The Covid-19 Pandemic Thread

[ZoWie]

This is existential for the Biden administration.

Testing is expanding, but too slowly. In most places, local officials need more help. It's possible to make this work. The lines at the three (3) three sites in the same number of blocks in Times Square are never very long. Today you have to stand out in the snow, but hey, New Yorkers are used to real winters.

Other places...... not that good.

We need to be able to order quickie home tests online and keep them handy for a quick and dirty covid check without needing the services of health professionals. This would help restore faith that civilization has a future. It would make social interaction safer and case rates would drop, since a sizeable portion of the population is over making even the slightest changes in their social lives over something that MIGHT happen. The hard core drumpfistas are unreachable on everything else too, but they're only a quarter or so of the population.

We also need to have the good medical grade tests far, far more available and convenient. You can call up the local drug store and get an appointment for your booster, but you can't get tested. In LA, that's six hours wait and $200, please. How many people just aren't testing at all?

People need to get their goddamn shots. The Nike ads come to mind. Just do it.

Bad show for the country that went from unprepared to raising a world class response to WWII in a matter of, what was it, about a year? Nine months?

Of course now we outsource and offshore everything, so as I'm always saying, now we'd lose WWII. Even so, I just don't want to hear the word "can't." Find a way to handle the worst pandemic in 100 years. The tools are there. The will is not.

Declare a national emergency if you have to. Indonesia has a national resiliency council and a bottom-up local emergency system. They have to, with all the volcanoes there. What do we have for dire national emergencies that isn't war? I know there's something, but it's been pretty invisible.

If all this country understands is war, then start a War On Covid. Make it unpatriotic to spread tommyrot about Jewish space lasers and the Bill Gates Chip Implanting Vaccine. Put off building more weapons we can't use, and build whatever helps restore hope.

If we leave it to drumpf and a bunch of fascists to rally the home front, America is over.

[Drak]

The GOP - constantly spreads Covid disinformation, then blames Dems for Covid.

[Motor City]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIFQT_ykxco

“People Might Just Die:” Ed Yong on America's Overwhelmed Healthcare System | Amanpour and Company

The Omicron variant is surging in almost all 50 states. For those who have tested positive but are asymptomatic, the CDC has shortened the isolation period from 10 days to five. Ed Yong, science writer for The Atlantic, tells Walter Isaacson how this policy change could have a significant impact on U.S. healthcare.

The kind of thing that could help to fill up emergency rooms



Department of Defense medical team stays 30 days longer than planned to help Beaumont Dearborn

The DOD team consists of six registered nurses assigned to the emergency center, eight registered nurses assigned to the ICUs, two respiratory therapists, two advanced practice providers, as well as DOD leaders.

Meanwhile the hospitals continue to hold back care and implement hostile staffing schemes to keep compounding money into wealth and the department of defense is sitting on a fortune in taxpayer money and resources and aiding only enough to allow the hostile staffing schemes to continue on unimpeded. Not much of a defense.

[gounion]

Our main county hospital is slammed, no ICU beds left. 96% of COVID patients was unvaxed.

Anywhere you go, no more than a handful of people masked.

[ZoWie]

Absent social pressure and a moral imperative to comply, Americans just won't bother. That's just the way it is.

In LA enough people are scared to make masks quite evident in the streets again, and you can't get into many indoor spaces like stores without one on. Masks are required in public spaces by law, but it was never really enforceable. However, now the masks are getting very prevalent, and many are the expensive kind.

You don't know from day to day which stores will have enough staff to open. For the first time in many years, it's not known whether a given place is open without calling first. It's happened before, but so long ago that I can't remember exactly when. I do remember that it was this same time of year. The combination of winter weather and all the big holidays coming at the same time has never been good for public health.

[Libertas]

The GOP - constantly spreads Covid disinformation, then blames Dems for Covid.

They need to be smashed in the face either with screams from decent people yelling SHAME or whatever. They are murderers AS ARE YOU if you sit here and say you will vote for ANY republican.

FUCK YOU

[carmenjonze]

The GOP - constantly spreads Covid disinformation, then blames Dems for Covid.

We now have an addition problem, in that there are Dem mayors in major cities like my mayor London Breed, Lori Lightfoot, that authoritarian freak in NYC Eric Adams, Brandon Scott of DC, all forcing public schools open while teachers and students want a reprieve with online education for the next couple weeks.

They're saying no, the CDC is inconsistent, and then you get the WS geniuses in the GOP who say "masks are dumb," then blame Dems for the state of COVID.

[Libertas]

PLEASE explain to me WHY in the FUCK would any democratic mayor do this?

[Libertas]

Absent social pressure and a moral imperative to comply, Americans just won't bother. That's just the way it is.

In LA enough people are scared to make masks quite evident in the streets again, and you can't get into many indoor spaces like stores without one on. Masks are required in public spaces by law, but it was never really enforceable. However, now the masks are getting very prevalent, and many are the expensive kind.

You don't know from day to day which stores will have enough staff to open. For the first time in many years, it's not known whether a given place is open without calling first. It's happened before, but so long ago that I can't remember exactly when. I do remember that it was this same time of year. The combination of winter weather and all the big holidays coming at the same time has never been good for public health.

Joe needs to be doing more. He is afraid of what righty will say, but I dont care anymore.

[Libertas]

Mass murderer tucker carlson, who the cons here adore and worship, says

https://twitter.com/NikkiMcR/status/147 ... 38112?s=20

Tucker Carlson tells viewers the COVID-19 boosters don't work and actually increase your chances of catching the omicron variant

so we need to arrest carlson ASAP...

[ZoWie]

American politicians have ignored urban social problems, or offered halfway measures that do more harm than good. The de facto situation is that these problems, such as poor nutrition, fragmented families, bad or no housing, and parents who work long hours for starvation wages, then get passed onto the schools. These become the child care system and often the only "good" meal of the day for a lot of kids.

When the covid put this informal arrangement into the shitter, everything started to fall apart. Remote learning was tried, but due to the information gap the same students who had once been put off onto to the schools to support were then left with poor or no ability to study and learn, plus there was little or no excess capacity in the system to support them any other way.

So now we have this drive to keep schools open at any cost. This, too, leads to catastrophe. Lose-lose.

Everyone knows what the solution is, but we lack the wherewithal and social awareness as a country to do it. This is the kind of thing where national resiliency systems and wartime-like emergency measures become valuable, but we don't have those. We have people buying guns, or supporting politicians that tell them that injecting bleach or eating horse dewormer helps.

It took the covid to reveal the flaws in this country, and there seems to be no way out.

Unfortunately, due to bad timing, this is existential for the Biden administration.

[Drak]

If the Dems lose the midterms, there will be no more free and fair elections. They will also impeach Joe Biden. They most likely will not have enough votes to remove him via the Senate, but they will try. They will do the same to Kamala Harris. They will also attempt to reinstall Trump. This isn't tinfoil, it's reality. They've stated this is their plan, over and over again.

[ZoWie]

Better restore confidence regarding the covid then. There are ten months left. Tick, tick, tick.

[ProfX]

Far be it from me to say Biden has handled this flawlessly ... there is a testing shortage, and they screwed the pooch on it, no way around it ...

All I can say is, I get that voters tend to process anger in a very emotional direction "throw the bums out" ... always take out revenge on those in power and I understand that instinct ...

I can only point out if you throw out the Biden/D bums, you will get a worse set of bums who don't even take the problem seriously and are spreading ridiculous disinformation about it. It kinda is the proverbial jumping out of frying pan into fire.

I mean, this is a serious case where the lesser of two evils, is really so lesser, it's less of a threat to the life of all Americans.

I know, I'm trying to get people to reason through a very emotional situation, but ... well, this is what I do.

The schools are not going to lockdown again. Should they? Well, that debate seems taken off the table. Only in places where teacher unions are forcing the issue, like Chicago. All I can say is, then they'd better focus on making sure all the proper mitigation protocols are followed. It's what has to be done.

[Drak]

Better restore confidence regarding the covid then. There are ten months left. Tick, tick, tick.

Hard to do when the MSM is primality owned by conservative mega corps and conservatives are constantly pumping out covid disinformation. We'll see.

[ProfX]

BTW, the evidence from South Africa and Europe suggests our Omicron wave may peak sometime later this month, and possibly start waning by February.

The thing about the fastest transmitting viruses is they tend to burn bright, hot, and fast, and then burn out.

That was no excuse for people being stupid over the holidays as it was peaking, though.

[ZoWie]

The professor, as usual, is the voice of reason.

Closing the schools is the most effective option in breaking the chain of infection, but it causes other problems that negate any social gains we make. Most of these problems are political, but some are economic, because the burden is then shifted onto a society that has failed to provide day care and proper nutrition due to lack of time, money, and will.

Lose-lose. Chaos in the schools or chaos in the homes. Education and mental health suffer either way, and there seems to be no way around the problem. Controlling Covid is the way around the problem, and the major shortage is of new ideas.

--------

The math favors the professor's idea that the drop in cases will likely be as sharp as the rise. That's indeed the kind of behavior we generally see here. Note that all of our previous peaks in this virus have been more or less symmetrical, in that the dropoff has been about the same as the initial rise. This bodes well for a quick decline in Omicron.

What's been causing the problem is that the dropoff is always to a general continuous level of new infections, which causes covid measures to remain in effect, and stresses overworked health systems. It's not just the surges, but also the ongoing level of infection that's the issue here.

The problem is that mental fatigue is setting in. If vaccines don't work and masks don't work and stay-home orders are ignored, then the problem continues, month after month. Past experiences had prepared us for a series of sprints, but what we got was the Tour de France, a long grind punctuated by short sprints.

What's become evident is that this continued case level (a high noise floor in information theory) causes Americans to do what they do best, and defy any semblance of authority. A large number simply won't comply with the measures that could lower the resting case level and allow the system to gradually catch up with the new reality. They've had it. I wish they hadn't, but then I wish a lot of things that the public seems in no mood to do. People, we have learned, are stubborn. Their first impulse is to slay the messenger.

So the high noise floor is the one reality that needs to be addressed.

The other reality is that holidays are a bitch. People won't give them up. They just won't. Jesus wasn't born in the dead of winter. The Biblical accounts suggest a summer event. There is apparently a human need for late-autumn holidays to get them past the winter solstice with their mental health intact. This goes all the way back, and seems pretty much pan-cultural in the "temperate" latitudes where there's a change of seasons.

This guarantees that the coming of winter will make a lot of people sick. The optimum time of year for isolation is inherently depressing, and most people won't isolate. So they get sick, even in the best of years.

Colds and flu are processed successfully by the culture, and we continue. People don't know what to make of Covid. They simply won't give up traveling and meeting with family, even relatives that they hate. Not on Thanksgiving (harvest/food for the winter), nor on Christmas/Chanukah/Kwaanza/Festivus/whatever you do at your house (solstice/sun returns/rebirth). People don't seem wired to do that, even for a couple of years.

Once this noise floor is lowered, the surges can be handled with contingency plans. I don't know the solution here, though.

[Libertas]

Yeah, burn out soon, we hope.

I have a colonoscopy scheduled in 12 days, and I am considering postponing for a few weeks with the hopes that it will wind down by then.

Theory being even in as controlled an environment as this will be (everyone has to test negative to be in the building let alone the room) there is still risk given the ease in which this thing transmits.

[carmenjonze]

PLEASE explain to me WHY in the FUCK would any democratic mayor do this?

Because they're beholden to munny.

In Mayor Lightfoot's case, the teacher's union wasn't asking for a shutdown or to go remote. They were asking for mitigation standards to be in place in time for school opening up. They weren't, and they voted to go remote for a couple weeks until they're put in place. The next day, Lightfoot locked them out of their online accounts. She also gave $280M of the city budget to the cops on COVID relief https://abc7chicago.com/covid-relief-cp ... /10350078/. The info about this is on Twitter with the hashtag #LoriLockout.

In NYC, it's a similar situation. LAUSD handled it better with mitigation in place, testing, masks distribution, but they've still got 13% of students with COVID in a HUGE-ass district.

These 3 districts are the largest in the country and I'm behind the teachers 100% because I know how much this country hates teachers, public education, and the children that attend public schools.

[carmenjonze]

Beyond that, you get ostensible liberals like Nikole Hannah Jones who joined in the pileon on teachers this week. Before 1619, she became known for her work on integration and public schools and got a MacArthur for it, so she no doubt feels she has some clout to speak. And like I've said many times on RFL, I'm not a big fan of hers. But this bit about teachers being selfish and not thinking of parents and students....um, hello....teachers have kids and families...IDK, people are just very quick to start spouting conservative talking points when it suits them.

To me, part of the major problem is that the Biden administration is afraid to govern, and say look - we've had exponential increases in cases and deaths over the past few weeks. Everybody stay TF home, here's $2K a month to do it. Parents, yes it is going to be a drag to have your kids at home again, but better that than spreading COVID everywhere so that truly nobody can work. That's what we've got now. Even Donald Trump had the good sense to do that, as much as he bunged up this entire situation to begin with.

There are other factors like longstanding lack of infrastructure and the 40 years of defunding of public education, no substitute teachers or school nurses for when everybody on faculty gets COVID, parents sending sick kids to school anyway because there's no childcare or they can't afford or make arrangements for it. And the big one that doesn't have anything to do with what the government is doing: people still not masking and doing whatever TF they wanna because they can, and spreading disease. I'm not talking about the antivaxxers, I'm talking about regular people who wish to pretend this isn't a pandemic, or that the pandemic is happening *over there*.

A lot of it is on Biden, and state and city governments. But not all of it.

[carmenjonze]

This person thinks this is a war, I guess.
__________

Mayor Lori E. Lightfoot
@chicagosmayor
.
@CTULocal1
leadership, you’re not listening.

The best, safest place for kids to be is in school. Students need to be back in person as soon as possible.

That’s what parents want. That’s what the science supports. We will not relent.

https://twitter.com/chicagosmayor/statu ... 7825683457
___________

Her kid reportedly goes to private school, which is remote, btw.

Some of these people are corrupt AH.

[Libertas]

Beyond that, you get ostensible liberals like Nikole Hannah Jones who joined in the pileon on teachers this week. Before 1619, she became known for her work on integration and public schools and got a MacArthur for it, so she no doubt feels she has some clout to speak. And like I've said many times on RFL, I'm not a big fan of hers. But this bit about teachers being selfish and not thinking of parents and students....um, hello....teachers have kids and families...IDK, people are just very quick to start spouting conservative talking points when it suits them.

To me, part of the major problem is that the Biden administration is afraid to govern, and say look - we've had exponential increases in cases and deaths over the past few weeks. Everybody stay TF home, here's $2K a month to do it. Parents, yes it is going to be a drag to have your kids at home again, but better that than spreading COVID everywhere so that truly nobody can work. That's what we've got now. Even Donald Trump had the good sense to do that, as much as he bunged up this entire situation to begin with.

There are other factors like longstanding lack of infrastructure and the 40 years of defunding of public education, no substitute teachers or school nurses for when everybody on faculty gets COVID, parents sending sick kids to school anyway because there's no childcare or they can't afford or make arrangements for it. And the big one that doesn't have anything to do with what the government is doing: people still not masking and doing whatever TF they wanna because they can, and spreading disease. I'm not talking about the antivaxxers, I'm talking about regular people who wish to pretend this isn't a pandemic, or that the pandemic is happening *over there*.

A lot of it is on Biden, and state and city governments. But not all of it.

Yep, they appear to be afraid to govern to the extent we need them to at this point.

Giving people money again will cause inflation to rise more, but it may be the only way to avoid a complete meltdown of humanity worldwide.

Having said that, many of the problems are NOT his or democrats, for instance:

As many here know two of my 3 (initially I thought all 3, so far just 2) older grandkids, all boys, got sick. Both were tested, one has Covid with mild symptoms the other tested negative with severe symptoms which might be the flu but no nausea, always had nausea when I had the flu so a little confusing.

TODAY while both are still sick a relative I wont say who is going to a big fucking birthday party at a bowling alley, NOBODY will wear masks if the management lets them get away with it. We cant survive people this dumb, and be sure that the main reason they are doing it is to OWN the libs and I am one of the libs they love to own. Their own family members are sick and they are doing this...

I am fucking ENRAGED, again!

[ZoWie]

There are other factors like longstanding lack of infrastructure and the 40 years of defunding of public education, no substitute teachers or school nurses for when everybody on faculty gets COVID, parents sending sick kids to school anyway because there's no childcare or they can't afford or make arrangements for it. And the big one that doesn't have anything to do with what the government is doing: people still not masking and doing whatever TF they wanna because they can, and spreading disease. I'm not talking about the antivaxxers, I'm talking about regular people who wish to pretend this isn't a pandemic, or that the pandemic is happening *over there*.

A lot of it is on Biden, and state and city governments. But not all of it.

In the long run, it's on the public, but they won't change their behavior and/or priorities unless they have to, and even then some will go for their guns. Indeed a check in the mail would help, but you'd still have an awful lot of kids not handling online learning well and falling behind.

If I could answer that one, I would run for president.

[ProfX]

It's not just the teachers who should be worried. It irritates me that this has anything supposedly to do with their "selfishness". But many of them see a bigger picture.

Children were NEVER immune to previous strains of COVID. But Omicron seems worse for THEM.

Child hospitalization rates hit record highs as Omicron variant becomes prevalent
https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/07/health/u ... index.html

Covid-19 hospitalization rates among children are soaring in the United States, with an average of 4.3 children under 5 per 100,000 hospitalized with an infection as of the week ending January 1, up from 2.6 children the previous week, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

This represents a 48% increase from the week ending December 4, and the largest increase in hospitalization rate this age group has seen over the course of the pandemic.

"For our youngest children, those who are not yet eligible for vaccination, it's critically important that we surround them with people who are vaccinated to provide them protection," CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said Friday.

New hospital admissions for children under 18 with confirmed Covid-19 are already at a record level, at an average of 797 each day, according to data from the CDC and the US Department of Health and Human Services. This is the highest it has ever been, and it's an 80% increase over the previous week.

[snip][end]

Are children dying a lot more from Omicron. No, except for the recurring rare syndrome-like cases (though they exist). That said, you tell the parents whose kids have to go to the hospital, it's no big deal.

[carmenjonze]

Yep, they appear to be afraid to govern to the extent we need them to at this point.

Giving people money again will cause inflation to rise more, but it may be the only way to avoid a complete meltdown of humanity worldwide.

Having said that, many of the problems are NOT his or democrats, for instance:

As many here know two of my 3 (initially I thought all 3, so far just 2) older grandkids, all boys, got sick. Both were tested, one has Covid with mild symptoms the other tested negative with severe symptoms which might be the flu but no nausea, always had nausea when I had the flu so a little confusing.

TODAY while both are still sick a relative I wont say who is going to a big fucking birthday party at a bowling alley, NOBODY will wear masks if the management lets them get away with it. We cant survive people this dumb, and be sure that the main reason they are doing it is to OWN the libs and I am one of the libs they love to own. Their own family members are sick and they are doing this...

I am fucking ENRAGED, again!

We just past $768 billion for the Pentagon while the healthcare system and public education system is crashing and burning. We can afford it.