Maybe it's not that the price of gas
has gone up 60 cents a gallon.
Maybe it's the fact that even
a temporary increase in the price of gas
puts millions of American wage-earners
at risk of going broke.
hat tp = @DanPriceSeattle
Mar 12, 2022
Mar 11, 2022
Ukraine
Ukrainians have been short on heavy arms and equipment - right neighborly of the Russians to oblige 'em like that.
The word "freedom" is derived from an Indo-European / Germanic conceptualization of "friend", "beloved", "dear one" - it's all about love. And when applied to standing up and defending your homeland from some asshole who just has to run around waving his tiny dick in the air, you're looking at the combination of an irresistible force and an immovable object.
Ukraine will have a very hard time getting through the shit they have to put up with now, but I can guarantee this: Ukraine will still be here when Putin is dust, and his memory lingers only in the nightmares of sleeping dogs.
Слава Україні
Amaze Balls
Seriously, Vlad - why can't you just fuck off and leave this guy alone?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy with Connie Talbot, covering Lionel Ritchie's Endless Love:
COVID-19 Update
USA Yesterday
New Cases: 41,206
New Deaths: 1,597
We're on track to hit a million dead next month.
This thing is not going away easy.
WaPo: (pay wall)
Opinion: This is what ‘living with covid’ might look like
Two years ago, long before vaccines and boosters, we cautioned that it would be reckless to go back to normal too soon. Now, with the omicron variant passing, with widespread vaccine and natural immunity, with greater knowledge about the virus and how to mitigate it, a new normal is in sight. But a smart group of public health experts has a warning to be heeded: The new normal will be different, and we must prepare for it.
In a report released Monday and titled “Getting to and Sustaining the Next Normal: A Roadmap for Living with Covid,” the experts caution that the United States is still in the grip of the pandemic. With 330 million people, they say the U.S. transition to the “next normal” will be when direct mortality from major respiratory illnesses is 165 deaths per day and 1,150 per week; the death toll from covid-19 going into this month was 10 times higher. And they caution that a new, concerning variant could emerge. At the same time, they suggest that the death toll will decline sharply from the disaster of the past two years, thanks to vaccine and natural immunity.
If the outlook is cautiously optimistic, however, the report makes an important plea for policymakers and politicians not to fall back into complacency and inaction, as they have in the past. It comes from two dozen epidemiologists, pharmacologists, virologists, immunologists and policy experts, shepherded by Ezekiel J. Emanuel, vice provost of global initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania.
What needs to be done? A major recommendation is that the United States should build a comprehensive testing and surveillance system for the coronavirus and other respiratory viruses, which does not yet exist in the nation’s patchwork of testing technology and reporting. The report suggests such a system should make rapid tests “both ubiquitous and affordable, which means less than $3 per test,” and swiftly link those who test positive — whether through a PCR or rapid test — to suitable treatment. The experts also suggest building a real-time disease surveillance network that would rely on viral, environmental, genetic, immunological and zoonotic sampling to provide early warning and data about outbreaks. These will be even more useful if linked to a modernized, comprehensive health-data system, which the pandemic showed is desperately needed. Other common-sense suggestions include measures to improve indoor air quality; a strategy to deal with burnout among health-care workers; sustained investment in vaccine and therapeutics research and development; a better understanding of long covid; and improvements on the confusing pandemic communications evident over the past two years.
All of this won’t be easy or cheap. The report calls for an estimated $100 billion investment the first year, about $30 billion for the second and third, and $10 billion to $15 billion annually thereafter. But the economic and other damages of the pandemic were in the trillions. Investing in the future of public health systems to avoid such a disaster in the future would be prudent and farsighted.
In a report released Monday and titled “Getting to and Sustaining the Next Normal: A Roadmap for Living with Covid,” the experts caution that the United States is still in the grip of the pandemic. With 330 million people, they say the U.S. transition to the “next normal” will be when direct mortality from major respiratory illnesses is 165 deaths per day and 1,150 per week; the death toll from covid-19 going into this month was 10 times higher. And they caution that a new, concerning variant could emerge. At the same time, they suggest that the death toll will decline sharply from the disaster of the past two years, thanks to vaccine and natural immunity.
If the outlook is cautiously optimistic, however, the report makes an important plea for policymakers and politicians not to fall back into complacency and inaction, as they have in the past. It comes from two dozen epidemiologists, pharmacologists, virologists, immunologists and policy experts, shepherded by Ezekiel J. Emanuel, vice provost of global initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania.
What needs to be done? A major recommendation is that the United States should build a comprehensive testing and surveillance system for the coronavirus and other respiratory viruses, which does not yet exist in the nation’s patchwork of testing technology and reporting. The report suggests such a system should make rapid tests “both ubiquitous and affordable, which means less than $3 per test,” and swiftly link those who test positive — whether through a PCR or rapid test — to suitable treatment. The experts also suggest building a real-time disease surveillance network that would rely on viral, environmental, genetic, immunological and zoonotic sampling to provide early warning and data about outbreaks. These will be even more useful if linked to a modernized, comprehensive health-data system, which the pandemic showed is desperately needed. Other common-sense suggestions include measures to improve indoor air quality; a strategy to deal with burnout among health-care workers; sustained investment in vaccine and therapeutics research and development; a better understanding of long covid; and improvements on the confusing pandemic communications evident over the past two years.
All of this won’t be easy or cheap. The report calls for an estimated $100 billion investment the first year, about $30 billion for the second and third, and $10 billion to $15 billion annually thereafter. But the economic and other damages of the pandemic were in the trillions. Investing in the future of public health systems to avoid such a disaster in the future would be prudent and farsighted.
Mar 10, 2022
COVID-19 Update
MASK UP
VAX UP
KEEP YOUR DISTANCE
WASH YOUR HANDS
WaPo:
Body bags, overflowing morgues and chaotic hospitals: Hong Kong’s pandemic goes critical
HONG KONG — There are no funeral ceremonies for some of the hundreds of elderly Hong Kong residents dying every day of covid. Their bodies are instead sealed in plastic bags and then quickly cremated, freeing up space at the morgue for more arrivals.
Hong Kong — a wealthy financial center — now has the highest covid death rate in the developed world. More than 2,300 people have died since the start of the city’s most recent outbreak, compared with just 213 in the two years prior. Those dying are overwhelmingly elderly, unvaccinated residents, but they also include toddlers and children too young to be immunized.
The outbreak has been an embarrassment for the city’s government, which once prided itself on a “zero covid” policy that kept local infections down. The policy mirrors that of mainland China, where strict social distancing, mass testing, lockdowns and largely closed borders have been effective at preventing the coronavirus from overwhelming the hospital system.
But Hong Kong has been unable to match the mainland approach, lacking the resources to isolate everyone who tests positive or put the city under lockdown. The highly transmissible omicron variant crippled the city’s defenses, affecting the most vulnerable elderly population in particular. In January, less than 1 in 5 residents above the age of 80 had been fully vaccinated with two doses, and almost none had three.
That percentage has risen since then, but experts say it is still too little, too late, especially compared with Singapore, South Korea and Japan, where the elderly were a priority for vaccinations.
“It would have been better if [the elderly] were vaccinated in the past eight months, we could have avoided this huge problem now,” Yuen Kwok-yung, a professor at the department of microbiology at the University of Hong Kong and a government adviser on covid, told reporters earlier this month.
“Unfortunately, I think the elderly will pay a huge price” in this wave, he added.
The failure to vaccinate this group has now pushed hospitals, elderly care homes and morgues to a breaking point. Kwok Hoi-bong, chairman of the Funeral Business Association, said that public mortuary refrigerators are so overwhelmed that temporary ones had to be installed outside the facilities.
“The key is how to clear them as quickly,” Kwok said. “There are regrettably more and more bodies."
For two years, Hong Kong held off the pandemic. Then, everything fell apart.
That percentage has risen since then, but experts say it is still too little, too late, especially compared with Singapore, South Korea and Japan, where the elderly were a priority for vaccinations.
“It would have been better if [the elderly] were vaccinated in the past eight months, we could have avoided this huge problem now,” Yuen Kwok-yung, a professor at the department of microbiology at the University of Hong Kong and a government adviser on covid, told reporters earlier this month.
“Unfortunately, I think the elderly will pay a huge price” in this wave, he added.
The failure to vaccinate this group has now pushed hospitals, elderly care homes and morgues to a breaking point. Kwok Hoi-bong, chairman of the Funeral Business Association, said that public mortuary refrigerators are so overwhelmed that temporary ones had to be installed outside the facilities.
“The key is how to clear them as quickly,” Kwok said. “There are regrettably more and more bodies."
Conundrums like these are new to Hong Kong and reminiscent of the early days of the pandemic in cities like New York and Italy’s Bergamo — which are now moving on and reopening to the world.
Hospital emergency rooms are also overflowing. One doctor at a public hospital’s emergency ward said in an interview that beds are now crammed close to fit them all in the space. Doctors can barely access the patients, with no way to walk around the beds.
One patient, he said, died in the short time a nurse went off to the hospital pharmacy to pick up some medicine.
“The image is really traumatic,” she said.
Hospital emergency rooms are also overflowing. One doctor at a public hospital’s emergency ward said in an interview that beds are now crammed close to fit them all in the space. Doctors can barely access the patients, with no way to walk around the beds.
One patient, he said, died in the short time a nurse went off to the hospital pharmacy to pick up some medicine.
“It is impossible to stop,” the doctor said, speaking on the condition of anonymity, fearing repercussions from the Hospital Authority.
Elderly care homes have also turned into battlegrounds. Almost 90 percent of the facilities have covid cases, and about 4,700 care home workers have tested positive. Cases are also rising in disabled care homes and among the caretakers of that at-risk population.
At one nursing home, a nurse now has to tend to about 60 elderly residents. None of these facilities are adequately equipped with quarantine rooms, making it impossible to stop others from getting infected.
The crisis has made Hong Kong increasingly dependent on the mainland, which in recent weeks has sent thousands of doctors, nurses, construction workers and experts to the territory.
The crisis has made Hong Kong increasingly dependent on the mainland, which in recent weeks has sent thousands of doctors, nurses, construction workers and experts to the territory.
But even they are finding that strategies that worked in cities like Wuhan cannot be immediately applied to Hong Kong at this stage in its outbreak.
Liang Wannian, a mainland Chinese covid expert sent to Hong Kong to help manage the crisis, said in an interview with state media that the city’s main target should be to cut the number of deaths. Carrie Lam, the territory’s chief executive, said Wednesday that while her government was still planning a recently announced mandatory testing exercise, it was not a “top priority.”
Social workers and nurses, meanwhile, find themselves consoling families unable to complete funeral rites and rituals for their elderly relatives. One social worker said an elderly resident died before an ambulance arrived to take him to a hospital, his family forced to watch as he took his last breath. Others can barely glimpse the faces of their loved ones before they are sent to the crematorium.
“The image is really traumatic,” she said.
Today's Quote
In 1863, that place was Gettysburg.
In 1940, it was the skies over Great Britain.
Today, in 2022, it is Kyiv.
To No Fly Or Not To No Fly
It's hard for me to understand what Biden is doing right now - what's he waiting for?
Rachel Maddow (Ali Velshi standing in)
I want to be patient and to support the best efforts of POTUS and his gang as they try to figure out how to get us all through this shit without blowing up half the world.
But I can absolutely see the point being made that you can't let an asshole like Putin start thinking he can push you around.
More often than not, you have to slam the bully full in the face - hard.
While we muddle about, Ukraine is being wrecked, and now the Russians are going after civilians - basically killing hostages, apparently thinking that's a legitimate way to apply political pressure on the western alliance.
It's fucking sickening, and something has to give.
Today's Tweet
I truly am uncertain at what’s more amazing: a “billionaire” former president begging supporters to buy him a new plane, or his supporters donating to get it built.
— Justin Horwitz (@JustinAHorwitz) March 10, 2022
Revelation
From Brian Tyler Cohen's Twitter account:
It's the shock of realizing that the world is not with you - that you aren't in the majority like they promised - that you've been lied to and manipulated.
A trucker in the convoy says he’s taking a day off from driving in laps around DC because “3 young girls in a blue Hyundai” flipped him off. He says he’s now fearful: “It wasn’t just a normal middle finger that was relaxed... It messed me up.”
ie: "I'm the bad guy? How'd that happen? I did everything they told me to..."
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