Posted Saturday 22nd of August, 2020 at 9:35:30 AM by Jeff
Near the end of March, when friends offered me their home on Long Island—they had gone to stay with relatives in Vermont—I thought that I’d go for a week. I had been quarantining at my partner’s house, in Brooklyn. He lives in a one-room studio, which doubles as his work studio, on the second floor of an old, four-story communal house, which he was sharing with four other people. We formed a pod. No outside contacts. No one left the house after mid-March, except for a rare grocery run, or a bike ride, or to walk the house dog. I promised that, while away, I would continue to social-distance. I’d be joining the experiment in solitude under way across the world.
When I arrived at my friends’ empty house, a wake of vultures was perched in a dead tree in the back yard. Not exactly auspicious. But the salty fresh air felt miraculous, the yard was covered in soft, lime-green moss, and the house was peaceful, full of light. It had an out-of-tune old piano, raised beds ready for planting, and a single room on the second floor that looked out over a marina. The only sounds were the birds and boats’ clanging masts. My friends had left the kitchen fully stocked, so I didn’t worry about bringing my city germs to the local grocery store. The days passed quickly. I stayed longer than I thought I would. Then, on Tuesday, April 14th, right when I planned to head back to Brooklyn, I woke up symptomatic.
Posted Saturday 22nd of August, 2020 at 9:34:21 AM by Jeff
Never in our lives have we experienced such a global phenomenon. For the first time in the history of the world, all of humanity, informed by the unprecedented reach of digital technology, has come together, focused on the same existential threat, consumed by the same fears and uncertainties, eagerly anticipating the same, as yet unrealized, promises of medical science.
In a single season, civilization has been brought low by a microscopic parasite 10,000 times smaller than a grain of salt. COVID-19 attacks our physical bodies, but also the cultural foundations of our lives, the toolbox of community and connectivity that is for the human what claws and teeth represent to the tiger.
Posted Saturday 22nd of August, 2020 at 9:33:54 AM by Jeff
June 2021. The world has been in pandemic mode for a year and a half. The virus continues to spread at a slow burn; intermittent lockdowns are the new normal. An approved vaccine offers six months of protection, but international deal-making has slowed its distribution. An estimated 250 million people have been infected worldwide, and 1.75 million are dead.
Scenarios such as this one imagine how the COVID-19 pandemic might play out1. Around the world, epidemiologists are constructing short- and long-term projections as a way to prepare for, and potentially mitigate, the spread and impact of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Although their forecasts and timelines vary, modellers agree on two things: COVID-19 is here to stay, and the future depends on a lot of unknowns, including whether people develop lasting immunity to the virus, whether seasonality affects its spread, and — perhaps most importantly — the choices made by governments and individuals. “A lot of places are unlocking, and a lot of places aren’t. We don’t really yet know what’s going to happen,” says Rosalind Eggo, an infectious-disease modeller at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM).
Posted Saturday 22nd of August, 2020 at 9:33:18 AM by Jeff
Data is beginning to emerge from contact tracing in states where indoor dining and drinking has resumed that proves that restaurants and bars can become vectors for spreading COVID-19, spelling bad news for the hospitality industry as a whole.
Dining inside a restaurant — at a table, with a server, a bottle of wine, and leisurely after-dinner drinks — isn’t something that anyone in San Francisco has done since early March. And even in the first two weeks of March, it was something many of us did skittishly and with a considerable amount of anxiety, as the pandemic threat loomed just beyond the city limits.
Posted Saturday 22nd of August, 2020 at 9:33:06 AM by Jeff
The masks were called muzzles, germ shields and dirt traps. They gave people a “pig-like snout.” Some people snipped holes in their masks to smoke cigars. Others fastened them to dogs in mockery. Bandits used them to rob banks.
More than a century ago, as the 1918 influenza pandemic raged in the United States, masks of gauze and cheesecloth became the facial front lines in the battle against the virus. But as they have now, the masks also stoked political division. Then, as now, medical authorities urged the wearing of masks to help slow the spread of disease. And then, as now, some people resisted.
Posted Saturday 22nd of August, 2020 at 9:30:49 AM by Jeff
On the long timeline of racial justice protests in Portland, July 1 was a lifetime ago.
Protesters had settled into a nightly routine at the Multnomah County Justice Center. The fencing around the building had just come down. The iconic elk statue still stood watch above Lownsdale and Chapman Squares, offering a comfortable late-night perch for many protesters.
Then federal law enforcement officers began appearing at the daily protests.
Posted Saturday 22nd of August, 2020 at 9:30:39 AM by Jeff
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the country’s top public health agency, is being kicked around by the White House. And it doesn’t have much power to kick back.
As President Trump spars with nearly all of the federal agencies that have a hand in his administration’s much-maligned response to the coronavirus pandemic, he’s been particularly successful at sidelining the CDC.
There’s good reason. The CDC, far more than other agencies, struggles with a slew of structural and cultural issues that have left the agency ill-equipped to fend off political attacks, or even to build up the political capital that could have helped it navigate the stark spotlight it finds itself in now.
Posted Saturday 22nd of August, 2020 at 9:28:18 AM by Jeff
LARRY BRILLIANT SAYS he doesn’t have a crystal ball. But 14 years ago, Brilliant, the epidemiologist who helped eradicate smallpox, spoke to a TED audience and described what the next pandemic would look like. At the time, it sounded almost too horrible to take seriously. “A billion people would get sick,” he said. “As many as 165 million people would die. There would be a global recession and depression, and the cost to our economy of $1 to $3 trillion would be far worse for everyone than merely 100 million people dying, because so many more people would lose their jobs and their health care benefits, that the consequences are almost unthinkable.”
Now the unthinkable is here, and Brilliant, the Chairman of the board of Ending Pandemics, is sharing expertise with those on the front lines. We are a long way from 100 million deaths due to the novel coronavirus, but it has turned our world upside down. Brilliant is trying not to say “I told you so” too often. But he did tell us so, not only in talks and writings, but as the senior technical advisor for the pandemic horror film Contagion, now a top streaming selection for the homebound. Besides working with the World Health Organization in the effort to end smallpox, Brilliant, who is now 75, has fought flu, polio, and blindness; once led Google’s nonprofit wing, Google.org; co-founded the conferencing system the Well; and has traveled with the Grateful Dead.
Posted Saturday 22nd of August, 2020 at 9:27:13 AM by Jeff
“That whole thing about the bad apple? I hate when people say that,” Rizer tells me. “The bad apple rots the barrel. And until we do something about the rotten barrel, it doesn’t matter how many good fucking apples you put in.”
To illustrate the problem, Rizer tells a story about a time he observed a patrol by some officers in Montgomery, Alabama. They were called in to deal with a woman they knew had mental illness; she was flailing around and had cut someone with a broken plant pick. To subdue her, one of the officers body-slammed her against a door. Hard.
Posted Saturday 22nd of August, 2020 at 9:26:51 AM by Jeff
Its decision to carry on in the face of the pandemic has yielded a surge of deaths without sparing its economy from damage — a red flag as the United States and Britain move to lift lockdowns.
Posted Saturday 22nd of August, 2020 at 9:26:09 AM by Jeff
Doctors may be missing signs of serious and potentially fatal brain disorders triggered by coronavirus, as they emerge in mildly affected or recovering patients, scientists have warned.
Neurologists are on Wednesday publishing details of more than 40 UK Covid-19 patients whose complications ranged from brain inflammation and delirium to nerve damage and stroke. In some cases, the neurological problem was the patient’s first and main symptom.
Posted Saturday 22nd of August, 2020 at 9:22:48 AM by Jeff
In mid-May, Merced County Sheriff Vernon Warnke had a lot to say about California’s stay-at-home orders to slow the spread of coronavirus, none of it good.
He posted a defiant message to Facebook saying he refused to enforce the state’s orders because they meant “economic slaughter” and he believed government had no right to tell him or anyone else it was too risky to get a haircut or dental checkup.
“I truly believe that Governor Newsom’s motivation is to have the majority of the citizens (and illegal residents) dependant [sic] on governments assistance so he could maintain this control once this ‘pandemic’ is declared over,” Warnke wrote.
Posted Saturday 22nd of August, 2020 at 9:21:51 AM by Jeff
It shocks and horrifies the world. America has 120,000 dead and counting of Coronavirus. That number’s going to rise to 200,000 in the blink of an eye. Where will it end? 500,000, a million — these figures are no longer the stuff of nightmares. Just of the grim and dystopian reality called American life.
But what truly startles the world is this: Donald Trump doesn’t appear to care. Not one bit. Mostly, he’s — still — golfing. When he wasn’t golfing, first, he minimized, then he pretended it would all go away, then he told people to drink bleach, then he…reopened the economy before the first wave had even crested. Which means that, of course, this.
While much of the rest of the world is already carefully preparing and planning for how to fight a second wave — America still has no strategy or plan for the first. It never did have anything resembling a national strategy for a lethal pandemic. Hence, in America, there’s just a rising tide of death, still surging ever higher. What the?
Posted Saturday 22nd of August, 2020 at 9:21:21 AM by Jeff
During the past two months, I have had lengthy conversations with some 30 scientists, health experts, and past and current government officials—all of them people with firsthand knowledge of what our response to the coronavirus pandemic should have been, could have been, and actually was. The government officials had served or are still serving in the uniformed military, on the White House staff, or in other executive departments, and in various intelligence agencies. Some spoke on condition of anonymity, given their official roles. As I continued these conversations, the people I talked with had noticeably different moods. First, in March and April, they were astonished and puzzled about what had happened. Eventually, in May and June, they were enraged. “The president kept a cruise ship from landing in California, because he didn’t want ‘his numbers’ to go up,” a former senior government official told me. He was referring to Donald Trump’s comment, in early March, that he didn’t want infected passengers on the cruise ship Grand Princess to come ashore, because “I like the numbers being where they are.” Trump didn’t try to write this comment off as a “joke,” his go-to defense when his remarks cause outrage, including his June 20 comment in Tulsa that he’d told medical officials to “slow the testing down, please” in order to keep the reported case level low. But the evidence shows that he has been deadly earnest about denying the threat of COVID-19, and delaying action against it.
Posted Saturday 22nd of August, 2020 at 9:20:54 AM by Jeff
As California began to rapidly reopen the economy, officials in Santa Cruz County decided the safe thing to do was keep its landmark beaches largely closed in the afternoons to prevent crowds that could spread the coronavirus.
But the public increasingly ignored the rules and demanded their summer on the sand, swimming, sunbathing and just hanging out. Unable to stop the crowds, county officials simply gave up.
Posted Saturday 22nd of August, 2020 at 9:20:39 AM by Jeff
For many Americans, the coronavirus pandemic has become white noise—old news that has faded into the background of their lives. But the crisis is far from over. Arizona is one of the pandemic’s new hot spots, with 24,000 confirmed cases over the past week and rising hospitalizations and deaths. Popescu saw the surge coming, “but to actually see it play out is heartbreaking,” she said. “It didn’t have to be this way.”
Popescu is one of many public-health experts who have been preparing for and battling the pandemic since the start of the year. They’re not treating sick people, as doctors or nurses might be, but are instead advising policy makers, monitoring the pandemic’s movements, modeling its likely trajectory, and ensuring that hospitals are ready.
Posted Saturday 22nd of August, 2020 at 9:19:54 AM by Jeff
What, to my people, is the Fourth of July? My people, who are failed every day by every country, sleepless in the long night, terrorized by fireworks, we who have cried salt baths for our kin.
Look at all we have borne for you: arms, armistice, the sweetest fruits, flesh of children hidden away from the ugly summer of their own blood — we are on the front lines. Help me, tell me, what do we tell the children of your Fourth of July? What is death to a daughter? What is river to a sea? Where is the country where my people are safe?
Ancestors set the table send dream mares in high supply. Too heavy, too spent, too hot to cook, no promise beyond the sparkly simple bombs. Keep your holiday, your hunger, the blood in your teeth. Police parade down streets, proud descendants of the slave patrol. Theater of denial, a propaganda pageant, and we are on the front lines all summer. My uncle can’t sleep and he was born free. And he ain’t never been.
Posted Saturday 22nd of August, 2020 at 9:17:52 AM by Jeff
In the summer of 2016, a 73-year-old Deaf woman suffering from dementia allegedly tried to pull another resident at her skilled nursing facility out of a chair.
After San Francisco police officers arrived at the scene, the officers were told they needed to communicate with the Deaf woman by writing down their orders, but they declined. The woman tried to hit another resident with a pillow, and then she allegedly “lunged” at the officers when they attempted to remove the pillow from her hands.
Officers then handcuffed the 73-year-old woman, leaving marks or her wrists, and she ended up at San Francisco General Hospital for a multi-hour psychiatric hold. There, doctors concluded, the woman’s behavioral outburst was not due to a psychiatric emergency, but rather “difficulty with communication due to deafness as well as progressing dementia.”
A Department of Police Accountability investigation completed a year later found that instead of soothing the woman, the officers escalated the encounter.
Posted Saturday 22nd of August, 2020 at 9:17:27 AM by Jeff
For now, the only options we have for reducing the spread of Covid-19 are social distancing and masks. According to a report released Thursday by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, by October, cumulative Covid-19 deaths could reach 179,106 people. Their projections show that number dropping to 146,047 people if at least 95 percent of Americans wear masks in public. With “quarantine fatigue” setting in, it seems like masks are our best chance at living a life that resembles pre-pandemic days while protecting others.
Posted Saturday 22nd of August, 2020 at 9:16:47 AM by Jeff
From the authors of Paul Has Measles comes Paul Stays Home, an illustrated book about COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2 for children.
Paul is sad because he can’t go out. He can’t see his friends or visit his grandparents. Like everyone else, he has to wait until the coronavirus pandemic is over. What is the coronavirus? How is it spread? How can we take care of ourselves and our families?
Paul Stays Home is written by Susana López, Selene Zárate, and Marth Yocupicio, with illustrations by Eva Lobatón.
Posted Saturday 22nd of August, 2020 at 9:15:11 AM by Jeff
DEMONSTRATING CAN be a dangerous activity, even in the best of circumstances. During a pandemic, it can be lethal. When mass protests against police brutality broke out in America earlier this month, following the death of George Floyd at the hands of policemen in Minneapolis, public-health experts worried they would lead to a surge in infections. Anthony Fauci, a leading member of the White House’s coronavirus task-force, called the protests “the perfect set-up” for the spread of the virus. Eric Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles, warned that the gatherings could become “super-spreader events”.
This was more than scaremongering. SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes covid-19, is spread through droplets of moisture produced when an infected person speaks, coughs or sneezes. Large, crowded gatherings can contribute to the spread of the virus, especially when those involved are shouting and chanting slogans—projecting droplets farther into the air. Police tactics such as spraying tear-gas, herding protesters into contained areas and rounding up troublemakers into police vans and jail cells also increase the risk of infection.
Posted Wednesday 8th of July, 2020 at 9:22:11 AM by Jeff
Police officers across America have adopted a set of beliefs about their work and its role in our society. The tenets of police ideology are not codified or written down, but are nonetheless widely shared in departments around the country.
The ideology holds that the world is a profoundly dangerous place: Officers are conditioned to see themselves as constantly in danger and that the only way to guarantee survival is to dominate the citizens they’re supposed to protect. The police believe they’re alone in this fight; police ideology holds that officers are under siege by criminals and are not understood or respected by the broader citizenry. These beliefs, combined with widely held racial stereotypes, push officers toward violent and racist behavior during intense and stressful street interactions.
Posted Wednesday 8th of July, 2020 at 9:21:31 AM by Jeff
Maxwell would take a knee in his crisp white home jersey, alone, while the rest of his teammates stood. Death threats and harassment immediately followed. Four days later, in Texas, his A’s teammates would joke with him about assassins in the box seats, how no one wanted to stand next to him during the anthem or sit next to him in the dugout for fear of being hit with a bullet intended for him. In the following weeks, Maxwell’s #protest would be met with skepticism, condescension and virtually no true support from anyone in major league baseball.
Posted Thursday 2nd of July, 2020 at 6:50:24 PM by Jeff
Amid the tragedy and confusion of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Ashish K. Jha ’92, director of Harvard University’s Global Health Institute, has emerged as a leading voice of reason and expertise, frequently called upon to clarify complicated issues in such forums as CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times and The Washington Post. Although Jha is more optimistic than many experts about the course of the pandemic over the next year, he says the federal government’s response was botched from the start, with deadly consequences. Tens of thousands of American lives were lost, he believes, because of denial, delay, lack of leadership and failure to heed sound scientific guidelines.
