BBC: China pneumonia outbreak: COVID-19 Global Pandemic

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[skinsmarydu]

I wonder if my idiot governor would consider it here, but I knew opening dining rooms wasn't going to be safe or last for very long...and I got laughed at. 

Sometimes it really sucks being right. 

[visionary]

 

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[visionary]

 

[China]

10 minutes ago, visionary said:

 

 

Yeah, I see a pattern.  I see stupid people everywhere.  Covid has been in this country for more than 8 months and people still don't believe it's real?  Shame on them (after Trump got it, they still didn't think it was real?).  I have no sympathy for them, although I do have sympathy for the overburdened healthcare workers and any innocent people these ignorant ****s may infect.

[TradeTheBeal!]

 

[Isifhan]

I wonder if Cruz gets up, looks at himself in the mirror and says "here's how I'm planning to be the biggest asshole on the planet today!"

[Sacks 'n' Stuff]

1 hour ago, Isifhan said:

I wonder if Cruz gets up, looks at himself in the mirror and says "here's how I'm planning to be the biggest asshole on the planet today!"

I don’t think there’s any doubt that he at some point made a conscious decision to forfeit all morals and principles for political gain. Really a shame because he’s actually not a dumb guy.

[Busch1724]

What does Trump have on Cruz? I know he's an ass, but he's not an idiot. 

[Sacks 'n' Stuff]

56 minutes ago, Busch1724 said:

What does Trump have on Cruz?

Stupid voters that Cruz needs to placate in order to win.

[visionary]

 

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[Dan T.]

[Barry.Randolphe]

I'm expecting the COVID rates to double...possibly triple after Thanksgiving. The numbers are going to be shocking a week from now

[TheGreatBuzz]

1 hour ago, Dan T. said:

 

This was my response to one of my idiot friends doubting CDC recommendations:

Quote

Know how frustrating it is when a pilot tries to tell you how to fix the bird?  You get mad because you’ve been doing this for a long time and they question your expertise.  

 

Now remember, you’re not an epidemiologist.

 

[LD0506]

[China]

Garrett non-profit tackling ‘worst food crisis in modern times’

 

GARRETT, Ind. (WANE) – The COVID pandemic is causing the worse food crisis in modern times. Some health experts are saying Indiana hasn’t seen starvation conditions like this since the great depression.

 

Hoosiers Feeding the Hungry is a non-profit in Garrett tackling this issue head on. The organization pays the cost for area hunters and farmers to process their meat locally, then helps distribute the meat to almost 600 food pantries across the state. And the demand for food is overwhelming.

 

“It’s very bad. Our numbers are up exponentially. People don’t have income because they’re out of work because of this COVID 19 crisis .So they’re going to local food pantries because they need food not just for themselves but for their children as well,” said Rebecca Stezowski with Hoosiers Feeding the Hungry.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

Hospitals Know What’s Coming

 

Perhaps no hospital in the United States was better prepared for a pandemic than the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha.

 

After the SARS outbreak of 2003, its staff began specifically preparing for emerging infections. The center has the nation’s only federal quarantine facility and its largest biocontainment unit, which cared for airlifted Ebola patients in 2014. The people on staff had detailed pandemic plans. They ran drills. Ron Klain, who was President Barack Obama’s “Ebola czar” and will be Joe Biden’s chief of staff in the White House, once told me that UNMC is “arguably the best in the country” at handling dangerous and unusual diseases. There’s a reason many of the Americans who were airlifted from the Diamond Princess cruise ship in February were sent to UNMC.

 

In the past two weeks, the hospital had to convert an entire building into a COVID-19 tower, from the top down. It now has 10 COVID-19 units, each taking up an entire hospital floor. Three of the units provide intensive care to the very sickest people, several of whom die every day. One unit solely provides “comfort care” to COVID-19 patients who are certain to die. “We’ve never had to do anything like this,” Angela Hewlett, the infectious-disease specialist who directs the hospital’s COVID-19 team, told me. “We are on an absolutely catastrophic path.”

 

To hear such talk from someone at UNMC, the best-prepared of America’s hospitals, should shake the entire nation. In mid-March, when just 18 Nebraskans had tested positive for COVID-19, Shelly Schwedhelm, the head of the hospital’s emergency-preparedness program, sounded gently confident. Or, at least, she told me: “I’m confident in having a plan.” She hoped the hospital wouldn’t hit capacity, “because people will have done the right thing by staying home,” she said. And people did: For a while, the U.S. flattened the curve.

 

But now about 2,400 Nebraskans are testing positive for COVID-19 every day—a rate five times higher than in the spring. More than 20 percent of tests are coming back positive, and up to 70 percent in some rural counties—signs that many infections aren’t being detected. The number of people who’ve been hospitalized with the disease has tripled in just six weeks. UNMC is fuller with COVID-19 patients—and patients, full stop—than it has ever been. “We’re watching a system breaking in front of us and we’re helpless to stop it,” says Kelly Cawcutt, an infectious-disease and critical-care physician.

 

Cawcutt knows what’s coming. Throughout the pandemic, hospitalizations have lagged behind cases by about 12 days. Over the past 12 days, the total number of confirmed cases in Nebraska has risen from 82,400 to 109,280. That rise represents a wave of patients that will slam into already beleaguered hospitals between now and Thanksgiving. “I don’t see how we avoid becoming overwhelmed,” says Dan Johnson, a critical-care doctor. People need to know that “the assumption we will always have a hospital bed for them is a false one.”

 

Click on the link for the full article

[visionary]

 

[China]

Utah drops restrictions on gatherings ahead of Thanksgiving

 

Utah dropped its coronavirus restrictions on resident gatherings ahead of Thanksgiving this week, though officials still recommend against them.

 

Utah Gov. Gary Herbert (R) announced Monday that the state was removing the two-week-old mandate against casual social gatherings of those from different households, instead making it a recommendation. The restrictions on gatherings were set to expire Monday.

 

Click on the link for the full article

 

 

 

[China]

Biden to spotlight CDC officials shunned by Trump

 

President-elect Joe Biden is putting scientists in charge and back on the stage to restore trust in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

 

The plans include immediately reviving regular media briefings and giving a central role to long-sidelined career officials including Nancy Messonnier, the public health official who first warned of the “severe” impact of the Covid-19 back in February.

 

The goal, said Biden’s advisers, is to send a tightly coordinated message that, nearly a year into the coronavirus crisis, the federal government is prioritizing science over politics in driving its pandemic response.

 

“You need the right people messaging,” said Vin Gupta, a professor at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation who served as an adviser to the Biden team. “None of this is hard conceptually — it’s about how you say it, and it’s about believability and authenticity.”

 

Messonnier, who is the CDC’s respiratory disease chief, and Anne Schuchat, who is the CDC’s principal deputy director, are among the government scientists whose warnings about the severity of the coronavirus ran afoul of President Donald Trump’s efforts to downplay the virus in its early months, infuriating senior White House officials. Both are expected to play large — and especially visible — roles in formulating the new administration’s policies.

 

When he takes office in January, Biden will confront a nation deeply skeptical of both public health interventions and federal agencies like the CDC and Food and Drug Administration that have spent the majority of the pandemic grappling with intense political pressure.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[visionary]

 

[Dan T.]

Having three effective vaccines seems a true embarrassment of riches.  I wonder how it complicates messaging and distribution patterns, though.  Will one type be more effective on certain demographics over others?  Will there be geographical overlap?   Will there be recommendations on which to choose and when?

 

Any problems created by having three vaccines ready are good problems to have, but it seems certain it will complicate the Biden team's response.  It's good knowing there will be top experts and not quacks and family members handling those efforts.

[CousinsCowgirl84]

I hope the vaccines are as good as promised.  These are the fastest vaccines ever developed and usually if something sounds too good to be true it usually is.

 

Dont get me wrong. I will be getting the vaccine... my concern is once these get going if there are any serious complications when the sample sizes are magnitudes higher what that will mean for our confidence in vaccines going forward.

 

Fingers crossed.