Coronavirus

[Scooter]

[Bicycle Bill]

Just a thought....

Remember that Mayan calendar that supposedly only went to 2012, and everybody figured the reason for that was because they somehow knew the world was going to end then?  Maybe it was a transposition of the numbers and they REALLY meant 2021....

And if Trump gets re-elected, it may prove to be that they were closer to right than anyone thought.

-"BB"-

[Gob]

People across the UK have taken part in a second "Clap for Carers" tribute, saluting NHS staff and other key workers dealing with the coronavirus pandemic.



Delivery drivers, supermarket staff, care workers and bin collectors were among those honoured by the nation.

Households banged pots and pans, while others played the bagpipes to show their support.

The event is now expected to happen every Thursday at 20:00 BST.

Households gathered on balconies, doorsteps and gardens to pay tribute to the efforts of key workers during the crisis.

Emergency workers and NHS workers also joined in the applause.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson - who is currently self-isolating in his flat above Number 11 Downing Street after testing positive for coronavirus - joined in, standing alone in his doorway to applaud.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn also joined the tribute, from his Islington constituency.

Last week's inaugural event paid tribute to NHS workers working on the frontline of the pandemic.

The initiative was devised by Annemarie Plas, from Brixton, south-west London, who was inspired by same event happening in her home country of the Netherlands, and in many other countries.

Ms Plas posted details of the event on her social media channels, and enthusiasm for taking part quickly spread across the UK.

A string of buildings including the Shard in central London and Windsor Castle, in Berkshire, were lit up blue to mark the moment.

Meanwhile bagpipers across Scotland performed tunes to pay tribute to key workers.



Finlay MacDonald, 42, of Clarkston in East Renfrewshire, took part, calling it a "really special moment".

"All our neighbours were out in their gardens with a rousing round of applause. We have heard from people in Japan, South Africa, America, Spain and Italy who are all taking part."

"Meanwhile bagpipers across Scotland performed tunes to pay tribute to key workers."

Aren't people suffering enough already?!?!?

[MajGenl.Meade]

I clapped on Facebook and told everyone to share to reach a billion

[Gob]

Gawd bless 'er...

The Queen is to deliver a message to the nation about the coronavirus outbreak on Sunday, Buckingham Palace has said.

The expectation had been growing about when the head of state would make a public statement about the unprecedented events that have led to the country going into lockdown to combat the Covid-19 pandemic.

Buckingham Palace said in a statement: “Her Majesty the Queen has recorded a special broadcast to the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth in relation to the coronavirus outbreak.”

The televised address, which was recorded at Windsor Castle, will be

[Lord Jim]

Another CNN show host comes down with Covid 19:

Brooke Baldwin is second CNN anchor to contract coronavirus this week



CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin announced Friday she has tested positive for coronavirus after a sudden onset of symptoms Thursday afternoon.

“I am OKAY. It came on suddenly yesterday afternoon. Chills, aches, fever,” Baldwin said in an Instagram post on Friday.

Advertisement

Baldwin, who has been broadcasting from CNN’s New York City studios, is the second CNN anchor this week to announce she’s contracted the virus, just days after Chris Cuomo said he has the illness. Baldwin said she has been social distancing and following government guidelines, but the virus still “got” her.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/0 ... rus-163292

Say lib, you think it's possible that maybe some Trump supporters are getting themselves sick and then running around trying to deliberately infect CNN show hosts?

[BoSoxGal]

From today’s LA Times:

As John Prine remains in the hospital fighting COVID-19, his wife, Fiona Whelan Prine, tweeted an update Thursday night that went into some detail about what’s going on with the esteemed 73-year-old Americana singer-songwriter.

“This is John’s 8th day in ICU,” she wrote in a lengthy Twitter thread. “He is receiving excellent medical care and being treated with kindness and compassion by the entire team looking after him day and night. I cannot be with him which makes this nightmare all the more distressing.”

Prine, who was put on a ventilator Saturday, has pneumonia in both lungs and “still needs quite a bit of help with his breathing,” Whelan Prine wrote. Some peripheral issues are being treated with medications including antibiotics.

The two-time Grammy winner, who was also given a lifetime achievement Grammy this year, was hospitalized March 26 after a “sudden onset” of COVID-19 symptoms.

“He is very ill and yet I remain hopeful that he can continue to fight this devastating virus and come home where we can care for him. I don’t have the words to adequately Thank You all for the outpouring of love and prayers that John and our family have received this last week,” she wrote, asking fans to please continue to send positive energy to her husband.

Whelan Prine, who is in her early 50s, also contracted the coronavirus but said Monday that she was recovering. The couple has been married since 1988.

When she updated people on Prine’s condition, she initially tweeted that he was stable, but then posted a clarification.

Stable, she tweeted, “is not the same as improving. There is no cure for Covid-19. He needs our prayers and love — as do the thousands of others who are critically ill.”

[BoSoxGal]

On Anderson Cooper’s show tonight he interviewed a doctor from Brigham & Women’s on his way into the overnight shift. One of the subjects Cooper raised, and I praise him for it, was his mom’s death last summer and how she had directives in place to avoid certain interventions in the end of her life. Not an entirely comparable situation obviously, but the discussion went into the importance of healthcare directives and conversations with family and medical providers so wishes can be followed appropriately in worst case scenarios.

The doctor who spoke with Anderson was a bit evasive, but I’ve read several articles now that indicated doctors are reporting only ~30% of covid patients who go on a vent will come off alive and reasonably well. About 60% are dying, and the others are experiencing some pretty devastating complications of the disease process. I just read an article tonight about a 58 year old woman with covid who is on a vent and has experienced necrotizing encephalopathy, a condition much more commonly seen as a side effect in children with influenza or other viral infections.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytime ... n.amp.html

Here’s a good article discussing vent survival rates in covid patients as observed by clinicians in a few different countries grappling with the pandemic.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.physic ... ators/amp/

[BoSoxGal]

Another bit on Cooper’s show tonight was a reporter interviewing folks on the way in or out of mass religious services in the Midwest - a whole bunch of folks who said they were washed in the blood of Jesus so couldn’t get coronavirus or even if they could, it’s their ‘Murican right to go to church and risk it and too bad to other people they encounter out in the world.

[BoSoxGal]

Thoughts about this?

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/03/health/c ... index.html


It seems clear to me that if I do get sick myself it will be when ventilators are having to be rationed and although I realize now more than ever that I’d like another 20 years if I could, I don’t want to die on a vent or come off one a veggie or take the place that should go to a younger and fitter person and maybe someone with kids or whatever.

It would be great if there was a comfy die at home prescription, like here’s some supplemental oxygen so you feel a little better and here’s a fentanyl patch that will shut you down nicely so you can die peacefully in your own bed with your dog beside you and not suffocate to death over a long period of time alone in a hospital with just absolutely wonderful medical people who are too busy to hold your hand or comfort you.

[Lord Jim]

Possibly some real good news (at least for those of us in NorCal)

Was the Bay Area successful in flattening the coronavirus curve?

Early reports suggest the stay-at-home order has led to fewer cases of coronavirus in the Bay Area.

In January, most Americans had never heard the phrases “social distancing” or “flatten the curve.” Two months later, millions of people in the United States are under stay at home orders, some indefinitely. Will it work?

Early numbers from the Bay Area of California, one of the first parts of the country to enforce preventative stay-at-home orders, suggest it might be working already. San Francisco, Santa Clara, San Mateo, Marin, Contra Costa and Alameda counties ordered residents to stay home on March 16, followed by a statewide order three days later.

After 14 days — the window for symptoms to appear post-infection — Politico reports doctors at Bay Area hospitals are reporting fewer cases than they expected to see at this point, easing the burden on emergency rooms and health care services.

"We believe very strongly the stay-at-home order has helped advance our efforts in reducing the stress on the system that we believe would have already materialized in more acute ways had we not advanced those protocols when we did," California Governor Gavin Newsom said at a press conference.

As of March 31, there are a total of 434 confirmed cases in San Francisco, with a death toll of seven, [as of today, we have 497 confirmed cases, still 7 deaths] according to Johns Hopkins University. Of the six counties, Santa Clara County, the state's epicenter, has reported 890 cases of COVID-19 with 30 deaths, while eight other counties in the Bay Area reported 1,352 cases and 24 deaths total.

And while public health officials are still predicting a second surge of cases, Kaiser Permanente told Politico that cases in northern California have leveled off.

"While we still predict an upcoming surge, the partnership between the health system and public health officials on the local and state levels to implement social distancing has given us more time to put a lot of pieces in place to prepare for a potential surge," Stephen Parodi, a infectious disease doctor and associate executive director with The Permanente Medical Group, told Politico in a statement.

https://calmatters.org/health/coronavir ... om-deaths/

[dales]

We in CALIFORNIA got on this early as opposed to some other states.

Mostly Trumpist hold outs.

A grim irony, I suppose.

[Bicycle Bill]

Every annoying and unfamiliar issue we are dealing with this year has already been confronted by the residents of the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the Korean War.  Frank Vaccarriello looked up the scenes from M*A*S*H that deal with social distancing, infection, hand washing, and worst of all, lack of toilet paper.



-"BB"-

[Gob]

How science finally caught up with Trump's playbook – with millions of lives at stake

On 6 March, a group of epidemiologists at Imperial College London gave the White House coronavirus taskforce a heads-up about the terrifying projections for the disease they were about to publish relating to the US.

The Imperial scientists’ findings would have induced paralytic fear in all but the most nonchalant American. They likened Covid-19, which by that point had already extended its tentacles into at least 28 states in the US, to the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed 50 million people around the globe.


On the basis of their modelling, they calculated that if nothing was done to halt the spread of the disease, within weeks it would infect 81% of the US population. The virus would ravage the nation, eviscerate its health system and – here came the sting – put 2.2 million Americans into body bags.

We don’t know at what point that bone-chilling figure was presented to Donald Trump. What we do know is that on the same day, 6 March, the president of the United States was taking a tour of the Atlanta offices of the federal disease control agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

He was in ebullient mood. He had just heard on Fox News that the latest tally of coronavirus cases in the country was 240, with 11 deaths. Trump and his favourite TV channel were as one in their interpretation of those figures – things were going great, there was really nothing to worry about.

“It will end,” he told the reporters trailing after him. “People have to remain calm … All I say is: ‘Be calm.’”

Then a resourceful reporter asked him to set out the Trump administration’s latest forecast for how coronavirus would progress in the country. He replied: “We don’t have a forecast, because we don’t know.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... e-analysis

[Lord Jim]

April 1 (GMT)

alert 26473 new cases and 1049 new deaths in the United States

"Our country is in the midst of a great national trial, unlike any we have ever faced before. [...] We’re at war with a deadly virus. Success in this fight will require the full absolute measure of our collective strength, love, and devotion. It’s very important. Each of us has the power through our own choices and actions to save American lives and rescue the most vulnerable among us" President Trump said

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

How many thousands of lives could have been saved if Trump had said, meant, and acted vigorously upon those words on March 1st, instead of just spouting them on April 1st?

RIGHT NOW, we need a Russel Honoré taking overall charge of our response to this crisis...

NOT a Jared friggin' Kushner...

[Lord Jim]

I'm actually going to cut Trump some slack on this wearing a mask business...

He's being derided for "do as I say not as I do" hypocrisy, but that's not what I heard...

I didn't hear him saying anyone else had to wear a mask in public; he repeated several times that it was voluntary, people could choose to do it or not, and he was choosing not...

The collective impression I'm getting from the medical community about this is, "Well, it might be nice and it couldn't hurt, so wear a mask so long as you're not buying a high quality one that's needed by medical personnel. And btw, if you're touching the mask you could be worse off than if you don't use it, it's not a substitute for social distance, and it's for protecting other people from you, not really protecting you."

As it happens, we have about half a box of good quality commercial masks that we've had for a while, since long before the crisis (we use them when we're doing a heavy duty cleaning job that involves chemicals we'd prefer not to be breathing in.) so if I wanted to, I could use them...

But like Trump, I'm going to choose not to, (unless it's made mandatory; when I went for my last medical appointment, I found that UCSF is now putting a mask on every person with business in the building; patients, visitors and staff, and that they are required to wear them the whole time they are on site. I realize that this is primarily for the protection of the hardworking dedicated medical personnel, so I'm happy to do it. I'm also glad that they are so well stocked on masks that they can have a policy like this.) everything I've seen and read from the medical community seems very mixed and the value seems pretty limited as a general behavior policy ...

I scrupulously observe all of the social distance and hand sanitizing and washing protocols when I have no choice but to venture out in public, (which I limit as much as possible) and I live in an area where the data is showing that these measures, along with shelter in place are being widely observed and are proving very effective in "bending the curve"...

After giving it careful thought and considering the informed medical community opinions on the subject, (and where I am fortunate enough to live) wearing a mask just as a general rule anytime I have to go out in public looks like something with a much higher dork factor than benefit factor...

An opportunity to engage in some self righteous "mask shaming"; a symbolic statement that says "Look at ME; I'm taking this threat REALLY seriously, not like YOU."

Rather than adding much meaningful substantive health value.

[BoSoxGal]

David Lat, Eyeing Hospital Discharge, Talks About His Battle and Donating Blood to COVID-19 Research

"I don't think I've fully wrapped my head—and heart—around the enormity of what I've just been through,” he said during his first interview since returning to stable condition. "And I'm so grateful to be alive.”

By Jason Grant | April 01, 2020 at 10:47 AM



Thirteen days ago, David Lat lay on a stark white hospital bed in Manhattan, getting oxygen 24 hours a day because his breathing had grown so labored. And he dared not look ahead too much, he said, as he eyed his battle with a severe COVID-19 infection.

“I don’t know that I’m getting any worse,” he said by cellphone on March 18, speaking about his illness. “And at this point,” he said, “I’ll take it.”

Lat, the founder of the legal blog Above the Law, did not know that just two days later he would be rendered unconscious by medical staff, suddenly intubated, and hooked up to a life-preserving ventilator for the next week, as he fought to survive, and as doctors administered to him novel drug therapies that they hoped—despite lack of solid scientific evidence—would work.

And he couldn’t know that, during his recovery, he’d be offering vials of blood in hopes of helping doctors and scientists find a proven treatment for the coronavirus scourge.

On Saturday, March 29, Lat was transferred out of intensive care, not long after being taken off a ventilator. And on Tuesday, in his first media interview since he’d returned to stable condition, he talked gratefully about being ready to finally go home—most likely, he said, on Wednesday evening. He also tried to reflect—for perhaps the first time, he said—on what he had just gone through in his battle with a coronavirus-caused infection that had ravaged his life.

“I don’t think I’ve fully wrapped my head—and heart—around the enormity of what I’ve just been through,” he said during an extensive interview conducted via direct messaging on Twitter.

“It’s wild to think about how close I came to dying, to leaving my husband Zach to raise our two-year-old son as a single dad,” he said. “I guess my main emotion is gratitude. I’m so thankful for all the people, many of whom I’ve never met, who were praying for, thinking of, and otherwise pulling for me throughout this ordeal. … And I’m so grateful to be alive.”
Lat also made clear how thankful he was to the medical team at NYU Langone Hospital, where he has been a patient since March 16, for the care they’ve given him. And on Monday he’d credited them, publicly on Twitter, with saving his life. He wrote that “maybe 1.7 times” the doctors and nurses had saved him—a specific calculation that he laid out in a Twitter thread that bore the directness that his tweets have become known for.

Lat, long a widely known figure in the legal world and today a legal recruiter, appears to be making continued progress and, according to his latest conversations with NYU medical staff, he is on the verge of being discharged.

Early on Monday, as he slept, he said, a team of nurses turned off the oxygen he’d been continuing to get since coming off the ventilator.

He was glad that they did it without telling him, he said, “because I think the oxygen had become a psychological crutch.”

And as of Tuesday late afternoon and evening, as he DM’ed with a reporter, he was able to breathe on his own “fine,” he said, “as long as I don’t exert myself.”

“My heart rate still tends to spike over 100 even for something as simple as walking 15 feet to the bathroom,” he added. “But that’s to be expected given what I’ve been through over the past three weeks.”

He was dealing with some pain, he said, as he sent direct messages back and forth, interspersed with an occasional tweet to his 86,000 followers. (On Monday and Tuesday alone, his many tweets ranged from information about his COVID-19 battle to patient advice to a retweeted announcement of the president’s latest nominee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.) Moreover, he said, his voice has been “very hoarse from the vocal-cord damage from being intubated for six days.”

“I try to speak as little as possible,” he said. In addition, he noted, he still had a “low-level cough” that is “probably not a true coronavirus cough but a so-called ‘follow-on’ infection.” Plus he remained “with all sorts of things—heart rate monitors, IV drips—stuck into me.”

“I haven’t shaved or showered since being admitted,” Lat also said. He explained that “back when I had a private bathroom, I was in the ICU and too weak to shower, and now the shared bath in the hallway is one the nurse suggested I avoid using, especially since I’m so close to discharge.”

He sat up at a 45-degree angle in his hospital bed, messaging and tweeting throughout much of Tuesday, he said. His face stayed under a cloth-type mask and a wide plastic eye shield. (“Look ma, no nasal cannula! Or non-rebreather mask,” he tweeted below a picture of his head.) His tools were his iPhone 8 and a MacBook Air.

Asked about the source of his energy so soon after being in intensive care, Lat said in a DM that “reading and tweeting about the news is something good to do from a hospital bed.” He also noted “that I haven’t been doing real work, in terms of either legal recruiting or heavy-duty writing, since getting admitted to the hospital.”

During the week that he was intubated and having a ventilator do his breathing for him, he said, he was “pretty much totally out of it.” Doctors and nurses heavily sedated him, and at the same time administered to him one drug therapy after another. In fact, he said Tuesday—while noting that he’s now read various recent articles about his coronavirus fight—he was given more medications than had been previously known.

“I ended up receiving an IL-6 inhibitor called Kevzara, a combo of the antimalarial drug called hydroxychloroquine and the antibiotic called azithromycin, an IL-6 inhibitor called Tocilizumab, an IL-6 inhibitor called Clazakizumab, and an antiviral called Remdesivir,” he said.

But asked whether the NYU Langone physicians have told him that the drug therapies used had helped him turn the corner and survive, Lat said that they hadn’t said that—because they themselves don’t know.

“In terms of what did the trick, the doctors can’t say,” said Lat, who is also a former federal prosecutor and a Yale Law School graduate. “From a clinical perspective,” he said, “I’m glad they tried so many different drugs. But from a research perspective, it does mean it’s hard to say what worked.”

“It’s like that famous JFK saying about victory having many fathers, while failure is an orphan,” he said.

For now, said Lat, he will simply look forward to soon reuniting with his son, his husband of four and a half years, Zachary Baron Shemtob, and his parents.

Though in the meantime, over the past couple of days, doctors have taken vial after vial of his blood, he said, and thanked him repeatedly for it. NYU Langone is running a study on the plasma of coronavirus patients in an effort to find an effective treatment for a deadly viral scourge that has no proven, effective therapy. And Lat has volunteered to be in it.

If he is discharged on Wednesday, said Lat, it will have been 25 days since he first started having symptoms, ranging from intermittent fevers to joint aches, chills, fatigue and coughing. Then, by March 15, the labored breathing set in, forcing him to get to his nearest emergency room right away.

A lawyer-turned-blogger-turned-recuiter-and-speaker, Lat said Tuesday that he can’t wait to be with his family again.

There are videos of his 2-year-old son, he said, that he has “watched dozens of times,” while he’s fought a war for his life with the novel coronavirus.

“They bring me joy,” he said of the videos, “and there’s not a lot of joy here in the hospital.”

One of them, which he posted with a Facebook announcement on Saturday night letting his friends know that he’d made it out of the ICU, shows his boy bouncing up and down, strumming a guitar and singing.

“I gotta wake up, warm up, clap my hands!” goes part of the song his son sings out. Lat said it is one of the videos he has watched so many times.

[Scooter]

[Lord Jim]

Watched most of the Idiot-In-Chief's press conference...

It reinforced my mixed feelings about the wisdom of a national shelter in place order...

On the one hand, ideally all of the states by now would be on the same page about this, but my fear is that if Trump orders it, his reckless and irresponsible impulse would be to lift it prematurely... the responsible Governors would simply ignore him, but others would be stupid and or craven enough to follow his lead, costing even more lives...

At this press conference, he performed a profound national disservice by throwing some of his craziest ideas back on to the table, (though ultimately I don't expect to actually follow through on these threats)

He talked about possibly creating an Easter exception to social distancing, to ful lfill his dream of packed churches on Easter...

He talked about how quickly he wants to see the sports stadiums packed up again, and repeated his nutso claim that somehow more people could wind up killing themselves because they're so depressed about not going to work, than the tens or hundreds of thousands projected to die from the disease, (a number as large as it is in no small part because of his incompetent blundering)

He talked about putting together some sort of second task force, whose job it would be to develop a strategy for "reopening" the country. (Not necessarily a bad idea at some point, but waaay premature now.)

And of course we were treated to another bunch of self-pitying lies and smears about how he wound up getting impeached, this time to justify his taking time out from dealing with the worst crisis to befall this country in over a hundred years to pursue his petty vengeance against yet another conscientious public servant doing his job (in this case, the Security Community IG )

And he took time out to launch a bunch of gratuitous and childish attacks on Joe Biden...

All-in-all a pathetic, disgusting, and depressing performance...

[Joe Guy]

I only heard some of it. I turned on the radio and Trump was saying that the states had chances to order ventilators before now but they didn't. Then he said, "That's not a knock."

At the end I may have misheard this but it sounded like when he was ending the conference, he said, "......We will see you soon. We'll keep you totally impressed........"

Anyone else hear that?