Breathe Baby Breathe

In my conversation with the Asshole about the transmission of Covid I reiterated that it was an AIRBORNE virus and that Covid had a longer life suspended in air. We are unsure what the time frame was but in the beginning it was presumed 15-30 minutes in a poorly ventilated area. Okay so I decided at that point it was mask on and limit any time indoors when shopping to under 30 minutes. And I washed my hands prior to shopping and again after. I always was produce and any containers for food I always switched out to my own and threw out the provided ones. I might wipe down those I did not but that was the extent of it. I never wiped down mail, packages or anything. Uh by that time it reached me dozens of hands had touched it and DNA transfer alone is an issue so just unpack your shit, toss the boxes and wash your hands again.

But the big issue is the one surrounding ventilation. I was amazed at how few buses had windows open and yes they have the ability to ventilate subway cars and they don’t but the reduced passenger level led to less of an issue and again I just got up and off and move and still do. That said I am not on anyone form longer than 30 minutes in which that is a problem. Right now again we do not know enough about the lingering affect to be comfortable with extensive hanging out unmasked for me so when at the Theater I drink with a straw under my mask, I do what I have to to simply feel safer.

The Asshole in this course of our convo did not seem to grasp it at first and then I breathed on the glass and made a fog, that then becomes a gas that breaks up and circulates in the air. I saw a glimmer of light and then we ended the discussion, as I am not a teacher of science but I do get how we have solids into liquids and vice a versa. Temp change is a key as well in understanding transmission and I am not sure at this point if we have settled the argument that humidity is or is not an affect to Covid’s ability to linger and transmit.

But the real amusing factor is watching the morons in the gym. They are always half dressed and that issue that liquid into solid means that sweat is a gas that becomes something liquid that can drop on a piece of equipment and in turn dry and dissipate into the air and where it can linger. But by having strong ventilation as in opening windows, having a fan with a HEPA filter or some type of more complex equipment can reduce that. And sure enough almost everyone comes in, closes windows and then breathes as if they are climbing Everest while running up and down and touching everything in their path, with uncovered legs and arms dripping sweat. Good times fun times. The minute the gym hits the 3 to 4 person mark and they start closing windows the time clock begins and within 15 mins I am out. I have a mask there that I don for that same period and quickly wipe and move out. Men are the most bizarre but many women of late also seem to think that if they act like an asshole they will find one of their own. I watched a couple with masks arrive yesterday and shut all the windows. Informed and stupid are a wonderful combo.

Below is an article about ventilation and how all this time has passed and so few changes have been made with regards to that subject. It is what I told the Asshole why I won’t eat indoors and and those stupid plexiglass barricades is why I did the demo, it is a spit collector not a protector. He ranted about those but by that time I had tuned out his bullshit as I have zero respect for a Father who doesn’t do right for his own well being or that of his family.

Virus at Once

The benefits of ventilation reach far beyond the coronavirus. What if we stop taking colds and flus for granted, too?By Sarah Zhang

Shira Inbar

September 7, 2021

Updated at 3:00 p.m. ET on September 7, 2021

When London vanquished cholera in the 19th century, it took not a vaccine, or a drug, but a sewage system. The city’s drinking water was intermingling with human waste, spreading bacteria in one deadly outbreak after another. A new comprehensive network of sewers separated the two. London never experienced a major cholera outbreak after 1866. All that was needed was 318 million bricks, 23 million cubic feet of concrete, and a major reengineering of the urban landscape.

The 19th and early 20th century saw a number of ambitious public-health efforts like this. The United States eliminated yellow fever and malaria, for example, with a combination of pesticides, wide-scale landscape management, and window screens that kept mosquitoes at bay. One by one, the diseases that people accepted as inevitable facts in life—dysentery, typhoid, typhus, to name a few more—became unacceptable in the developing world. But after all this success, after all we’ve done to prevent the spread of disease through water and insects, we seem to have overlooked something. We overlooked air.

This turned out to have devastating consequences for the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. The original dogma, you might remember, was that the novel coronavirus spread like the flu, through droplets that quickly fell out of the air. We didn’t need ventilation or masks; we needed to wash our hands and disinfect everything we touched. But a year and half of evidence has made clear that the tiny virus-laden particles indeed linger in the air of poorly ventilated areas. It explains why outdoors is safer than in, why a single infected person can super-spread to dozens of others without directly speaking to or touching them. If we are to live with this coronavirus forever—as seems very likely—some scientists are now pushing to reimagine building ventilation and clean up indoor air. We don’t drink contaminated water. Why do we tolerate breathing contaminated air?

It’s not just about COVID-19. The scientists who recognized the threat of airborne coronavirus early did so because they spent years studying evidence that—contrary to conventional wisdom—common respiratory illnesses such as the flu and colds can also spread through the air. We’ve long accepted colds and flus as inevitable facts of life, but are they? Why not redesign the airflow in our buildings to prevent them, too? What’s more, says Raymond Tellier, a microbiologist at McGill University, SARS-CoV-2 is unlikely to be the last airborne pandemic. The same measures that protect us from common viruses might also protect us from the next unknown pathogen.

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To understand why pathogens can spread through the air, it helps to understand just how much of it we breathe. “About eight to 10 liters a minute,” says Catherine Noakes, who studies indoor air quality at the University of Leeds, in England. Think four or five big soda bottles per minute, multiply that by the number of people in a room, and you can see how we are constantly breathing in one another’s lung secretions.

The particles emitted when people cough, talk, or breathe come in a range of sizes. We’ve all been unwittingly sprayed by large droplets of saliva from the mouth of an overenthusiastic talker. But smaller particles called aerosols can also form when the vocal cords vibrate to air rushing out from the lungs. And the smallest aerosols come from deep inside the lungs. The process of breathing, says Lidia Morawska, an aerosol scientist at Queensland University of Technology, in Australia, is essentially a process of forcing air through the lungs’ moist passages. She compares it to spraying a nebulizer or perfume bottle, in which liquid—lung secretions, in this case—becomes suspended in exhaled air.

Even before SARS-CoV-2, studies of respiratory viruses like the flu and RSV have noted the potential for spread through fine aerosols. The tiny liquid particles seem to carry the most virus, possibly because they come from deepest in the respiratory tract. They remain suspended longest in the air because of their size. And they can travel deeper into other people’s lungs when breathed in; studies have found that a smaller amount of influenza virus is needed to infect people when inhaled as aerosols rather than sprayed up the nose as droplets. Real-world evidence stretching back decades also has suggested that influenza could spread through the air. In 1977, a single ill passenger transmitted the flu to 72 percent of the people on an Alaska Airlines flight. The plane had been grounded for three hours for repairs and the air-recirculation system had been turned off, so everyone was forced to breathe the same air.

In official public-health guidance, however, the possibility of flu-laden aerosols still barely gets a mention. The CDC and World Health Organization guidelines focus on large droplets that supposedly do not travel beyond six feet or one meter, respectively. (Never mind that scientists who actually study aerosols knew this six-foot rule violated the laws of physics.) The coronavirus should get us to take the airborne spread of flu and colds more seriously too, says Jonathan Samet, a pulmonary physician and epidemiologist at the Colorado School of Public Health. At the very least, it should spur research to establish the relative importance of different routes of transmission. “We had done such limited research before on airborne transmission of common infections,” Samet told me. This just wasn’t seen as a major problem until now.

At the University of Maryland, Donald Milton—one of the few longtime airborne-transmission researchers—is about to embark on a multiyear, controlled trial aimed at understanding influenza. Flu patients and healthy participants will share a room in this study. And they will take different precautions, such as hand-washing plus face shields or having good ventilation, which would presumably stop either droplet or aerosol transmission. The trial is meant to prove which intervention works the best, and thus which transmission route is dominant. When Milton had managed to get funding for a different aerosol study in the 2000s, he said a public-health official told him, “We’re funding you to put the nail in the coffin of the idea that aerosols are important.” Now, Milton says, “We’ll find out which direction the nail is being driven here.”

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A virus that lingers in the air is an uncomfortable and inconvenient revelation. Scientists who had pushed the WHO to recognize airborne transmission of COVID-19 last year told me they were baffled by the resistance they encountered, but they could see why their ideas were unwelcome. In those early days when masks were scarce, admitting that a virus was airborne meant admitting that our antivirus measures were not very effective. “We want to feel we’re in control. If something is transmitted through your contaminated hands touching your face, you control that,” Noakes said. “But if something’s transmitted through breathing the same air, that is very, very hard for an individual to manage.”

The WHO took until July 2020 to acknowledge that the coronavirus could spread through aerosols in the air. Even now, Morawska says, many public-health guidelines are stuck in a pre-airborne world. Where she lives in Australia, people are wearing face masks to walk down the street and then taking them off as soon as they sit down at restaurants, which are operating at full capacity. It’s like some kind of medieval ritual, she says, with no regard for how the virus actually spreads. In the restaurants, “there’s no ventilation,” she adds, which she knows because she’s the type of scientist who takes an air-quality meter to the restaurant.

Earlier this year, Morawska and dozens of her colleagues in the fields of building science, public health, and medicine published an editorial in Science calling for a “paradigm shift” around indoor air. Yes, vaccines and masks work against the coronavirus, but these scientists wanted to think bigger and more ambitious—beyond what any single person can do to protect themselves. If buildings are allowing respiratory viruses to spread by air, we should be able to redesign buildings to prevent that. We just have to reimagine how air flows through all the places we work, learn, play, and breathe.

The pandemic has already prompted, in some schools and workplaces, ad hoc fixes for indoor air: portable HEPA filters, disinfecting UV lights, and even just open windows. But these quick fixes amount to a “Band-Aid” in poorly designed or functioning buildings, says William Bahnfleth, an architectural engineer at Penn State University who is also a co-author of the Science editorial. (Tellier, Noakes, and Milton are authors too; the author list is a real who’s who of the field.) Modern buildings have sophisticated ventilation systems to keep their temperatures comfortable and their smells pleasant—why not use these systems to keep indoor air free of viruses too?

Indeed, hospitals and laboratories already have HVAC systems designed to minimize the spread of pathogens. No one I spoke with thought an average school or office building has to be as tightly controlled as a biocontainment facility, but if not, then we need a new and different set of minimum standards. A rule of thumb, Noakes suggested, is at least four to six complete air changes an hour in a room, depending on its size and occupancy. But we also need more detailed studies to understand how specific ventilation levels and strategies will actually reduce disease transmission among people. This research can then guide new indoor air-quality standards from the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), which are commonly the basis of local building codes. Changing the building codes, Bahnfleth said, is what will actually get buildings to change their ventilation systems.

The challenge ahead is cost. Piping more outdoor air into a building or adding air filters both require more energy and money to run the HVAC system. (Outdoor air needs to be cooled, heated, humidified, or dehumidified based on the system; adding filters is less energy intensive but it could still require more powerful fans to push the air through.) For decades, engineers have focused on making buildings more energy efficient, and it’s “hard to find a lot of professionals who are really pushing indoor air quality,” Bahnfleth said. He has been helping set COVID-19 ventilation guidelines as chair of the ASHRAE Epidemic Task Force. The pushback based on energy usage, he said, was immediate. In addition to energy costs, retrofitting existing buildings might require significant modifications. For example, if you add air filters but your fans aren’t powerful enough, you’re on the hook for replacing the fans too.

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The question boils down to: How much disease are we willing to tolerate before we act? When London built its sewage system, its cholera outbreaks were killing thousands of people. What finally spurred Parliament to act was the stench coming off the River Thames during the Great Stink of 1858. At the time, Victorians believed that foul air caused disease, and this was an emergency. (They were wrong about exactly how cholera was spreading from the river—it was through contaminated water—but they had ironically stumbled upon the right solution.)

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Take me to your leader

This is the new excuse, explanation or reasoning behind well anything but particularly vaccinations. There are the Celebrity endorsements which seem to have as much meaning as the question, “Do you want fries with that?” As either you do or you don’t and the offer is not so much one as a reminder. Then we have of course the politics of allegiance whatever that means and lastly the trauma of a tale either told or known that for some reason has been associated with having a vaccine that could protect your health and those around you. Yes we know that having an anal wart removed was tough but what has that got to do with this?

As the cries of help resound through the universe from medical staff who cannot find the services and treatments available to the newly hospitalized, going “Oh shit this is real man” to the families who have lost members as they were just waiting to see if anyone else died, not from Covid but from the vaccine, to only find out that people were still dying from Covid, so whoops my bad!

Two essays yesterday resonated with me that discussed the hyper hysteria over vaccines, one from a woman in Kansas who knows that they quit believing in OZ a long time ago and how this divisive an issue is one that really has no reason to be. I recommend reading What To Do with our Covid Rage as again this is not an issue where there is one right way or wrong way, there is just no way to reconcile the rage that the vaxxed and the unvaxxed have for one another. This is no longer about politics it is about personhood and control.

The other from one of my favorite contrarians and skeptics about how Covid has been handled from the outset, Zeynep Tufekci, The CDC Needs to Stop Confusing the Public. There is so much misinformation and contradicting data and much of it coming from the CDC and the NIH spokes daddy, Fauci, that I quit listening to them a long time ago. Well I never did but I did read it and then used it to fact check and double check from other sources with regards to their analysis that it enabled me to make the decisions I needed to adapt my own behavior. I have attended quite a few events and most all require vaccines and the outdoor ones that haven’t are well outdoors. I don’t congregate in packed bars and restaurants unless I feel that comfortable with the ventilation or the actual vax status of the region. So thanks RI for being heavily vaxxed! But in all honesty we are back to ground zero when it comes to handling the pandemic and that quarantining and curfews will do nothing to stop the spread. Do they even use that idiotic expression anymore?

When the leadership has handed over the messaging to a beleaguered institution there is a problem as it will not be any better overnight with a new messenger and frankly the overturn of medical health professionals across the country have proven that yes you can shoot the messenger. Mask, no mask. Booster, no booster. Variant transmission, no and then yes. Well I really think Provincetown is a great test study for how to not party. This happened last year on Fire Island and what have we learned here? That Gays and viruses are magnets. Boys, please don’t be boys be men and mask up everywhere.

Did they check the Lallapalooza event, the Newport Folk or Jazz Festival? I am going no with that as I attended one and heard nothing so if there was an outbreak they should of as they had our data and our vaccination info. So we are on our own as again there is no fucking contact tracking/tracing and never was. It was a private citizen in Provincetown who did it and again the Gay community has a well established protocol of this type of action and duty when it comes to tracking virus spread. I wonder how many were also on anti viral drugs like Prep and did that have an affect? Again we will never know shit about Covid and why it seems to do more damage to faces of color and to Gays (yes that is a fact) than to aging white fucks who think they are invincible. Yes, I had that discussion too in RI where a man claimed ALL the deaths were with those who had preexisting conditions. I assume living was one said “condition.”

So who are the experts one turns to when seeking advice rergarding the vaccine? The Media? Politicians? Doctors? Scientists? Teachers? Celebrities? Religious Figures? All of the above? When I read this article I was shocked it took several deaths before intervening. Better late than never I guess.

Florida church reeling after six members die within 10 days amid spike in cases

By Maria Paul The Washington Post August 8 2021

Florida church hosts vaccine drive after six of its members die of covid-19 in 10 days

For George L. Davis, a bishop at Impact Church in Jacksonville, getting vaccinated against the coronavirus was an act of faith. He says that he believes in divine creation, and that the shot is a miracle — a sign of God guiding scientists in their attempts to curb a devastating virus. Yet, for his nondenominational congregation, the provenance of a lifesaving tool was not as obvious.

The hesitancy was clear from the beginning. When cases surged, some of Davis’s congregation, which numbers more than 6,000 parishioners, had a different idea of the pandemic’s effects. One spat back false information to the pastor. Others did not trust government and health officials. Davis said he tried to bridge the gap — enacting safety measures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, encouraging vaccinations when doses were made available, and discussing the virus on social media.

Still, he said, some did not listen. Six of the church’s members, Davis said, died of covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, in 10 days. Four of them were healthy and younger than 35; all were unvaccinated.

“It’s very frustrating knowing that these were avoidable deaths,” he said. “You also don’t want the loved ones who are left behind to feel horrible and don’t want to seem like I’m putting guilt onto them, but the reality is, I know that these people would still be here had they gotten the shot.”

It was the devastation that “emboldened” Davis to organize a vaccination drive after each of Sunday’s three services, he said — an unusual move for a Black pastor when the pandemic has divided people across spiritual, ideological and racial lines. While Florida is among the states with the highest infection rates during the new virus surge, Davis’s attempts underscore widespread vaccine hesitancy and the ongoing debate between science and some religious leaders — one that has been especially exacerbated by the pandemic.

In Davis’s experience, medicine and faith are two sides of the same coin.

When doctors diagnosed sickle cell disease in his daughter when she was an infant, they said she was probably not going to live long. Davis and his wife, who is a senior pastor at Impact, prayed, fasted and took Communion every day for two years. At the same time, they researched procedures that could help their baby.

Now, after a bone-marrow transplant, she’s 19.

“The miracle is no less of a miracle if medical science has to kick in to finish it off,” he said. “For me, that’s a little bit of a turning point, because I’ve seen God do it with no medical help up until a point and then finish it off with medical help. And that’s what I [see] in this virus, too.”

Since the pandemic began in the United States, Davis’s sermons have urged protection and emphasized the coexistence of science and faith. For Davis, the need to care for one another led him to another role: a trusted adviser in a church where about 75 percent of parishioners are Black, a demographic that struggles with a legacy of distrust in medical institutions.

The Tuskegee Study from the 1930s to the ’70s — a secret experiment conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service to research the progression of syphilis in Black males without treatment — is one major reason health officials’ outreach in Black communities has suffered, Davis said. Many of his parishioners refused to get vaccinated at a government-run vaccination center in front of the church, prompting the pastor to organize a campaign in March.https://0341bd6a096d40f17258a9cead25cede.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

“My pushback was, ‘I promise you, we’ll get you a good turnout because there are a lot of people who are more comfortable coming to their church for a vaccine than they would be going to a government-run health location,’ ” he said. “And it turned out to be true. Some 1,000 people registered and 800 showed up.”

Davis’s observation is consistent with a March study by the nonprofit Public Religion Research Institute. It found that about 36 percent of Black Protestants who are vaccine-hesitant said faith-based approaches would make them more likely to get vaccinated. About 70 percent said they would turn to a religious leader for information about vaccination.

The success of Davis’s first vaccine drive, combined with devastation about the deaths of parishioners, inspired him to organize a second one for Sunday, when a panel of University of Florida experts was present to answer questions, he said.

More than 200 people were vaccinated, and 35 percent of them were teenagers.

“Several people who told me out of their own mouth, ‘I wasn’t comfortable doing this, but because I’m here in my church, because I’ve heard my pastor talk about it, I’m more comfortable doing it,’ ” he said. “And it isn’t just the elderly folks. It was a lot of young people, who are also being affected by it.”

Unvaccinated young people are increasingly among the most severe cases of the coronavirus’s easier-to-spread delta variant, Mary Mayhew, president of the Florida Hospital Association, told The Washington Post on Wednesday.

“We now are seeing healthy 25-year-olds in the hospital in intensive care and on ventilators,” she said. “The delta variant has been ripping through a younger unvaccinated population and putting them into the hospitals.”

Cities with young populations have seen significant spikes in cases. Jacksonville faced a surge representing “200-plus percent of their previous highest peak,” Mayhew said last week.

According to data from Baptist Health, the number of children admitted in July more than quadrupled from June. Across Baptist Health’s five-hospital system, 579 covid-19 patients — including 19 children — were reported Sunday. Among the 116 patients in intensive care, five were children. An unvaccinated 16-year-old with no underlying health problems died Thursday at Baptist’s Wolfson Children’s Hospital in Jacksonville, the company said.

The increase in hospitalizations is not unique to Jacksonville. With 13,793 patients — a 30 percent uptick since last week — Florida is the state with the most hospitalized people in the country, according to data from The Post’s coronavirus tracker.

Hospitals statewide have been overwhelmed, Mayhew said, but not only as a result of the pandemic: Covid-19, other illnesses and a staffing shortage have made the state’s health-care problems dire.

“This is why we need people to get vaccinated,” Mayhew added.

States have offered incentives — including free doughnuts, beer and $100 savings bonds. Celebrities have lent their high-profile endorsements. Yet mistrust lingers, baffling officials.

Although a clear-cut answer may take time to find, the Impact Church pastor said the solution may have been nestled within communities the whole time.

“A lot of people look up to the entertainers and media moguls, but when it comes to trust, they trust the people in their communities,” he said. “You know, your pastors, your barbers, your friends — those folks that you know have been there with you through some real tough times after.”

A Memorial

This marks a year from the death of George Floyd, in that same year 965 others who were killed at the hands of Police, some known some not. We need to know their names as well.

And with that I will say that Police Reform in some States has moved forward while the federal reform promised has stalled as the issues surrounding the rise of gun violence, crime and physical assaults on people of color and of faith has risen as well, making everyone still angry, still afraid and still looking for answers.

I don’t think anyone in this country reads anything. I have said that my loathing of Millennials leads me to have a cognitive bias towards that Generation as they are very demanding of safe spaces and in mandating change yet few of them seem to have ever read a history book, picked up a newspaper or read a journal that covers said issues in detail. To note I was discussing Feminism and a young millennial declared Camile Paglia, her Feminist idol, (a farce given her views she is not), so when I referred her to an current article about Camille Paglia, who is now Trans and still not a Feminist, (odd) said: “That is a lot of words could you just sum it up for me with the important part.” I refused and said, “Try reading, you may learn something.” Not the first time I have had that discussion with that group, proffering articles and magazines and knowing that they are tossed aside upon my departure. The young man keen on getting into my pants was discussing this very issue of Police reform and I gave him an article from the NYT to review. He never discussed it and then wondered why I was not ever going anywhere with him. Truly what would our convos other than him touching my hair or commenting about me getting laid would we have? Oh yeah the part about what he wants on his sammie after he is done servicing me.

And with that the barometer of how I feel about sex and sexuality is my own and I would never presume, just like my own Atheism, that anyone has to agree with me nor even understand its history, but just treat me with respect and know that I have come to these places with full knowledge and time spent working through it. This folks is what is called “my truth.” And for many all of this is an ongoing learned process through encountering others not like you, reading and more importantly taking the time to do the work. Name me three millennials who do. Yeah, me neither. So the protests for George Floyd, were in my mind for all the thousands who have come before and since.

And with that we now are coming to day 438 of Covid Theater, the drama never ends even as we begin to resume to normal. There will be mass evictions I suspect and despite the demand for employees we are seeing fewer return to the work force by choice due to the low wages and crappy working conditions that existed prior to the pandemic. The exodus from the cities will continue and the debate about a centralized workplace will also be examined as this is not simply a light switch that turns back on. Even Biden is considering making some Government positions to permanently remain off site. Again he never ceases to amaze me each day.

And what about Covid itself, will we ever get the answers and the truth about the virus? Yes and no. We still have quite a large failure on the part of the Trump Administration to acknowledge their failures regarding this among many, don’t look for a January 6th commission anytime soon, so it will largely become a project I suspect for scholars to analyze with regards to the mistakes and severity of it all in decades to come. But the real truth, the origin of the virus itself is coming to light. I early on communicated with a Biology Professor who was sure that it was not Zooinotic and that it was an airborne flu-like virus that was almost random in the way it affected individuals who contracted it and at that point they were unclear as to the length and distance it traveled and remained in air. Since then we have decreased the space between people from 6 to 3 and the time frame was once considered 30 minutes now due to variants sits at 15. The CDC has finally acknowledged it is airborne and admitted well into the pandemic it was not tactile, that asymptomatic transmission is possible and yes folks being outdoors is the least likely way to contract Covid. Poor ventilation, air circulation, veracity of the virus in the host and close, prolonged contact is the source which again months spent on cleaning and other bullshit means, such as temp taking and erecting barriers did nothing to actually STOP THE SPREAD.

There is now clear information coming out that the lab in Wuhan as early as November 2019 had cases of two workers with the same symptomatic illness and in turn hospitalized. This is from Pro Publica’s research and collection of information regarding Covid.

Early in the pandemic, President Donald Trump and some scientists speculated about the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 was created and accidentally released by Chinese virologists doing some sort of research. That hypothesis was quickly and vehemently dismissed by the scientific establishment, which noted that the genetic makeup of the virus showed no signs of human tampering. I encouraged several ProPublica reporters last year to poke around on a slightly different theory: What if the beginnings of the pandemic were the result of a lab accident in which scientists studying the characteristics of coronaviruses inadvertently became infected with a wild virus and spread it to others. Lab leaks are far more common than one might think and have occurred in the U.S. elsewhere. Our reporting turned up some officials who shared that suspicion. But none could offer any direct evidence that it had happened. This situation is among the least favorable arenas for investigative reporting — a debate in which all sides are drawing conclusions from minimal evidence released by a foreign government renowned for its tight control over information. The credibility of the lab leak theory wasn’t helped by the breathless coverage by Trump-supporting media outlets that took as given China’s culpability. We moved on, but, partly based on my experience reporting on germ warfare, I continued to believe that a lab accident was one possibility among many that would explain the pandemic’s origins. In the year since, theories about the virus originating in a lab have gained traction, even among those who initially doubted it. A growing number of scientists feel China was less than transparent in its recent dealings with a visiting World Health Organization team that was attempting to gather evidence on the beginnings of the pandemic. In a May 14 letter to Science magazine, 17 prominent researchers from around the world called on the WHO to look more closely at the lab theory. “We must take hypotheses about both natural and laboratory spillovers seriously until we have sufficient data,” they wrote. “A proper investigation should be transparent, objective, data-driven, inclusive of broad expertise, subject to independent oversight, and responsibly managed to minimize the impact of conflicts of interest.” Days later, Harvard’s Marc Lipsitch, one of America’s most respected epidemiologists, added his name to the letter. “There just aren’t any answers yet, one way or the other, about how the coronavirus that’s now ravaging the world began,” Lipsitch told WBUR, a Boston radio station. “What we are saying is that the existing evidence has not ruled out a laboratory origin, nor has it ruled out a natural origin. And there’s really no positive evidence, either. It’s just pretty much a lack of evidence right now.” The absence of facts fueled a frenzy of internet speculation, a fair amount of which has focused on the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a government-funded lab. To conspiracy theorists, it cannot have been a coincidence that China happened to be doing research on coronaviruses just a few miles from where the pandemic broke out. The head of the institute, Dr. Shi Zheng-li, reminded me of many of the dedicated scientists I interviewed for the book “Germs.” Press accounts portray her as someone deeply committed to the battle against microbes. After China was hit by the SARS coronavirus in 2003, Shi led teams of researchers into caves to capture and take samples from bats that might be harboring more dangerous strains of the disease. When an inexplicable outbreak of pneumonia struck Wuhan in December 2019, she worried that a coronavirus had somehow escaped her lab. She told Scientific American that she frantically reviewed records about the genetic makeup of her samples. Li said she was enormously relieved when she learned that SARS-CoV-2 was only 96% similar to its nearest relative at the institute — decades of evolution away from a match. “That really took a load off my mind,” she said in her interview with Scientific American. “I had not slept a wink for days.” The Chinese came up with the now well-known theory for the origin of SARS-Cov-2. It began in bats and jumped to an intermediate animal that was sold at a wet market in Wuhan. Questions quickly arose about that narrative. Chinese authorities had destroyed all of the animals at the wet market soon after the outbreak began, and researchers have never been able to identify the intermediary animal that transmitted the virus to humans. Then, the British medical journal The Lancet published a paper that poked another hole in the wet market theory. It reported that nearly one-third of the people initially treated in Wuhan hospitals, 13 of the first 41 patients, had no link to the market or to one another. The uncertainty about the origins of the pandemic have only deepened over the past year. More facts emerged about Shi’s training, including that she worked with scientists who spliced together coronaviruses, creating the same sort of chimera viruses the Soviet germ warriors were experimenting with back in the 1990s. The 2016 paper documenting that research is now a central element in some of the online conspiracy theories. It had what turned out to be a prescient title. “SARS-like” coronaviruses, it warned, were “poised for human emergence.” The likely source? Chinese bats. As ProPublica President Dick Tofel likes to say, investigative reporting always begins with a question, not an answer. On Sunday, The Wall Street Journal quoted U.S. intelligence reports that three members of the Wuhan institute had become sick in November 2019 and required hospital care for unspecified illnesses. The head of the institute, Shi, has said that all of her lab workers tested negative for exposure to SARS-CoV-2, a result some analysts viewed with skepticism given the prevalence of the virus in Wuhan. The history of germ weapons shows that even eminent scientists can misread the evidence. In the early 1980s, Matthew Meselson, a Harvard geneticist and molecular biologist, disproved allegations that Hmong anti-Communists in Laos had been attacked by a mysterious Soviet chemical weapon known as “yellow rain.” Meselson and a colleague’s inquiry showed it was bee feces. On the other hand, Meselson backed the Soviet cover story that an outbreak of anthrax in the town of Sverdlovsk was due to consumption of contaminated meat. It turned out to be an accident at an anthrax factory. After the fall of Communism, Meselson was allowed to investigate in Russia and concluded that it was indeed a leak from a weapons facility. So where does that leave us? As I’ve watched the theories about the pandemic’s origin wax and wane, I believe more strongly than ever that reporters should begin their research agnostic and remain skeptical as new facts come to light. No story is ever really over. Certainly not this one.

We are a long way from ever knowing the full truth behind the origins of the virus and if it was intended to be a biological weapon, but never in the history of the globe has a virus done this much damage to as many countries at a single moment as Covid has.

I was reading Salaman Rushdie in the Post and he said this: We are not the dominant species on the planet by accident. We have great survival skills. And we will survive. But I doubt that a social revolution will follow because of the lessons of the pandemic. But yes, sure, one can hope for betterment, and fight for it, and maybe our children will see — will make — that better world.

To repair the damage done by these people in these times will not be easy. I may not see the wounds mended in my lifetime. It may take a generation or more. The social damage of the pandemic itself, the fear of our old social lives, in bars and restaurants and dance halls and sports stadiums, will take time to heal (although a percentage of people seem to know no fear already). We will hug and kiss again. But will there still be movie theaters? Will there be bookstores? Will we feel okay in crowded subway cars?

The social, cultural, political damage of these years, the deepening of the already deep rifts in society in many parts of the world, including the United States, Britain and India, will take longer. It would not be exaggerating to say that as we stare across those chasms, we have begun to hate the people on the other side. That hatred has been fostered by cynics and it bubbles over in different ways almost every day.

As I wrote in the post Chrysalis, I am not sure as we emerge from our cocoon’s we are able to fully grasp the seriousness of this pandemic and for those who are still afraid they will continue to be. Those who never took it seriously, never will and so on. I am at odds with most people in the best of times so my contrarian nature found myself living my best life during the early days of the pandemic. Perhaps because I was armed with scientific facts and a knowledge of history, and a well developed sense of personal responsibility I thrived. It was only in the waning days of winter with the endless cold that I became despondent, and with that dropped my “No Compromises” mantra to try to make friends with a Millennial! What was I thinking? But today that is behind me and the light is ahead of me. I believe in the power of science but not of medicine as those are two different worlds to me. The Medical Industrial Complex once again proved to me that it is as dangerous and deadly as any virus and that they are staffed and manned by incompetents whose idea of care is charging more and making you believe that you need it. This is one thing that too must change to go forward. But we shall.

Covid Chronicles – Zip it

I have repeatedly mentioned I am no fan of Dr. Fauci. I find him annoying. He has a lot of baggage and frankly its time at age 80 to retire. He has validated his creds and he is respected but of all the spokesmodels one could have to educate, inform and discuss Covid, this is the best we got? I call him the Christy Tiegen of the med world. God he needs to zip it.. and frankly does she.

As we have now a third vaccine added to the list the reality that we are coming closer to reducing the spread or to use the catch phrase – flattening the curve. Despite that there are two new variants that are “more contagious” in and of itself vague as what does that mean exactly, have seen numbers of positive cases declining. Death count is now at 500K unless Cuomo is counting so that could be less or more dependent upon the real numbers that were never tallied early on in the pandemic as they were never tested nor confirmed as POS. And we will never know the true number of Covid POS cases as many have never been tested nor confirmed either by choice or because it was again in the early days and the lack of tests and the stringent protocol criteria did not allow them to get tested and as a result they recovered or again died without true accounting of cause of death.

What is still transpiring is the endless misinformation and inaccuracies with regards to Covid and the vaccines. And what that means after one is vaccinated and how they are to proceed until we reach an appropriate level to determine herd immunity. And if Fauci is still the town crier I suspect a great deal of off switches will be used as to the right he will never be anyone worth listening to.

I read this in the Tennessean as a reflection of a year gone by and lack of listening that went down when it came to Covid response in the region. The area is ripe with religion, we know that many of the insurrectionists came from that area, fueled with lies and a lack of respect for science and fact that comes from any source other than behind a pulpit or screen. Lies are best swallowed with some sweet tea and biscuits the better to choke them down and they love their sweet tea. It is also explains the numerous health issues faced by that population so Covid and pre-existing conditions are why that region took a big death toll. That may be the morbidity issue we are trying to understand why faces of color seemed to have higher fatalities, poverty, poor health and lack of access of preventative medical care are massive public health issues in non-pandemic times.

Then let’s face the ugly truth about education, it sucks overall but in the South it is a hot mess of Covid fever. These are people whose academic level of success is largely confined to K-12 and even that is hit and miss. The largest sector of education is secular and that too means a selective approach to matters concerning Science, especially those matters surrounding Biology. It is the sex part kids that set them off. Literacy and ability to read at or above grade level is middling and few do read. There is the landscape itself with concentrated cities that are hardly world class surrounded by largely rural areas with little access to health care, education, let alone bandwidth. The social and physical isolation was long in existence before Covid and the tribalism alone contributes to further segregate people.

The rest of the country in largely rural economies also suffer from this and the Dakotas are certainly another example with a crazy Governor who is determined to be like Trump down to the deaths and destruction of communities rather than admit science may be right and while there were wrong steps made it can be righted. Nope, shame is a factor here that leads people to refuse to apologize and right wrongs. I am no less guilty.

Denial is another. The hoarding of cold and flu medicines did contribute to many who were POS spreading the virus as again getting tested for simply having a fever but no cough, having the shits. Not knowing anyone who had COVID or been in contact with one who had was impossible in the beginning and still is as there is little to no contact tracing and it turn more lies and misinformation. So why any reason, sole reason to be tested should have been enough but that like the vaccines there is never enough so we lie. And we deny and we go on as if we are fine.

Dr. William Schaffner, a prominent infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University who’d watched all year as ill-advised gatherings spread the virus over and over.

Throughout the pandemic, Schaffner gave thousands of interviews to hundreds of news publications, offering expertise that was calm, polite and peppered with the folksy charm. But by December, faced with the same questions about yet another preventable surge, he’d finally grown exhausted of repeating himself.

“We paid a price after Memorial Day. We paid a price after July 4. The same thing happened, more or less, after Thanksgiving,” Schaffner said. “I don’t know how many lessons we need. How many times do we have to do this experiment to convince ourselves of the result?”

Denial and anger seems to be perfectly demonstrated by our Congressional reps. Irony or tragedy, a North Dakota man was elected to his State’s Congress post-humously. And since that two more have died. What more do you need to know with regards to Covid? That it is a virus, it is contagious and it can be deadly. Congress had to learn the hard way being trapped in a room with deniers (not just of the election) and in turn the CPAC convention this weekend will I sure rival any prior super spreader event.

Covid has reminded more and more of AIDS with each passing day. Shame, guilt, retributions and repercussions. The shame and frustration and of course the anger about condoms is the same expressed about masks. I am exhausted from hearing the endless excuses, stories and pleas to encourage safety and health. I have been down this road before and yet we are much like the Doctor in Nashville said, just not able to learn and alter our behavior. Why is that so hard? I assume being an asshole is simply easier.

This article from The Washington Post talks about a small town in Illinois, and its awareness that Covid was not just a big city disease is just one of many as Covid ran amok across the country. The article in the Tennessean ends with this note: And the second year of coronavirus in the American South began the same as the first – with a party. (This was over the cherished hysteria over College Basketball another Southern ritual) But like anywhere in America it is not just the South that feels the need to spread cheer and with it disease.

A Shit Show

I think of that phrase in application to many things, a bad program on television or a chaotic attempt to do something that failed miserably and that sums up the Covid response with regards to the Trump Administration. The daily shit shows or as I called them the lottery drawings held by both the Idiot in the White House or Crazy Dopey Grandfather and the varying Governors across the Country rivaled in their sheer level of arrogance and idiocy, the Siamese twins of Covid response. I cannot say what I found more repellent, the daily scolding by Cuomo and the parroting by Murphy in New Jersey with DiBlasio coming in to remind them of his dick size or that the day end was marked by some incoherent rambling with Igor and the Bride standing by making medicine taste bad faces, standing alongside the rotating crew of cheerleaders and others to somehow defend, support or just be there in case of some medical/personal mishap that would require their expertise. It was a debacle and while Rome burned the idiot fiddled. Now which idiot is debatable as we also have the Siamese Twins of Pence and Jared Kushner who were also assigned responsibilities and duties regarding allocation of resources, establishing testing sites and coordinating with states and hospitals to assure them help was on the way. Only it wasn’t.

When the Commission inevitably established on both federal and state levels begin to look back and examine the massive failures with regards to the protocol, the massive executive orders and of course the number of dead, known and unknown, and of course the economic failures that resulted from this shit show I suspect even then the truth will be buried with the ever increasing dead from Covid. And Americans are becoming immune not to Covid but to that fact as they race around the clock like Bill Haley to also ignore protocols and lie about their own failings and health. Whose Bill Haley you ask? Well that will be a common refrain soon enough when it comes to asking, whatever happened to…?

I have shared numerous articles about how events became superspreaders and in turn when did we know, how did we know, when did we believe or learn how Covid came to U.S. shores and the aftermath of what followed as we tracked the virus across the country and the globe. And we have much to learn still. Anyone who thinks we have a robust tracking and tracing program think again as in the current pandemic bill awaiting CDG signature is in fact funding for said programs as they lack. A subject I have also covered and in fact applied for a position and since learned that there is no said position as there is no actual program. I validated this when a friend found a co-worker had been tested POS and she contracted it from a family member who arranged a photo shoot and neglected to mention their own pending test that had yet come back but while waiting went ahead with their plans assuming what? Testing NEG? Well shocking, no, not really. They weren’t, but by then the damage done and of the attendees she was one who managed to get the luck of the draw. Again at this point we know transference is 1:3 but with the new strain it may in fact be more extensive and may rival its competitors, like Whooping Cough (1:4) or Measles (1:7). Either way who the fuck plans anything when they have no confirmation about their tests? What is wrong with you fucking idiot, there is optimism and there is stupidity. Clearly we know that most people fall into the latter versus the former on that one. And were any of this person’s co-workers contacted by the tracking agency? No. Why? There is not one and what exists is an extremely poorly trained and coordinated one, a problem that exists in most cities and countries. And now on the verge of a preventative drug I don’t think this will improve it will in fact utterly kill off that too. Man Covid is deadly.

I suspect the vaccine rollout to be comparable to the testing rollout, in other words as fucked up as that was only without the addition of Kushner to further screw it up. That doesn’t mean there will be anyone in place January 20th to assume the role of Covid Czar and be able to quickly assemble a team, a plan and in turn create a logistical plan that will ensure parity of distribution across state lines. Not.going.to.happen.

We have “recommendations” and suggestions but right now it is quite interesting to see varying GOP delegates who eschewed much of Covid’s havoc, line up and get their first shot, with of course the medical professionals as they get theirs being the actual and critical front line workers who are most at risk. Round two will more of a challenge as who defines “essential worker” and how they in turn will be assigned to receive their inoculation. That will end badly and the last rollout will be to the general public and once again will be a cluster fuck of a shit show with how that be allocated. Expect the 1% to buy theirs with their drug cocktails that can treat Covid successfully and in turn allow them to retire to their second homes to await the rest of the world’s eventual turn. In other words we are still fucked but some lube is available, just how we get it is another matter. It sure as hell won’t be in the numerous tubs like hand sanitizer found everywhere, that much is sure. It will be more like toilet paper, hoarded and stashed. The next set of Siamese Twins – Access and Availability. Aka the rich versus the poor, income meet inequality.

The next step is trying to find the light in the dark for the vaccination process is two fold, two shots over 28 days and during the interim and following there is to be the same protocol that we may or may not have followed earlier. Again this too is confusing and deliberately so to force compliance without understanding. The endless contradictions, misinformation, and continual changing of the guard as if that somehow is a way to build trust and secure safety is absurd. Let us not forget the overall behavior of many elected officials and that of Birx of Frankenstein whose own actions contradicted their messages. How was that dinner at the French Laundry, Gavin?

What this is about is idiocy and a lack of knowledge about basic science. Again a virus that transmits itself is like all others, close contact, prolonged exposure and of course the ability of access via numbers. In and of itself it cannot exist in a transient state. I have yet to hear anything otherwise to change that view, so I seriously doubt it flies across a room over 27 feet, lands on Amazon packages and enters your home that way or simply lays dormant in the body for 14 days and then just vacates the premises without so much as a genital wart, herpes it ain’t. And yes there are vaccines that work more quickly today thanks to the money flooding in its direction, the eyes and hands all touching (gloved of course) the endless samples and the ability to roll out a massive testing protocol as there are ample volunteers who want to do right by the world. But then again Science in not perfect, infallible or without its own inherent bias. This is why the Brown/Black community are concerned as they have been victims in many ways by the mishandling of medicine. And we have yet to test the virus on children and given the angst of the anti-vaxx crowd there will be many who simply refuse. As for the MAGA group they will be just like the rest of the GOP, lining up for there free shot and decrying government handouts all at the same time. Too bad, social Darwinism would have had a hell of test there.

Below is an article about the failures and malfeseance of our Government and the lack of leadership that led to what we have today. Over 300K dead and a vaccine that will not reach the greater good for months or longer to reach “herd immunity.”

Dire PPE shortages. Limited Covid tests. Political negligence. A Guardian/KHN investigation reveals what went wrong

Christina Jewett and Robert Lewis |Guardian | Wed 23 Dec 2020 \

Workers at Garfield medical center in suburban Los Angeles were on edge as the pandemic ramped up in March and April. Staffers in a 30-patient unit were rationing a single tub of sanitizing wipes all day. A May memo from the chief executive said N95 masks could be cleaned up to 20 times before replacement.

Patients showed up Covid-negative but some still developed symptoms a few days later. Contact tracing took the form of texts and whispers about exposures.

By summer, frustration gave way to fear. At least 60 staff members at the 210-bed community hospital caught Covid-19, according to records obtained by KHN and interviews with eight staff members and others familiar with hospital operations.

The first to die was Dawei Liang, 60, a quiet radiology technician who never said “no” when a colleague needed help. A cardiology technician became infected and changed his final wishes – agreeing to intubation – hoping for more years to dote on his grandchildren.

Few felt safe.

Ten months into the pandemic, it has become far clearer why tens of thousands of healthcare workers have been infected by the virus and why so many have died: dire PPE shortages. Limited Covid tests. Sparse tracking of viral spread. Layers of flawed policies handed down by healthcare executives and politicians, and lax enforcement by government regulators.

All of those breakdowns, across cities and states, have contributed to the deaths of more than 2,900 healthcare workers, a nine-month investigation by over 70 reporters at KHN and the Guardian has found. This number is far higher than that reported by the US government, which does not have a comprehensive national count.

The healthcare worker fatalities have skewed young, with the majority under age 60 in the cases for which there is age data. People of color were disproportionately affected, and account for about 65% of fatalities in cases in which there is race and ethnicity data. After conducting interviews with relatives and friends of about 300 victims, Guardian and KHN learned that one-third of the deaths involved concerns over inadequate PPE.

Many of the deaths occurred in New York and New Jersey, and significant numbers also died in southern and western states as the pandemic wore on.

Workers at well-funded academic medical centers – hubs of policymaking clout and prestigious research – were largely spared. Those who died tended to work in less prestigious community hospitals like Garfield, nursing homes and other health centers in roles where access to critical information was low and patient contact was high.

Garfield medical center and its parent company, AHMC Healthcare, did not respond to multiple calls or emails regarding workers’ concerns and circumstances leading to the worker deaths.

So as 2020 draws to a close, we ask: did so many of the nation’s healthcare workers have to die?

New York’s warning for the nation

The seeds of the crisis can be found in New York and the surrounding cities and suburbs. It was the region where the profound risks facing medical staff became clear. And it was here where the most died.

As the pandemic began its US surge, city paramedics were out in force, their sirens cutting through eerily empty streets as they rushed patients to hospitals. Carlos Lizcano, a blunt Queens native who had been with the fire department for two decades, was one of them.

He was answering four to five cardiac arrest calls every shift. Normally he would have fielded that many in a month. He remembers being stretched so thin he had to enlist a dying man’s son to help with CPR. On another call, he did chest compressions on a 33-year-old woman while her two small children stood in the doorway of a small apartment.

“I just have this memory of those kids looking at us like: ‘What’s going on?’”

After the young woman died, Lizcano went outside and punched the ambulance in frustration and grief.

The personal risks paramedics faced were grave.

More than 40% of emergency medical service workers in the New York fire department (FDNY) went on leave for confirmed or suspected coronavirus during the first three months of the pandemic, according to a study by the department’s chief medical officer and others.

In fact, healthcare workers were three times more likely than the general public to get Covid-19, other researchers found. And the risks were not equally spread among medical professions. Initially CDC guidelines were written to afford the highest protection to workers in a hospital’s Covid-19 unit.

Yet months later, it was clear that the doctors initially thought to be at most risk – anesthesiologists and those working in the ICU – were among the least likely to die. This could be due to better PPE or patients being less infectious by the time they reach the ICU.

Instead scientists discovered that “frontdoor” health workers such as paramedics and those in acute-care “receiving” roles – such as in the emergency room – were twice as likely as other healthcare workers to be hospitalized with Covid-19.

For FDNY first responders, part of the problem was having to ration and reuse masks. Workers were blind to an invisible threat that would be recognized months later: the virus spread rapidly from pre-symptomatic people and among those with no symptoms at all.

In mid-March, Lizcano was one of thousands of FDNY first responders infected with Covid-19.

At least four of them died, city records show. They were among the 679 healthcare workers who have died in New York and New Jersey to date, most at the height of the terrible first wave of the virus.

“Initially we didn’t think it was this bad,” Lizcano said, recalling the confusion and chaos of the early pandemic. “This city wasn’t prepared.”

Neither was the rest of the country.

Silence from the government

The virus continued to spread like a ghost through the nation and proved deadly to workers who were among the first to encounter sick patients in their hospitals or nursing homes. One government agency had a unique vantage point into the problem, but did little to use its power to cite employers – or speak out about the hazards.

Health employers had a mandate to report worker deaths and hospitalizations to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha).

When they did so, the report went to an agency headed by Eugene Scalia, son of the conservative supreme court justice Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016. The younger Scalia had spent part of his career as a corporate lawyer fighting the very agency he was charged with leading.

Its inspectors have documented instances in which some of the most vulnerable workers – those with low information and high patient contact – faced incredible hazards, but Osha’s staff did little to hold employers to account.

Beaumont, Texas, a town near the Louisiana border, was largely untouched by the pandemic in early April.

That’s when a 56-year-old physical therapy assistant at Christus Health St Elizabeth hospital named Danny Marks called in sick with a fever and body aches, federal Osha records show.

He told a human resources employee that he had been in the room of a patient who was receiving a breathing treatment – the type known as the most hazardous to health workers. The CDC advises N95 respirators be used by all in the room for the so-called “aerosol-generating” procedures. (A facility spokesperson said the patient was not known or suspected to have Covid at the time Marks entered the room.)

Marks went home to quarantine. By 17 April he was dead.

The patient whose room Marks entered later tested positive for Covid-19. And an Osha investigation into Marks’ death found there was no sign on the door to warn him that a potentially infected patient was inside, nor was there a cart outside the room where he could grab protective gear.

The facility did not have a universal masking policy in effect when Marks went into the room, and it was more than likely that he was not wearing any respiratory protection, according to a copy of the report obtained through a public records request. Twenty-one more employees had contracted Covid by the time he died.

“He was a beloved gentleman and friend and he is missed very much,” Katy Kiser, Christus’s public relations director, told KHN.

Osha did not issue a citation to the facility, instead recommending safety changes.

The agency logged nearly 8,700 complaints from healthcare workers in 2020. Yet Harvard researchers found that some of those desperate pleas for help, often decrying shortages of PPE, did little to forestall harm. In fact, they concluded that surges in those complaints preceded increases in deaths among working-age adults 16 days later.

One report author, Peg Seminario, blasted Osha for failing to use its power to get employers’ attention about the danger facing health workers. She said issuing big fines in high-profile cases could have a broad impact – but Osha had not done so.

“There’s no accountability for failing to protect workers from exposure to this deadly virus,” said Seminario, a former union health and safety official.

A dangerous lack of protective equipment

There was little outward sign this summer that Garfield medical center was struggling to contain Covid-19. While Medicare has forced nursing homes to report staff infections and deaths, no such requirement applies to hospitals.

Yet as the focus of the pandemic moved from the east coast in the spring to southern and western states, healthcare worker deaths climbed. And behind the scenes at Garfield, workers were dealing with a lack of equipment meant to keep them safe.

Complaints to state worker-safety officials filed in March and April said Garfield medical center workers were asked to reuse the same N95 respirator for a week. Another complaint said workers ran out of medical gowns and were directed to use less-protective gowns typically provided to patients.

Staffers were shaken by the death of Dawei Liang. And only after his death and a rash of infections did Garfield provide N95 masks to more workers and put up plastic tarps to block a Covid unit from an adjacent ward. And this may have been too late.

Covid can easily spread to every corner of a hospital. Researchers in South Africa traced 119 cases in a hospital – 80 among staff – to a single ER patient. Those included 62 nurses from neurology, surgical and general medical units that typically would not have housed Covid patients.

By late July, Thong Nguyen, 73, a Garfield cardiac and respiratory technician, learned he was Covid-positive days after he collapsed at work. Nguyen loved his job and was typically not one to complain, said his youngest daughter, Dinh Kozuki. A 34-year veteran at the hospital, he was known for conducting medical tests in multiple languages. His colleagues teased him, saying he was never going to retire.

Kozuki said her father spoke up in March about protective gear rationing but his concerns were not allayed.

The PPE problems at Garfield were a symptom of a broader problem. As the virus spread around the nation, chronic shortages of protective gear left many workers in community-based settings fatally exposed. Nearly one in three family members or friends of about 300 healthcare workers interviewed by KHN or the Guardian expressed concerns about a fallen worker’s PPE.

Healthcare workers’ labor unions asked for the more-protective N95 respirators when the pandemic began. But Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines said the unfitted surgical masks worn by workers who feed, bathe and lift Covid-19 patients were adequate amid supply shortages.

Mary Turner, the Minnesota Nurses Association president and an ICU nurse, said she protested alongside nurses all summer demanding better protective gear, which she said was often kept from workers because of supply chain shortages and the lack of political will to fix them.

“It shouldn’t have to be that way,” Turner said. “We shouldn’t have to beg on the streets for protection during a pandemic.”

At Garfield, it was even hard to get tested at the facility. Tony Ramirez, a critical care technician, said he had started feeling ill on 12 July. He had an idea of how he might have been exposed: he had cleaned up urine and feces of a patient suspected of having Covid and worked alongside two staffers who also turned out to be Covid-positive. At the time, he had been wearing a surgical mask and had worried that it was not protecting him.

Yet he was denied a free test at the hospital, and went on his own time to Dodger Stadium to get one. His positive result came back a few days later. https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/ChHh1rFAPA8?wmode=opaque&feature=oembed Facebook Twitter Pinterest

As Ramirez rested at home, he texted Alex Palomo, 44, a Garfield medical secretary who was also at home with Covid, to see how he was doing. Palomo was the kind of man who came to many family parties but would always slip away unseen. A cousin finally asked him about it: Palomo said he just hated to say goodbye.

Palomo would wear only a surgical mask when he would go into the rooms of patients with flashing call lights, chat with them and maybe bring them a refill of water, Ramirez said.

Ramirez added that Palomo had no access to patient charts, so he would not have known which patients had Covid: “In essence, he was helping blindly,” he said. Advertisementhttps://323e8577c39618342f3fceee3be3b764.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html

Palomo never answered the text. He died of Covid-19 on 14 August.

And Thong Nguyen had fared no better. His daughter, a hospital pharmacist in Fresno, had pressed him to go on a ventilator after seeing other patients survive with the treatment. It might mean he could retire and watch his grandkids grow up. But it made no difference.

“He definitely should not have passed [away],” Kozuki said.

Nursing homes devastated

During the summer, as nursing homes recovered from their spring surge, Heather Pagano got a new assignment. The Doctors Without Borders humanitarianism adviser had been working in cholera clinics in Nigeria. In May she arrived in south-eastern Michigan to train nursing home staff on optimal infection-control techniques.

Federal officials required worker death reports from nursing homes, which by December tallied more than 1,100 fatalities. Researchers in Minnesota found particular hazards for these health workers, concluding they were the ones most at risk of getting Covid-19.

Pagano learned that staffers were repurposing trash bin liners and going to the local Sherwin-Williams store for painting coveralls to backfill shortages of medical gowns. The least-trained clinical workers, nursing assistants, were doing the most hazardous jobs, turning and cleaning patients and brushing their teeth.

She said nursing home leaders were shuffling reams of federal, state and local guidelines, yet had little understanding of how to stop the virus from spreading.

“No one sent trainers to show people what to do, practically speaking,” she said.

As the pandemic wore on, nursing homes reported staff shortages getting worse by the week: few wanted to put their lives on the line for $13 an hour, the wage for nursing assistants in many parts of the US.

The organization GetusPPE, formed by doctors to address shortages, saw almost all requests for help were coming from nursing homes, doctors’ offices and other non-hospital facilities. Only 12% of the requests could be fulfilled, its October report says.

A pandemic-weary and science-wary public has fueled the virus’s spread. In fact, whether or not a nursing home was properly staffed played only a small role in determining its susceptibility to a lethal outbreak, the University of Chicago public health professor Tamara Konetzka found. The crucial factor was whether there was widespread viral transmission in the surrounding community. Advertisementhttps://323e8577c39618342f3fceee3be3b764.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html

“In the end, the story has pretty much stayed the same,” Konetzka said. “Nursing homes in virus hotspots are at high risk and there’s very little they can do to keep the virus out.”

The vaccine arrives

From March through November, 40 complaints were filed about the Garfield medical center with the California department of public health, nearly three times the statewide average for the time. State officials substantiated 11 complaints and said they were part of an ongoing inspection.

For Thanksgiving, the AHMC Healthcare chairman, Jonathan Wu, sent hospital staff a letter thanking “frontline healthcare workers who continue to serve, selflessly exposing themselves to the virus so that others may cope, recover and survive”.

The letter made no mention of the workers who had died. “A lot of people were upset by that,” said Melissa Ennis, a critical care technician. “I was upset.”

By December, all workers were required to wear N95 respirators in every corner of the hospital, she said. Ennis said she felt unnerved taking it off. She took breaks to eat and drink in her car.

Garfield said on its website that it was screening patients for the virus and will “implement infection prevention and control practices to protect our patients, visitors, and staff”.

On 9 December Ennis received notice that the vaccine was on its way to Garfield. Nationwide, the vaccine brought health workers relief from months of tension. Nurses and doctors posted photos of themselves weeping and holding their small children.

But it proved too late for some. A new surge of deaths drove the toll among health workers to more than 2,900.

And before Ennis could get the shot, she learned she would have to wait at least a few more days, until she could get a Covid test.

She found out she had been exposed to the virus by a colleague.

Crush It!

As I noted in another post yesterday about Covid for some reason we think the worst is over, no its ongoing everyday.  Largely why? Because we have a Government indifferent to the reality of this, States and Municipalities trying to figure it out from Governors who are sure they have the right team, crew, input from the same afraid, ignorant or slightly more knowledgeable medical staff who for all ostensible purposes have actually never been in the field during a pandemic. And those that have been are relegated to the sidelines, not called to action, to devise a cohesive, comprehensive plan and more importantly find a clear messenger who can communicate with the public in a fashion that evokes both concern and hope that this will too come to an end.

For awhile here in the tri-state area we had the Three Amigos, Cuomo, DiBlasio and Murphy. After a week or two I realized that they were the Three Stooges, all of them grasping to be some type of leader with their messaging that emphasized fear and compliance and if you failed you would be relegated to restrictions, the irony was we already were so at some point what more can you do?  When I began to listen to their messages and the other crackpot Mike DeWine of Ohio I learned early on that none of them had a fucking clue.  Look to the West Coast and listen to Newsom and Inslee who actually ran for President, and no loss there clearly.  The most interesting was that while all of them had varying levels of tone and advocacy to ensure the public’s cooperation you underneath realized that the message was the same – be afraid, be very afraid.  What they failed to do was actually have any real testing, tracking, tracing and treatment plan. They knew by shouting numbers, making threats and promises that it will get worse they seemed to think that being a bully was the way to somehow make Covid go away.  My favorite here was Murphy saying repeatedly, “Don’t be a knucklehead” while constantly demonstrating what that was with his rambling bullshit that could never be clearly proven, numbers that mad little sense and just the clear copying of Cuomo as the leader of the tribe.  It was as if we are living on the island of lost boys – Neverland. And well that was no utopia and there is no Peter Pan.

When you look to the countries, largely those run by women, it was a much faster progress with regards to all the elements that manage a crisis, planning, communication, cooperation and of course clear established goals in which to meet them.   I knew from looking at the way the announcements were set that regardless we had only a 90 day window, it would be “over” by the 4th of July and that in the interim lives would be destroyed and the economy crushed versus the virus.   Men do that they crush it That is a man’s way.  Never did I hear a voice from in the field sitting adjacent to these men to add resonance and personal experience.  I saw news reports that hysterical health workers fearing for their lives, crying and of course killing themselves over the stress of the failures of the same men crushing it trying to figure out how to have a well thought out plan to deliver supplies and in turn not crush them with patients.  Well they failed on that count as well.  If they believe this was a success then they also believe in fairies.   If any of these idiots are re-elected then I fear for us all.

Then the idiocy of the general public, sending food, the donation of supplies to supplement the ones they lacked, the flying of Blue Angels and let’s not forget the nightly cacophony of clapping, banging pots and making noise to show support. I cannot believe that this will end but why it was in the first place also bothered me as this is a for profit industry and the public facilities where they dumped, yes dumped, most patients were so underfunded, so badly managed and so poorly prepared that I am not sure why we are clapping any of this instead also taking to the streets to demand that while defunding the Police, fund public health. For if we did some of this death may have been prevented.  Then again that would require intelligence and planning such as establishing testing protocols for the most at risk, quarantining them first and in turn having a staggered type of work schedule, to reduce commuting, allow business to function with the limits, the ones they have now only with clear guidelines in place. What is working now would have worked then it was just that they had no way to test the population and we know that the majority of people have not been tested who never showed symptoms nor were sick at all at any time during this lockdown.  So welcome to the doll house.

Today begins the next big phase and frankly what I saw this weekend was alarming, the lack of physical distancing, the lack of PPE and of course overall behavior that made me think the protests were safer to congregate among.  And at least their messaging was clear and concise.

This is from an EMT who I think says it all and reminds us that we are not in a second wave we are in the third wave, a wave comes and goes as all do, some are more powerful and each month the waves were smaller in nature but the water is not flat, it is not calm and it is still flowing every day.  Water does that until it dries out.  We ain’t anywhere near shore yet.  Crush it? Fuck no we just dented it.

Voices from the Pandemic
‘Heroes, right?’
Anthony Almojera, on being a New York City paramedic and the injustices of covid-19
By Eli Saslow
The Washington Post
June 21, 2020

Nobody wants to know about what I do. People might pay us lip service and say we’re heroes, but our stories aren’t the kind anyone actually wants to hear about. Kids in this country grow up with toy firetrucks, or maybe playing cops and robbers, but who dreams of becoming a paramedic? That’s ambulances. That’s death and vulnerability — the scary stuff. We’re taught in this culture to shun illness like it’s something shameful. We’d rather pretend everything’s fine. We look the other way.

That’s what’s happening now in New York. We just had 20,000-some people die in this city, and already the crowds are lining back up outside restaurants and jamming into bars. This virus is still out there. We respond to 911 calls for covid every day. I’ve been on the scene at more than 200 of these deaths — trying to revive people, consoling their families — but you can’t even be bothered to stay six feet apart and wear a mask, because why? You’re a tough guy? It makes you look weak? You’d rather ignore the whole thing and pretend you’re invincible?

Some of us can’t stop thinking about it. I woke up this morning to about 60 new text messages from paramedics who are barely holding it together. Some are still sick with the virus. At one point we had 25 percent of EMTs in the city out sick. Others are living in their cars so they don’t risk bringing it home to their families. They’re depressed. They’re emotionally exhausted. They’re drinking too much. They’re lashing out at their kids. They’re having night terrors and panic attacks and all kinds of outbursts. I’ve got five paramedics in the ground from this virus already and a few more on ventilators. Another rookie EMT just committed suicide. He was having trouble coping with what he was seeing. He was a kid — 23 years old. He won’t be the last. I have medics who come to me every day and say, “Is this PTSD I’m feeling?” But technically PTSD comes after the event, and we’re not there yet. It’s ongoing stress and trauma, and we might have months to go.

Do you know how much EMTs make in New York City? We start at $35,000. We top out at $48,000 after five years. That’s nothing. That’s a middle finger. It’s about 40 percent less than fire, police and corrections — and those guys deserve what they get. But we have three times the call volume of fire. There are EMTs on my team who’ve been pulling double shifts in a pandemic and performing life support for 16 hours, and then they go home and they have to drive Uber to pay their rent. I’m more than 15 years on the job, and I still work two side gigs. One of my guys does part-time at a grocery store.

Heroes, right? The anger is blinding.

One thing this pandemic has made clear to me is that our country has become a joke in terms of how it disregards working people and poor people. The rampant inequality. The racism. Mistakes were made at the very top in terms of how we prepared for this virus, and we paid down here at the bottom.

It started around the middle of March when the call volume began to spike in the poorer neighborhoods. The stay-at-home order in New York hadn’t even gone into effect at that point. Trump was telling us he had everything under control. The mayor was saying we had great health care, and we wouldn’t get hit as bad as other countries, so we should keep on going to the movies. But for us, it was wheezing, trouble breathing, heart palpitations, cardiac arrest, cardiac arrest. This virus stresses out the heart in a bunch of different ways. I’d look at our dispatch screen sometimes and see 30 possible cardiac events happening at any one time across the city, mostly in the immigrant neighborhoods. It felt like watching a bomb go off in slow motion. You had time to see who was going to get hit and who had the ability to escape. I saw in Manhattan, on the East Side, people clearing out of the city to set up shop in the Hamptons or rent property upstate. The business class packed up their computers and went off to work elsewhere. Meanwhile, the rest of us were huddling with no ventilators, like fish in the barrel.

It got so quiet sometimes that all you could hear were our sirens. The most 911 calls we’d ever had was back on September 11th, and we broke that record every day for two weeks straight. My station is right in Brooklyn’s Chinatown, so it’s a lot of new Chinese immigrants, sometimes 10 or 12 people living in a small place. They tend not to call 911 unless its absolutely necessary, but they were calling. One woman was apologizing for bothering us while we were trying to get a pulse back on her uncle. The Dominicans and Puerto Ricans in Sunset Park got hit hard. Sometimes those families will pray over you while you’re doing CPR. The Middle Eastern neighborhoods in Bay Ridge got hit. The African American communities, where hypertension is a big thing. The nursing homes in Far Rockaway. The housing projects in East Flatbush. We weren’t carrying too many stretchers into the fancy brownstones.

I’m a lieutenant and vice president of the union, so I cover a big area, and I mostly go to the big traumas. I grew up in Brooklyn, and I know every street in this city. I can whip it. Doesn’t matter where the call is. I’m two minutes out. I had one guy with covid who was talking to me in his fifth-floor apartment. He was breathing heavy, so we loaded him on the stretcher, and by the time the elevator hit the lobby, he didn’t have a pulse. I went to another high-rise for an unresponsive elderly woman, and then I realize, two days before we were in the same place because her husband had dropped. Both of them died. We sometimes had 400 emergency calls sitting on hold. People were waiting hours for an ambulance on the more minor stuff. I pronounced more deaths in the first two weeks of April than I have in my career.

I got one call at the height of the madness, another cardiac arrest, and it was a Latin guy, young guy, unresponsive and passed out in a room with bunk beds. There wasn’t enough space to work, so we dragged him out into the living room to start giving him CPR. This guy had no pulse. That’s clinical death, but biological death doesn’t come until about six minutes later. That’s our window to bring you back. That’s why we do this job. Now this guy was 31. He was strong, healthy. His mother told us he’d just gone out. As a medic, you hear that and your eyes start to get big. It’s like, okay, maybe this is one we can save.

It was four guys and me. That’s the crew. The two EMTs were bagging him up to get oxygen in his lungs. The medics were starting to intubate and calculating the meds. Everything they can do for you in a hospital, EMS brings to you. We carry 60 medications. We hook up the heart monitor. It all happens so fast, and there’s barely time to talk. It’s scalpel, needle, put in the IV, pace it, shock it, check on the heart rhythms. It’s like a symphony, and you have to know your part.

The team kept working, and I went over to get information from the mother. There was a little girl standing behind her, 7 years old, and it turns out she’s the daughter. They told me he’d been sick four or five days, but he worked at a bodega and he couldn’t afford to take off. He’d come home from work and collapsed a few minutes later. Now I’m getting upset. Here we’re supposed to be this great society, and this guy can’t even miss one paycheck. There’s no safety net. The system we have is broken, and this 7-year-old is seeing her dad get CPR. We kept working. After a few minutes, we got a pulse back. I told the family: “He’s not out of the woods yet, but we might have a shot here.” We rushed him into the truck and over to the hospital, and then he died a while later.

I did 14 cardiac arrests that day. I didn’t save anybody.

The thing about being a paramedic is you need to have some reservoir of hope. This job is the ultimate backstage pass. It can make you believe in humanity, but it can also suck the humanity out of you. You see death, suffering — grief in its rawest forms. I’ve been shot at on this job. I’ve been beaten and cursed at. But then every year, we go to the Second Chance Brunch, and we get to meet some of the people we saved. There’s no drug on the planet like that. There’s no job that matters more. It keeps you going. But then we came into this virus, and we weren’t bringing people back. The virus kept winning. It always ended the same way.

I’d go park the truck at the beach after a double and try to calm myself down and gather my thoughts. I’ve gained weight during this pandemic. I don’t sleep well anymore. Emotionally, I’ve been feeling a little numb. They teach you as a Buddhist that life is suffering, and I believe that. You have to stay in the suffering. You can’t deny reality and turn the other way.

I’ve been in therapy for 17 years, and lately what keeps coming up is that reservoir of hope. It’s starting to feel more and more empty. Our call volume has been down for the last month, but I’m worried it won’t stay there. I don’t have that much faith in what we are anymore. America is supposed to be the best, right? So why aren’t we united at all? Why aren’t we taking care of each other? The virus is hanging around, waiting for us to make more mistakes, and I’m afraid that we will.

Friday. Okay, whatever

I am still on unofficial lockdown as the area begins to open up to Stage 2, 3, 16, whatever at this point it is all just smoke, mirrors, games and bullshit.  That said I have no interest in contacting, speaking or giving a shit as these next two weeks will be game changers.

Today in the Washington Post there was considerable alarm at the way we as a country have emerged from our cocoon but rather than a butterfly we are some type of moth that will race to the flame and ultimately die.  Yes folks, while I have long been calling bullshit on all of this I was always sure there was a serious virus, it was and is killing people but what was being done, what is being done and will be done will continue to allow this to happen. At this point they have run out of cards and have nothing left to even bluff with.  The overwhelming failure of all countries regarding Covid other than a few, New Zealand, Iceland to name those with land in their names have done not just a stop the spread but made it literally a flatline.  Why? Each had very unique strategies and of course they were countries run by women, go figure. Women can rule just not in America. What? Ever.

The New Yorker does an excellent piece on why Iceland was a success story despite the numbers that in the U.S. was akin to a death sentence and in turn why Europe is working so well to stem the tide that they are now laughing while secretly being received that Britain did BREXIT given the state of that country’s fiasco handling Covid, as Boris and Trump are two strands alike and both fatal to their country’s well being.   This is an article about the horrific contact tracking/tracing Britain has assembled and it only beats the U.S. in that there is one. No State has taken that on and I just received an email that they are looking for an appropriate administrator of such a program here and will be letting us know soon. In other words they are just hoping numbers go down enough to make that moot and they can move on.  What? Ever.

The posturing today in Cuomo’s last state of the state of covid speech veered to tears as he of course takes no responsibilities for the numerous fiascos of any of it, while DiBlasio is still trying to figure out how to run the city during a pandemic and civil unrest.  It is clear he could barely manage in the best of times so why do it any differently.  And here the third amigo of the posse of stupid, Murphy, once again bores us to the point that there is no point except to remind us that we have a lot of malls here and they need to be open. Okay, then. What? Ever.

Covid is quite serious and every day between protest stories another runs about a drug that is working or failing or how it is spread or not spread, to mask or not and basically how no one is social distancing and Fauci is now backtracking on the second wave and capitulating to the moron in charge who is having a racist rally and whining about Bolton as if he was shocked that an asshole would turn on him. Well had he given him a war to keep him busy then no he wouldn’t but hey what? Ever.

Everyday is another story about Covid, how asymptomatic people spread or don’t spread the virus. **note the constant corrections, contradictions and oxymorons when it comes to this.*** Again I think it is like Herpes and in the first few days, 3 or so, the virus sheds and goes dormant until it leaves the body and again we believe that is after 14 days.  Apparently because no disease actually manifested no antibodies are found meaning there is no immunity but that also may apply to those with Covid as many are coming back testing positive and getting sick. Meaning it is dormant like Herpes and then it flairs up.  Funny that it is steroids that are having the strongest affect as that is often the same treatment for what? Herpes.  (tricked you there, just like herpes)  I may not be a Doctor but watching this and remembering Herpes and AIDS,  the parallels are not lost it is just the transmission that is different.  And again we are being warned that the phase one is getting worse.  Or is that the first wave is now just kinda bigger and longer.  Really or is that NOT a second wave? So is there a third? Folks we are confused about what waves mean and this is now into full blown Tsunami versus Hurricane.  And the difference is that Tsunami starts with an earthquake under water that is stage one then it turns the water into tidal waves which bash the shore with force that comes from the quake A Hurricane is a water gathering wind that passes over land so the first wave is damage via wind and its second wave is the water that follows.  Okay they are kinda the same. Like Covid only not. Okay, then. What?Ever.

We don’t know shit and the CDC has deferred much of the prognostication and projection onto two schools of thought and they are east versus west and it appears that the are dueling it out for who kills more.  Okay, then.  But one thing is certain Covid ain’t leaving anytime soon, like Herpes it is the guest for life. They have never found a cure for it either.

Today is Juneteenth and I found this opinion in the Times much like I too learned of it when I was teaching, like Kwanza I had no real traction on it but it has gained a strong hold of positive energy and for that let’s end on it.

Why Juneteenth Matters

It was black Americans who delivered on Lincoln’s promise of “a new birth of freedom.”

By Jamelle Bouie
Opinion Columnist
The New York Times
June 18 2020

Neither Abraham Lincoln nor the Republican Party freed the slaves. They helped set freedom in motion and eventually codified it into law with the 13th Amendment, but they were not themselves responsible for the end of slavery. They were not the ones who brought about its final destruction.

Who freed the slaves? The slaves freed the slaves.

“Slave resistance,” as the historian Manisha Sinha points out in “The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition,” “lay at the heart of the abolition movement.”

“Prominent slave revolts marked the turn toward immediate abolition,” Sinha writes, and “fugitive slaves united all factions of the movement and led the abolitionists to justify revolutionary resistance to slavery.”

When secession turned to war, it was enslaved people who turned a narrow conflict over union into a revolutionary war for freedom. “From the first guns at Sumter, the strongest advocates of emancipation were the slaves themselves,” the historian Ira Berlin wrote in 1992. “Lacking political standing or public voice, forbidden access to the weapons of war, slaves tossed aside the grand pronouncements of Lincoln and other Union leaders that the sectional conflict was only a war for national unity and moved directly to put their own freedom — and that of their posterity — atop the national agenda.”

All of this is apropos of Juneteenth, which commemorates June 19, 1865, when Gen. Gordon Granger entered Galveston, Texas, to lead the Union occupation force and delivered the news of the Emancipation Proclamation to enslaved people in the region. This holiday, which only became a nationwide celebration (among black Americans) in the 20th century, has grown in stature over the last decade as a result of key anniversaries (2011 to 2015 was the sesquicentennial of the Civil War), trends in public opinion (the growing racial liberalism of left-leaning whites), and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Jamelle Bouie’s Newsletter: Discover overlooked writing from around the internet, and get exclusive thoughts, photos and reading recommendations from Jamelle.

Over the last week, as Americans continued to protest police brutality, institutional racism and structural disadvantage in cities and towns across the country, elected officials in New York and Virginia have announced plans to make Juneteenth a paid holiday, as have a number of prominent businesses like Nike, Twitter and the NFL.

There’s obviously a certain opportunism here, an attempt to respond to the moment and win favorable coverage, with as little sacrifice as possible. (Paid holidays, while nice, are a grossly inadequate response to calls for justice and equality.) But if Americans are going to mark and celebrate Juneteenth, then they should do so with the knowledge and awareness of the agency of enslaved people.

Emancipation wasn’t a gift bestowed on the slaves; it was something they took for themselves, the culmination of their long struggle for freedom, which began as soon as chattel slavery was established in the 17th century, and gained even greater steam with the Revolution and the birth of a country committed, at least rhetorically, to freedom and equality. In fighting that struggle, black Americans would open up new vistas of democratic possibility for the entire country.

To return to Ira Berlin — who tackled this subject in “The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States” — it is useful to look at the end of slavery as “a near-century-long process” rather than “the work of a moment, even if that moment was a great civil war.” Those in bondage were part of this process at every step of the way, from resistance and rebellion to escape, which gave them the chance, as free blacks, to weigh directly on the politics of slavery. “They gave the slaves’ oppositional activities a political form,” Berlin writes, “denying the masters’ claim that malingering and tool breaking were reflections of African idiocy and indolence, that sabotage represented the mindless thrashings of a primitive people, and that outsiders were the ones who always inspired conspiracies and insurrections.”

By pushing the question of emancipation into public view, black Americans raised the issue of their “status in freedom” and therefore “the question of citizenship and its attributes.” And as the historian Martha Jones details in “Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America,” it is black advocacy that ultimately shapes the nation’s understanding of what it means to be an American citizen. “Never just objects of judicial, legislative, or antislavery thought,” black Americans “drove lawmakers to refine their thinking about citizenship. On the necessity of debating birthright citizenship, black Americans forced the issue.”

After the Civil War, black Americans — free and freed — would work to realize the promise of emancipation, and to make the South a true democracy. They abolished property qualifications for voting and officeholding, instituted universal manhood suffrage, opened the region’s first public schools and made them available to all children. They stood against racial distinctions and discrimination in public life and sought assistance for the poor and disadvantaged. Just a few years removed from degradation and social death, these millions, wrote W.E.B. Du Bois in “Black Reconstruction in America, “took decisive and encouraging steps toward the widening and strengthening of human democracy.”

Juneteenth may mark just one moment in the struggle for emancipation, but the holiday gives us an occasion to reflect on the profound contributions of enslaved black Americans to the cause of human freedom. It gives us another way to recognize the central place of slavery and its demise in our national story. And it gives us an opportunity to remember that American democracy has more authors than the shrewd lawyers and erudite farmer-philosophers of the Revolution, that our experiment in liberty owes as much to the men and women who toiled in bondage as it does to anyone else in this nation’s history.

That Covid thing?

We are still in the throes of a pandemic, despite that the Covid Task Force has been disbanded and the daily lottery numbers have given way to proclamations that are pro protest, amidst the calls to being the phase one openings of New York City and most of New Jersey.  For the states that began this phase weeks ago they are finding slight upticks in the numbers that have little to do with the ongoing protests and other incidents that have placed people into close contact with Police contributing to the chaos with tear gas and flash bombs that lead to coughing and spewing droplets all over the place. Talk about stopping the spread, really?

Covid, I believe, is what led to the protests. Frankly the deaths of black men and others at the hands of Police have been topping 1,000 (3 a day ) for the past five years since The Washington Post and Guardian began to tally the deaths they tracked across the country after Ferguson.  I am sure much like Covid those numbers are largely skewed and incorrect in light that we really don’t have any way of tracking deaths that occurred later out of custody due from injuries sustained or even suicide the result of PTSD when once experiences serious trauma.

But Covid is here and it is not going anywhere as long as it has a lung to attach itself to and spread that virus like bad case of herpes.  We all remember that one? You don’t?  Well incurable disease and fear of contagion has been around a long time, so welcome to the club.  But we really get our knickers in a twist when its about sex and how its transmitted. Remember AIDS?   Starting to see similarities between them all?  EBOLA, ZIKA, H1N1.  Then we have a return of Polio, and my personal favorite Measles and Whooping Cough, all preventable but not to the Anti Vaxx crowd.

One of the most important tool in understanding contagion and transmission is contact tracing and it has a long history from Smallpox to AIDS. Irony that now States are trying to enter that phase is of course a little to late and utterly without any true training or plan in place it will be as effective as the lockdown was to stopping the spread, as well cases are still there so that worked out well, didn’t it?  Economic destruction and social unrest are equal tradeoffs for the failures of our Government, both federal and state, to have any type of coherent and consistent pandemic response.

This is where we are with regards to Contract Tracing and it will be as fucked up as all the rest so don’t throw out those masks and gloves quite yet.

Contact tracing is ‘best’ tool we have until there’s a vaccine, say health experts

By Frances Stead Sellers and Ben Guarino
The Washington Post
June 14, 2020 at 8:00 a.m. EDT

It has quelled outbreaks of Ebola, allowed smallpox to be corralled before being vanquished by a vaccine, and helped turn HIV into a survivable illness. And whenever a new infectious disease emerges, contact tracing is public health’s most powerful weapon for tracking transmission and figuring out how best to protect the population.

But now, as coronavirus cases are surging in hot spots across the country, the proven strategy’s efficacy is in doubt: Contact tracing failed to stanch the first wave of coronavirus infections, and today’s far more extensive undertaking will require 100,000 or more trained tracers to delve into strangers’ personal lives and persuade even some without symptoms to stay home. Health departments in many of the worst-affected communities are way behind in hiring and training those people. The effort may also be hobbled by the long-standing distrust among minorities of public health officials, as well as worries about promising new technologies that pit privacy against the public good.

“We don’t have a great track record in the United States of trust in the public health system,” said David C. Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors. Ever since the 40-year Tuskegee experiment, which withheld treatment for syphilis from poor black men, officials have had to make special efforts, he said, to reach those now “disproportionately impacted by covid who are African Americans and Latinos.”

Still, as states relax restrictions, public health experts believe wide-scale contact tracing is the price that must be paid to reopen safely without reverting to the blanket lockdown that put nearly 40 million Americans out of work. Time is of the essence, they say, taking advantage of the drop in cases resulting from the shutdowns.

“Contact tracing is finding the next generation before they happen, getting ahead of that transmission cycle to stop it,” said Emily Gurley, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the instructor of the school’s new six-hour online contact-tracing course. Gurley doesn’t believe the strategy will stop transmission, but that in concert with testing and other measures, it can prevent the disease from spreading exponentially.

Right now, though, the virus is showing signs of taking the lead again. As states have lifted restrictions on retail and large gatherings, more than a dozen are facing new heights in cases or hospitalizations, according to Washington Post data.

In Arizona, for example, the governor reopened before local health departments had hired and trained its new army of contact tracers, said Will Humble, former director of the state’s health department.

“We flattened the curve. Then, by the time we ended, the contact tracers weren’t up and running yet,” said Humble, who described case investigation and contact tracing as key elements of a multipronged response, including mask-wearing and social distancing. The health departments in the state’s hard-hit urban counties have been repurposing staff, in addition to making new hires, he said, using federal dollars and support from an Arizona-based nonprofit group, the Crisis Response Network.

Incentives could have been built in, tying each region’s reopening to its hiring of adequate contact tracers, Humble said.

“We didn’t do that here,” he said. “Now we have to ramp up a contact-tracing workforce that isn’t going to get to everything probably.”

Texas, also seeing a dramatic surge, has relaxed restrictions after hiring about 3,000 of the 4,000 contact tracers Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said in April he planned to have in place as part of his reopening strategy.

“Both we and the local health departments continue to add staff,” said Chris Van Deusen, spokesman for the Texas Department of State Health Services. “We can scale up further if that becomes necessary.”

Michael Sweat, director of the Center for Global Health at the Medical University of South Carolina, said the state health department, which has suffered from long-term underfunding, was trying hard to ramp up contact tracing as parts of the state suffer “worrisome micro-epidemics.”

“There’s a lot of effort going into training and deploying people, and working on technology to help. But they are still getting their footing,” Sweat said, as the infection growth rate in Charleston suddenly doubled.

In April, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention awarded $631 million from the Cares Act to state and local health departments for surveillance, including contact tracing, even as a report from the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security estimated 100,000 new hires will be needed to trace all contacts, safely isolate the sick and quarantine those exposed, at a cost of $3.6 billion.

Across the country, the efforts to ramp up are vast and varied.

The University of California at San Francisco has been tapped by the state to create a Pandemic Workforce Training Academy that will train as many as 3,000 people for the state’s 58 county health departments, many of them focusing on low-income communities where requests to quarantine can be financially devastating.

In Fairfax County, Virginia, the county health department has subcontracted to a private company, GattiHR, to create a 400-strong, largely remote contact-tracing team, looking for people with “empathy, attention to detail, resilience [and] investigative skills,” and finding successful applicants among those furloughed from the hospitality industry.

In Rhode Island, Gov. Gina Raimondo (D) unveiled a free voluntary app that health officials hope will prove more reliable than people’s memories in re-creating their recent contacts — one of numerous cellphone tracking innovations, including the Apple-Google exposure notification system, that have prompted privacy concerns from civil libertarians.

And in Florida, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers has been working urgently with Doctors Without Borders to win the confidence of migrant workers, where 37 percent of those tested at pop-up clinics were positive. Their goal is to slow the virus’s spread before farmworkers leave for summer jobs in Georgia, South Carolina and beyond.

“We have a window of opportunity,” said Gerardo Reyes Chavez, a former farmworker, who said that as people have become sick, they have worried they might lose their jobs. “They are having to weigh what is scarier for them — to know they have the disease or not.”

But several people like Chavez who work with immigrant groups said people have grown more willing to respond to contact tracers as the virus has sickened more people, giving them concerns about infecting their own family members.

In San Francisco, librarian Ramses Escobedo, who became a contact tracer after two weeks of training, said the health department gave out a 60-page instruction document. “It has information from the scripts you’re supposed to follow, the questions you’re supposed to ask.” (Escobedo, who speaks Spanish, noticed some errors in the Spanish translations and said he had them fixed.)

Of the 30 people Escobedo spoke to in his first three weeks as a contact tracer, only one refused to answer his questions.

Susie Welty, a Spanish-speaking contact tracer who joined the UCSF effort after her own overseas research on HIV was suspended by the pandemic, also said people have largely been responsive. Getting them to agree to voluntarily self-isolate is far easier when resources are available to provide food and other out-of-pocket payments during the 14-day period.

Welty described a conversation with a pastor whose wife had tested positive. When the pastor explained he did not want his congregation to know and so did not want them bringing food during their quarantine, Welty was able to refer them to SNAP, the food supplement program.

“San Francisco has resources,” Welty said. “That is not the case in many jurisdictions,” she added, saying it is particularly hard for undocumented workers to comply if they are unable to feed their families.

“They’re scared,” said Venus Ginés, founder of the Latino community health organization Dia de la Mujer Latina, which operates in Houston and other cities.

After the Houston health department asked Ginés to help fill contact-tracing positions, her organization supplied 200 résumés of Spanish-speaking applicants within 24 hours, and Ginés said the health department told her that hires will be made from that pool.

Kirstin Short, Houston Health Department bureau chief of epidemiology, said her agency relies on Dia de la Mujer Latina and other organizations to “speak as that trusted authority within that community to vouch for us as a government entity.”

But the possibility of data falling into hostile hands worries representatives of immigrant groups.

“There’s always that fear if I say something, and this person is undocumented and the government finds out about it, then that person could be deported,” Ginés said. “We don’t know if this information is going to get hacked or how it is going to be utilized.”

Using cellphone location data or Bluetooth to determine proximity, as has been done successfully in Singapore and South Korea, increases those concerns.

The app rolled out in Rhode Island is voluntary — an effort to walk a line between digital data collection and protecting civil liberties.

“Privacy and data protection are paramount,” Raimondo said in an interview. “Which means I need to give you confidence that if you opt in, your data is safe.”

But privacy advocate Mitchell Baker, CEO of Mozilla, which owns the Firefox Web browser, said it’s easy for data to be misused.

“How do citizens know what is actually happening? What data are you collecting, where is it going, how is it used, and when and how is it destroyed?” she asked.

Not everyone owns a smartphone. And many experts believe conversations with a contact tracer are preferable for other reasons, too. When a disease so disproportionately affects marginalized populations, it’s important to build trust, said Joia Mukherjee, chief medical officer of the international medical nonprofit Partners in Health, which works with the Massachusetts contact-tracing program, as well as numerous vulnerable communities across the country.

“This is a terrifying time. You need some level of human contact,” Mukherjee said. “If I were exposed, I would want to know to protect my mother’s life.”

Even when people do comply — in person, on the phone or online — the novel coronavirus is proving to be an exceptionally wily foe.

Unlike a blood-borne or sexually transmitted disease, or one such as smallpox or measles that scars its victims, the coronavirus moves invisibly on people’s breath, meaning they may have no idea they’ve recently spent time with somebody who is infected.

Because people can become contagious in just a few days — as opposed to two weeks for syphilis, for example — contact tracers have limited time to reach them before the virus moves on, leading some epidemiologists to believe digital technologies are key to stopping it.

And the microscopic bug moves so stealthily — before symptoms show up, or without them ever appearing — that it confounded the earliest attempts to corner it, according to a recent CDC report. This past week, after a World Health Organization official cast doubt on whether the virus could spread asymptomatically and then revised her position, doctors called for more clarity on an issue with such profound implications for how they practice medicine.

The best way to establish the truth, infectious disease specialists say, is to use contact tracing to build a fuller picture of the virus’s habits and preferences, including information about people who for some reason escape infection.

“It’s not a silver bullet: It won’t reach everyone; not everybody will comply.” Welty said. “But it’s the best we have now, the best we will have until we have a vaccine.”

So as we move forward with no General leading the march we are heading into a battle that I suspect will end like Gettysburg only that there will be no winner in this one.

The Wall Street Journal did an outstanding job investigating the failures of the two stooges in New York, Cuomo and DiBlasio (Murphy proves that with three you get egg roll and the two’s company and three’s a crowd but he follows the Italian Stallion’s lead) and how they continued throughout the crisis to mishandle the Covid outbreak in the region.  

Many of the things that I have long suspected and commented on was the bizarre assignments of hospitals as the primary facilities to receive Covid patients without sufficient funding and materials to handle the influx they were clearly overwhelmed early. Then we have the transferring of patients that never made sense and now we see this may have contributed to their deaths as they were simply too ill to be moved.  As for the crazy Naval ship and the Javitz Center those two bullshit facilities were dog and pony shows to prove to the President we were in serious shit.  Again the WSJ does not discuss the crazy fucking tent of Evangelical gay hater but that too I have never thought necessary nor actually useful.  And I have long said the never ending bizarre communication that had the goal posts moved endlessly often with conflicting if not contradicting information.

Here are some of the most salient point the Journal made:

• Insufficient isolation protocols, mixing pos with not pos patients (and later this includes the returning of the elderly to nursing homes while still ill and in turn contributing to the rising death tolls) 
• Inadequate staff planning especially trained staff to handle patients including allowing many to die alone
• Mixed messages. Shifting guidelines about when exposed workers return to work along with incomplete staff protection policies
• Over reliance on government sources for key equipment, much inadequate or faulty
• Procurement planning gaps, focusing on ventilators while ignoring other key supplies and medical needs including PPE and testing materials

One of the many issues that has come out of this was the excessive use of ventilators as the key to treatment, but since that we have learned that many other less intrusive and dangerous methods (the issue of droplets spread as well as patient overall success ratio) have been more useful. And this of course comes from Oxygen treatment as well as monitors observe patients, as well as the ability   to suction mucus from lungs to facilitate breathing.  Of course add to this,  few experienced available medically trained individuals placed in hospitals, and this led many to die alone if needlessly since they had no one to oversee the cases.   In fact, the dated and faulty equipment may have contributed to the deaths of patients, including some ventilators that led to collapsing patients lungs.  In addition  the lack of coordinated information on treatments  that led to many patients to develop deadly blood clots and die from that as well as kidney failure.  All treatable.

Then of course the testing failures and chaos that led many to be returned to their communities to infect more and the patients and staff exposed to medical waste thrown about, the lack of isolated chambers to place patients and in turn transferring them without proper protocol to stop spread.  And the lack of communication between hospital systems leading them to be returned as their was no available space.

And lastly the amount of spread to health care was largely due to a failure to have proper PPE equipment, to have a policy that was consistently in place with regards to when an ill staff member could return and that too has been obvious with the whole mask debacle as one where just a bandana will suffice. Really?

This is why when I shop I wear a very secure mask, gloves and am careful on public transport. I move if someone sits to close and frankly I walk about keeping my distance even when outside.  I shudder to think when schools begin how in the flying fuck they are going to do any of this as again there is no clear leadership let alone science to explain what to do.  There is no money and no materials or again protective equipment in place for Teachers and Staff to use, for students who cannot afford to have the proper masks etc and let alone who or how this will be enforced. I walked by the bars and restaurants open yesterday along the harbor and they were packed arm in arm so social distancing has gone right out the window with little regard to the reality that there is still a major health crisis in place and why?  George Floyd.

Again to not dismiss the reality of that fact but Mr. Floyd was positive for Covid.  It does not excuse that Chauvin kneed him for over 8 minutes and in turn the other two officers were also placed on top of his body to reduce movement (nor the other standing there like some sort of Scarecrow in place to scare off any potential film makers of this encounter); however, it may have been a contribution to his death.  As Police are currently running amok in the streets gassing, bean bagging and going nuts with largely peaceful protesters are possibly contributing to further spreading of a fatal disease (and that may be the point saves the whole other way of killing) and that cannot be overlooked.   Covid affects the ability to breathe and that is essential to understand and acknowledge too that Mr. Floyd may not even have known he was ill, that he needed medical attention and in turn would have never led him to go out that day. Again that is hindsight but Covid and its decimation in the black community cannot be overlooked or forgotten either.

Going Somewhere?

That was once a literal inquiry if someone was planning to go on holiday, leave a room or just plain leave.  Now today it is the million dollar question as many of us sit in wait wondering what is next and what will happen when we finally get somewhere.

The reality is no one knows anything about anything and that includes the virus we have come to know as Covid.   That much is clear as many man hours and labor has been spent on when did it get here and how did we know it did and more importantly who brought it here.  In other words, the elusive Patient Zero which means a whole hell lot of nothing frankly as this is now and now what do we do?

Much is made of the decision to NOT shut the country down sooner, or how it was done and the reality of the disease and its travels Asia, to Europe, to America and elsewhere as it travails across the globe leaving a wake of decimation be it physical  or economical as at this point it is hard to grieve as the losses are so great in both.

The New York Times posted a 1000 names of the dead taken from the random of 100K and climbing since Covid hit the shores sometime in 2019 – 2020. Again who the fuck cares as they are still dead and still dying.   Normally I love a good obituary but this time I passed as this is beyond even my level of empathy and compassion, I am just too angry to be anything else.

Then we had the Memorial Day holiday which I believed would lead to chaos if the powers that be did not lessen the leash we have been on these near three months and it shows that some of the pups are not well trained as they flocked to public places and ran amok.  This did not surprise me; however, I was surprised how the tri-state area seemed quite contrite and complacent but that may have been due to weather as it was not clear until the afternoon and for many it is just exhausting to think about doing more than organizing once again the shopping, the laundry and the rest of daily life to add a day/weekend trip to go somewhere else only to do the same there. Remember no restaurants nor shops are open for regular traffic/business so is that not the point of getting away, to get away from the routine?

Now was I shocked that in Arkansas a pool party went amok? That in the Ozarks it was a crazy ass party of drunks?  That in South Carolina, North Carolina and Florida shit and crazy hit the fan? No.  Have you been there, no wait, lived there?  After living in Nashville and traveling in the region no I wasn’t and again these are areas that have not been as heavily affected by the virus and they are sure this is all bullshit and somehow about Trump.  If you met the great unwashed as I have you would realize they are just not screaming hillbilly racists.. well that they are.. but they are just like any part of America that has been relegated to the discount heap pile.  They are sorted over, picked apart and neglected and that rage has to be released in ways that have led to mass shootings, opioid addiction, violence and of course Trump.  To think that is exclusive to the region, think again and check the story about the Staten Island Shop Rite shoppers abusing a patron for not wearing a mask or anything in Jersey with regards to the Orthodox sect.

Again the idea that in bleak times we look to leadership to define heroism and in turn guidance we have somehow latched onto Cuomo who for whatever reason thinks he is the Big Covid Daddy of us all, regaling us stories about his daughters, their boyfriends and his brother and mother as if we too are all one family fighting the virus together. No we are not and shut the fuck up.  I have written about the Three Stooges here before and once again want to highlight that as Cuomo feigns dismay over the dead he carefully placed in the budget an amendment  absolving legal responsibility for those in the medical industry (the same ones he sent many Covid patients back to to their ultimate deaths as well as infecting others) was due to the one factor that explains it all money.  

And as New York tries to figure it out the expression goes: As goes California there goes the nation. If that is so then guess what we are fucked. The States have these odd panels comprised of former Feds, Private Industry and of course Billionaires who will do what I have no clue but the idea that private industry can rescue America is another one of the many bullshit screeds that have been exposed behind the pandemic curtain.  Americans have been slowly eroding their faith in Government (and this has not changed) but have been stable with regards to the State and Municipal entities and we can say well hello to the flying monkeys on that as well.

No one, I repeat, no one has the Magic Crystal Ball in which to figure this out.  There can be all the speculating, posturing and of course my personal favorite, modeling on how and if and when and why if that is this then that could be this but if that x is not y then it becomes z and then all hell breaks loose.   I never want to see/hear/know about another model for anything, including homes, tops, bottoms, super or otherwise.   I love that if and or but somehow magically is able to predict and tell us what may, could of, might of and if or nor had this been done then, or maybe then or this time for sure.  Okay, thanks.

What we are seeing is fear and that is not measurable nor predictable.  We have people running amok here in two different directions.  One heading to the beach and beer ponging until Covid kills them or the ones running screaming that Covid is coming, Covid is coming in their best Paul Revere until that versus Covid makes them hoarse.  Either/or, Neither/Nor I am done with the daily digests of someone told me that I know of their friend on Facebook who told them about a BBQ with 13 families and they all work in a prison and then they all will go back to work at the prison and then more shit will hit the fan or not.  So do you know them and are they at your house? Did you go to the BBQ? To the prison? Do you live in the City? The State? Work with them or their family? No. Then why do you give a flying fuck? This is personal responsibility have some.

And that is why once again as we watch another Black person being killed as if it is okay to follow them, tape them and then wait and turn over the video to the Police but accept no responsibility as you watch men chase and gun him down sure what is the problem. Or the girl calling the Police as she was walking her dog off leash in an area where it is required and a man asked her to do so,  I see the sense of urgency.  Or the black man standing on the corner waiting for a bus is an issue as well the buses aren’t coming as often so he is waiting longer than usual and therefore your fucking problem. Wow, just wow.  I don’t give a flying fuck unless you come into my personal space and that is three feet, not even six and so when you are on the bus/train/rail don’t but here is what I do, I MOVE.  Gosh that is not hard.  Well I can now call 1-844-WYT-FEAR and all will be solved.

No one knows shit so the prognosticating, the predicting, the forecasting is all for nothing or not as they get paid for their performance, like monkeys. Do they fly too?

No One Knows What’s Going to Happen
Stop asking pundits to predict the future after the coronavirus. It doesn’t exist.

The New York Times
Sunday Review
May 24, 2020

By Dr. Mark Lilla; Professor of humanities at Columbia.

The best prophet, Thomas Hobbes once wrote, is the best guesser. That would seem to be the last word on our capacity to predict the future: We can’t.

But it is a truth humans have never been able to accept. People facing immediate danger want to hear an authoritative voice they can draw assurance from; they want to be told what will occur, how they should prepare, and that all will be well. We are not well designed, it seems, to live in uncertainty. Rousseau exaggerated only slightly when he said that when things are truly important, we prefer to be wrong than to believe nothing at all.

The history of humanity is the history of impatience. Not only do we want knowledge of the future, we want it when we want it. The Book of Job condemns as prideful this desire for immediate attention. Speaking out of the whirlwind, God makes it clear that he is not a vending machine. He shows his face and reveals his plans when the time is ripe, not when the mood strikes us. We must learn to wait upon the Lord, the Bible tells us. Good luck with that, Job no doubt grumbled.

When the gods are silent, human beings take things into their own hands. In religions where the divine was thought to inscribe its messages in the natural world, specialists were taught to take auspices from the disposition of stars in the sky, from decks of cards, dice, a pile of sticks, a candle flame, a bowl of oily water, or the liver of some poor sheep. With these materials, battles could be planned, plagues predicted and bad marriages avoided.

In those places where the gods were thought to communicate verbally with humans, oracles and prophets were designated to provide answers on demand. The most highly revered oracles in the ancient Greek world were the high priestesses at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. When it came time to respond to a petitioner who had placed a question before her, the priestess would enter the inner sanctum and seat herself on a tripod erected over a crevice in the ground, out of which inebriating gases were thought to rise.

These fumes paralyzed her rational faculties and put her in a trance of receptivity that allowed the god Apollo to speak through her in cryptic remarks and riddles. These would be interpreted by a second figure, the prophet, who answered the grateful petitioner in poetry or prose. It was a very successful start-up and made Delphi a wealthy town.

Prophets today are less flamboyant. Former prime ministers do not, as a rule, sniff drugs before appearing on CNN. They sit meekly in the green room sipping mineral water before being called on to announce our fate. Augurs have given up on sheep livers and replaced them with big data and statistical modeling. The wonder is that we still cry out for their help, given that the future is full of surprises.

Professional forecasters know this about the future, which is why in the small print of their reports they lay out all the assumptions that went into the forecast and the degree of statistical confidence one might have in particular estimates, given the data and research methods used. But harried journalists and public officials don’t read or comprehend the footnotes, and with the public baying for information, they understandably pass on the most striking estimates just to get through the day.

Ancient augurs and prophets were in high-risk professions. When their predictions failed to materialize, many were executed by sovereigns or pulled apart by mobs. We see a

Take a banal example: snowstorms and school closings. A half century ago, when meteorological forecasting was less sophisticated, parents and children would not learn that classes were canceled until the storm began and it was announced on radio and television that very morning. We lived in harmless uncertainty, which for kids was thrilling. When snowflakes fell they even looked like manna from heaven.

Today, mayors and school superintendents, putting their faith in the meteorologists, routinely announce closings a day or more in advance. If the storm fails to arrive, though, they are sharply criticized by parents who lost a day of work or had to find day care. And if an unforeseen storm paralyzes the city, leaving streets unsalted and children stranded at school, the reaction is far worse. More than one mayor has lost a re-election bid because of failed prophecies, victim of our collective overconfidence in human foresight.

Our addiction to economic forecasting is far more consequential. Here the footnotes really do matter but politicians and the press encourage magical thinking.

The candidate declares, My plan will create 205,000 new jobs, raise the Dow 317 points and lower the price of gasoline 15 cents. Two years later, the gloating headline reads: The President’s Unkept Promises. Stagnant growth, a bear market and war in the Middle East make re-election unlikely.

Never mind that declining global demand slowed growth, that Wall Street is a drama queen and that a freakish tanker collision set off the war. A failed presidency is declared. And so the press and the public turn to fresher faces — who of course offer the same absurdly precise predictions. Not for nothing did Gore Vidal call us the United States of Amnesia.

The public square is thick today with augurs and prophets claiming to foresee the post-Covid world to come. I, myself, who find sundown something of a surprise every evening, have been pursued by foreign journalists asking what the pandemic will mean for the American presidential election, populism, the prospects of socialism, race relations, economic growth, higher education, New York City politics and more. And they seem awfully put out when I say I have no idea. You know your lines, just say them.

I understand their position. With daily life frozen, there are fewer newsworthy events to be reported on and debated. Yet columns must be written, and the 24/7 cable news machine must be fed. Only so much time can be spent on the day’s (hair-raising) news conferences or laying blame for decisions made in the past or sentimental stories on how people are coping. So journalists’ attention turns toward the future.

But the post-Covid future doesn’t exist. It will exist only after we have made it. Religious prophecy is rational, on the assumption that the future is in the gods’ hands, not ours. Believers can be confident that what the gods say through the oracles’ mouth or inscribe in offal will come to pass, independent of our actions. But if we don’t believe in such deities, we have no reason to ask what will happen to us. We should ask only what we want to happen, and how to make it happen, given the constraints of the moment.

Apart from the actual biology of the coronavirus — which we are only beginning to understand — nothing is predestined. How many people fall ill with it depends on how they behave, how we test them, how we treat them and how lucky we are in developing a vaccine.

The result of those decisions will then limit the choices about reopening that employers, mayors, university presidents and sports club owners are facing. Their decisions will then feed back into our own decisions, including whom we choose for president this November. And the results of that election will have the largest impact on what the next four years will hold.

The pandemic has brought home just how great a responsibility we bear toward the future, and also how inadequate our knowledge is for making wise decisions and anticipating consequences. Perhaps that is why our prophets and augurs can’t keep up with the demand for foresight.

At some level, people must be thinking that the more they learn about what is predetermined, the more control they will have. This is an illusion. Human beings want to feel that they are on a power walk into the future, when in fact we are always just tapping our canes on the pavement in the fog.

A dose of humility would do us good in the present moment. It might also help reconcile us to the radical uncertainty in which we are always living. Let us retire our prophets and augurs. And let us stop asking health specialists and public officials for confident projections they are in no position to make — and stop being disappointed when the ones we force out of them turn out to be wrong. (A shift from daily to weekly news conferences and reports would be a small step toward sobriety.)

It is bad enough living with a president who refuses to recognize reality. We worsen the situation by focusing our attention on litigating the past and demanding certainty about the future. We must accept what we are, in any case, condemned to do in life: tap and step, tap and step, tap and step ….

Got It, Yet?

The end is not neigh it is nowhere near it and the reality is that many people who seem confused about contagion and viruses and how they spread bought the messaging that self quarantining was the answer to stopping Covid and then in a few months we would be free and clear. And no as that was simply done to curtail it and slow it, stop it no.

Add to this the confusing rambling incoherence and endless conflicting messaging from the get go this did not help in allowing people to understand what Covid is and what they can do to be proactive to not catch, spread or in fact understand if they even had the disease as they were not able to get quickly tested for Covid or any presence of an antibody to tell them they had and were now able to move about freely, not fully immune but likely so with some protective protocol in place to ensure they are safe to be with others.

No, the media, the local Governments, the federal Government and of course social media went off the rails and decided to do a daily lottery announcement where every number announced was a losing one.  And everyday people never heard anything but negativity and with that it spread faster than Covid could have ever wished.  The shut down of the economy further was another issue and that too was exacerbated by a system so antiquated that many found themselves wishing they had Covid as death seemed a better option.

Then we had again likely interference from foreign agents to further inflame and agitate as evident by social media posts and  quick review of commentary pages on boards, message sites and newspaper articles. In the best of times they resemble white noise to sewer waste and given the level of average intellect this is of its own a super spreader.

Lastly the reality is that most of the virus is in fact contained that the irony it is within two sources – health care workers and those deemed essential. The lack of protocol in handling cases, the testing issues, the lack of PPE and of course the actual set up in a hospital to handle these type of highly contagious virus has contributed to much of it being spread further and even become more deadlier as the strain attaches itself to the host and in turn its DNA alters itself to manifest itself in a whole other type of disease or diseases in which to treat.  So you see many simply having lung failure as they collapse from the pressure as Covid seems to literally choke the life out of you, others have blood clotting, heart attacks, their own bodies immune systems go into overdrive and lead to heart attacks, and other numerous if not endless other symptoms and ailments that in some cases fatal others utterly treatable but still long lasting if not permanent damage to the physical body. Covid is a bitch on wheels but again do you hear that in the daily lottery numbers how many actually have the worst case scenario versus those who do not and the average stay in the hospital, the length of time in hospital and of course time from date of the positive test to the day they test negative? Nope you don’t.

Then we have the endless bullshit about testing, the crazy dopey Grandpa and his Igor that either come out with utter bizarro messages and his Igor to say, “No the Master is wrong we will die.”  So it doesn’t help that no rational single message and plan is shared on a regular basis.

I quit listening to the media and instead read carefully every article that has information about the disease and the double check the science journal about the current most recent hysterical screed about  Covid.  Yesterday buried in an article about a CDC report declaring the death total will be triple  in months my first thought that this has Igor’s fingerprints (that is if he wasn’t wearing gloves but careful in contactless delivery) all over it as he is doing his best to reign in Trump.  So by scaring the shit out of everyone he knows that eventually the insiders will corral the CDG and he will retract his most recent crazy. And yep it works.

But lastly the reality is that the reason Covid is still here is because of not only health workers but the essential workers who are running the show here.  We have no way of knowing how many are ill at any time be that municipal workers which I have heard on the down low is quite high among the Police which explains their escalating violence and why many seem to not follow the protocols and are just wandering around without masks beating the shit out of people as well that is some kind of contact and I sure as hell wouldn’t do it unless I wanted to catch it or in turn had it already or well knew I did and thought fuck this I want to be a super spreader.

And right now we have a shitload of people who have Covid and it is called Thinkihadititis.  And these idiots are now running around without any confirmation or ability to find out it is true and they could be very much asymptomatic carriers as we don’t know anything about the bodies ability to hold onto the virus and in turn how long it remains to shed.  We assume 14 days but then again without clear bold testing fuck all on that. And again that means you have three days you are fine, day three the cough or some other symptom arrives, it is Covid? Until you are tested fuck if you know. Then you have up until a week waiting for results.  So now it Day 10 and you feel better. Are you? Then the test comes back, no you do not have Covid, but did you also get tested for the flu?  And even if you did test NEG are you? As do we know if they are false positives and then you go out and well two out of every four you meet and greet you may expose as you did not go back to get a “second opinion” as I like to call it to ensure that you are fine.  There are numerous labs and they can all have cross contamination issues, poor testing agents or administers of said test that affect results.   And that is your week two right there in Quarantine.  Who the fuck is doing that?  And again you get sick try to get tested and numerous calling, failing to get it and by day four (the average for the record of Covid) you feel better so you don’t follow up just to see if in fact you are better and the virus is there just like Herpes waiting to shed itself to the next victim.  So out you go and for the next 10 days you are super spreader just like the whore Herpes love.  Again understand Herpes and that virus you get the drift.

This brings me to the issue with children who had all kinds of shit this fall from minor stomach flu like problems to major Asthma attacks and mysterious other ailments they are now finding.  It also mayshow they may be carriers, and in turn that window from exposure to actual symptoms may be longer than the believed 72 hours which it seems to take with regards to normal viruses.  And Covid is not normal in any stretch of the imagination but and this is big but.. it is a blood borne virus and that much is true.  It is not airborne like Measles or Whooping Cough.  But its pass rate is just in that same classification as it is more than one to one as in the case of the flu (Again for the mathematically challenged it means in a family of four three of you are tagged “it.”)  And again in that 72 hours that is a long three days in which contact and spread can be serious hence the lockdown now entering month three.

And those are again the contactless workers, the delivery agents, the grocery shoppers, the retail clerks, the phone call center agents, the transit workers, the people who are largely invisible from the Amazon primers, the pickers at Sephora or some retailer just trying to survive the second wave as in bankruptcy,  to the meat packers.   Or the Farmers, their distributors and the rest that have led to much food destruction and waste as the supply chain is fucked up.   Add to that the larger scale truckers, the many municipal workers who are not just “Front liners” but the road repair, street cleaners, meter maids and assorted others who cannot work remotely. And that is a large cohort scared shitless and yet are happy to have aa job.  Read their hysterical paranoid screeds on social media telling people to stay home to not buy makeup and candy and nothing not essential.  Ask my Doormen about the endless packages that include Gap sweats and their frustration at trying to deliver and organize the chaos that makes Christmas seem like a low key day.  There is your spread. And that means the Covid ain’t leaving us anytime soon.

If People Are Staying Home, Why Is Coronavirus Still Spreading?
People Magazine

Two months in to near-nationwide stay-at-home orders, Americans are ready to get back to their pre-pandemic lives. Those who are non-essential workers (and followed the rules) have been at home all day, every day, save for trips to the grocery store or for socially distant walks. And yet, the number of new cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. continues to go up each day, by about 2 to 4 percent.

While the number of new cases is decreasing in hard-hit areas like New York, Michigan and New Jersey, or small states like Hawaii, which is down to around just 1 new case a day, the numbers are spiking upwards in nearly half of the country, from Illinois to Texas to New Hampshire to Alabama.

There isn’t one single reason for the increases, but several, based on the way the U.S. shut down (or didn’t), the current push to reopen and the nature of the virus itself.

Essential Workers

While many Americans are able to stay home, essential workers are still heading in each day, to hospitals, nursing homes, supermarkets and factories — all places where they can come in contact with people with COVID-19.

Nursing homes, in particular, are dealing with large outbreaks of the virus. At least 10,000 deaths in the U.S. have been linked to nursing homes, where the older residents are highly susceptible to COVID-19, and workers are often surrounded by sick patients. One nursing home in New Jersey was so overwhelmed by the number of patient deaths that police found 17 bodies stacked in the facility’s morgue.

In the Midwest, several meat processing factories are dealing with large outbreaks among their workers that only began in the last few weeks. At a Tyson Foods meat factory in Perry, Iowa, 58 percent of the workers have tested positive for COVID-19, NBC News reported. Tyson, and several Smithfield meat factories, have had to temporarily close or slow down production as workers have gotten sick, leading to meat shortages nationwide.

Additionally, many of these essential workers are making minimum wage and can’t afford to stay home and quarantine, even if they get COVID-19.

“They are afraid of losing their jobs,” J. Luis Nunez Gallegos, an assistant medical director at a health center in Washington, D.C., told The Washington Post. “They are anxious their employers won’t respect the quarantine, or that two weeks seems too long, and they don’t always have the savings to get by.”

And as these essential workers continue to go to work, they also risk bringing COVID-19 home to their families and spreading the virus further.

The Push to Reopen

Now, with the economy struggling, many governors are starting to slowly lift stay-at-home orders in their states and allow non-essential businesses, such as hair salons, retail stores and gyms, to reopen. This is happening despite warnings from health experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci who warn that reopening too soon could cause another spike in cases, and polls showing that most Americans are against easing restrictions.

Video: Should you wear a face mask for an outdoor run during the pandemic? (Courtesy: Shape)

Several states that have begun to reopen are now seeing an increase in COVID-19 cases, The New York Times reported. Indiana, Kansas and Nebraska all eased restrictions on Monday despite spiking numbers, along with Iowa, Minnesota, Tennessee and Texas.

And while the White House was able to announce in mid-April that the projected number of deaths had decreased from 100,000 to 60,000 by the end of August, those estimates have now gone back up, and deaths are estimated to hit 100,000 by June. As of Wednesday morning, more than 71,000 people have died.

The Virus Persists

Another issue is the messaging — when social distancing was first emphasized in mid-March as a way to “flatten the curve” and limit the spread of COVID-19, it wasn’t a way to eliminate the virus completely, as people may have believed.

What social distancing actually does is slow down virus transmission to a level that is manageable for hospital workers and enables them to have enough hospital beds, masks and equipment to properly treat COVID-19 patients.

While the virus will eventually slow down in areas that are adhering to social distancing and other safety precautions, “there will be some places where it’s still circulating, so it never really leaves,” Dr. Robert Norton, a professor of public health at Auburn University and member of several

Unfortunately, the virus will likely continue to persist until a vaccine is ready, in about 12 to 18 months at the earliest.