officials and the public to make it happen.
If there is good news about the current outbreak, it is a truly silver lining: Older Michiganders, the most vulnerable population throughout the pandemic, are experiencing far lower rates of hospitalizations. That has happened because of the extraordinary push to vaccinate them first. Vaccines by the tens of millions will be distributed in the coming weeks. We just have to hold on — and not abandon measures and behaviors that kept people safe until now, in Michigan and all across the country.
Apr 1, 2021
Republicans Are Prone To Scandal
when you wish people would start talking
about your drinking problem again
On Shaky Ground
I can hope this turns out to be cause for celebration, and not an excuse for racist assholes to come and fuck up my town again.
WaPo: (pay wall)
Virginia Supreme Court clears the way for Charlottesville to take down statue of Robert E Lee
The Supreme Court of Virginia has cleared the way for the city of Charlottesville to take down the statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee that was the focus of 2017's deadly Unite the Right rally, and the ruling appears to open the door for statue removals around the state.
The Charlottesville City Council voted to take down both the Lee and a nearby statue of Stonewall Jackson shortly after the rally in which white supremacists defended Confederate iconography, with one of them driving his car through a crowd of counterprotesters and killing a young woman.
But several local residents sued to prevent the statues from coming down. They argued that a state law passed in 1997 prohibited localities from removing Confederate war memorials.
A circuit court judge agreed and placed an injunction against any removal, even ordering the city to pay court costs.
The city appealed, and Thursday the Supreme Court of Virginia ruled that the 1997 state statute applies only to monuments erected after the law was adopted.
That law provides authority for localities to create war memorials and monuments, and the prohibition on taking them down “only applies to monuments and memorials erected prospectively under that statute’s grant of authority,” the court wrote.
“The statute has no language which imposes regulation upon the movement or covering of war monuments and memorials erected before [the law] was enacted,” the justices ruled.
The court found that Charlottesville is free to take down its statues, which were erected in the 1920s.
But L. Steven Emmert, a Virginia Supreme Court analyst, said the ruling appears to clear the way for such statues to come down statewide.
“Most of the statues that were erected for Civil War leaders or veterans were put up in a period roughly between the 1880s and 1920s. What this means is that none of those monuments are governed by this statute,” Emmert said. “That means localities are free to consider whether they want to continue to display them. It means they can take them down if they want.”
The General Assembly passed a law last year that set up a mechanism for localities to take down statues after a lengthy public review process. Emmert said he was uncertain how Thursday’s ruling affects that law.
Amid last summer’s protests over racial inequity, triggered by the killing of George Floyd while in police custody in Minneapolis, one of the localities that used the new law to take down a statue was Albemarle County.
Supervisors voted to remove a statue of a Confederate soldier outside its courthouse, which is in downtown Charlottesville, a short distance from the Lee statue.
I can also hope that the statues can be preserved as art, but kept in the appropriate historical context of a War To Perpetuate Slavery and the attempts to re-establish White Supremacy after that war.
Today's Daddy State
Even now, I won't make the sweeping generalization, but I will say that most of the bluster we get from Republicans about BLM and AntiFa, and how all those horrible protesters last summer were 'radical leftists' bent on destroying our beautiful dreams of (an all-white) America - all that shit - was made up in their own feverish little imaginations.
'Boogaloo Bois' member charged in attack on Minneapolis police precinct during George Floyd protests
He allegedly fired 13 rounds from an AK-47 style gun and helped set it on fire.
A self-described member of the 'Boogaloo Bois' has been charged with participating in a riot after he allegedly shot 13 rounds from an AK-47 style assault rifle into a Minneapolis Police Department building during the civil unrest following the death of George Floyd in late May.
Ivan Hunter, 26, is accused of traveling from Texas to Minneapolis to meet up with other members of the 'Boogaloo Bois' with the goal of carrying out acts of violence during the riots.
The FBI describes the 'Boogaloo Bois' as a loosely-connected group driven by militant anti-government sentiments. Members of the group regularly refer to the 'Boogaloo' as an impending civil war they expect will be incited by accelerationist acts of terror.
Federal investigators said they reviewed video of Hunter firing rounds with his AK-47 style assault rifle into the Third Precinct building while looters were still inside and that he also helped assist them in setting the building on fire.
According to an FBI affidavit, after shooting into the building Hunter hi-fived another individual and while walking towards the camera yelled, "Justice for Floyd!"
Boogaloo: The movement behind recent violent attacks
The affidavit additionally states that Hunter was pinned as the shooter by an unidentified cooperating defendant.
- more-
'Boogaloo Bois' member charged in attack on Minneapolis police precinct during George Floyd protests
He allegedly fired 13 rounds from an AK-47 style gun and helped set it on fire.
A self-described member of the 'Boogaloo Bois' has been charged with participating in a riot after he allegedly shot 13 rounds from an AK-47 style assault rifle into a Minneapolis Police Department building during the civil unrest following the death of George Floyd in late May.
Ivan Hunter, 26, is accused of traveling from Texas to Minneapolis to meet up with other members of the 'Boogaloo Bois' with the goal of carrying out acts of violence during the riots.
The FBI describes the 'Boogaloo Bois' as a loosely-connected group driven by militant anti-government sentiments. Members of the group regularly refer to the 'Boogaloo' as an impending civil war they expect will be incited by accelerationist acts of terror.
Federal investigators said they reviewed video of Hunter firing rounds with his AK-47 style assault rifle into the Third Precinct building while looters were still inside and that he also helped assist them in setting the building on fire.
According to an FBI affidavit, after shooting into the building Hunter hi-fived another individual and while walking towards the camera yelled, "Justice for Floyd!"
Boogaloo: The movement behind recent violent attacks
The affidavit additionally states that Hunter was pinned as the shooter by an unidentified cooperating defendant.
- more-
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