Covid-19 #37: Mississippi Worming

[The Anti-Targ]

I like this lockdown song better than whatever it was Eric Clapton did.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6bEESkZWn4&t=11s

 

[karaddin]

1 hour ago, The Anti-Targ said:

49 new cases today. Another decrease but only a small decrease. Still, 2 days straight of decreases in case numbers is giving us more hope.

I'm wary of celebrating too early when its the Sunday and Monday numbers, just based on patterns of case numbers from other places, but if it holds/improves for another day then definitely cautious optimism time.

[The Anti-Targ]

It is true the rate of testing halved between last week and Sunday and Monday, so that could be the reason and not that actual case numbers are dropping. However everyone who has been identified by contact tracing as at risk is required to get tested, so the most likely source of new cases are still testing and isolating. Even the prison guard was identified through contact tracing and sent for a test. So the drop in testing numbers could be simply due to fewer people being added to the mandatory testing list with reducing numbers of new locations of interest being identified. So the bulk of people needing to be tested has possibly worked its way through the system.

On top of that we now have flooding and evacuations happening in parts of Auckland. So that's an added stress on those folks.

[Fragile Bird]

I was just looking at my Facebook feed and two stories popped up, a NYT story about how Mississippi is in a uniquely bad position and a story about Louisiana hospitals just days away from running out of oxygen supplies. Gee, sounds like India.

[Mindwalker]

How 'America's Frontline Doctors' Sold Access to Bogus COVID-19 Treatments—and Left Patients in the Lurch

Since its founding last year by Dr. Simone Gold, a Los Angeles physician who was later arrested during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, America’s Frontline Doctors has nurtured medical conspiracies popular in right-wing circles. Created as a political project to support the Trump Administration’s economic reopening push, it ricocheted from promoting skepticism about COVID-19 to launching a national RV tour to denounce “medical censorship and cancel culture.” It promoted hydroxychloroquine as a miracle drug and billed itself as a provider of legal services for people who refuse to be vaccinated or to wear a mask, or who want to stop vaccinations for children. (...)

Its website traffic has quadrupled since April, according to an analysis by the web-analytics company SemRush, which estimates it drew nearly half a million visitors in July. In the process, AFLD’s reach has spread beyond to mainstream sites like Instagram and TikTok, making it a leading purveyor of medical disinformation that erodes public confidence and hinders efforts to get the pandemic under control, experts say. (...)

Federal authorities are cracking down on coronavirus-related telemedicine schemes. The Federal Trade Commission has sent nearly 400 warning letters to groups and individuals marketing false COVID-19 treatments, including one missive, in April, telling a Texas medical practice to “immediately cease” promoting ivermectin or face steep fines. (...)

“America’s Frontline Doctors are really good at what they do. This idea of doctors fighting the system is a narrative that is really appealing to a lot of people.”

https://time.com/6092368/americas-frontline-doctors-covid-19-misinformation/

The article explains how te group was founded by extreme pro Trumpers and how they profit from the ivermectin craze.

[IheartIheartTesla]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/31/ivermectin-covid-ohio-judge-orders-hospital

Quote

A judge in Ohio ordered a hospital to treat a Covid-19 patient with ivermectin, despite warnings from experts that the anti-parasitic drug has not proved effective against the virus and can be dangerous in large doses.

Gregory Howard, a judge in Butler county, outside Cincinnati, ordered doctors at West Chester hospital to administer ivermectin to Jeffrey Smith, 51, who contracted Covid-19 in July and was transferred to intensive care.

Just what we need, activist judges mandating what medicine hospitals provide to patients.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

19 minutes ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/31/ivermectin-covid-ohio-judge-orders-hospital

Just what we need, activist judges mandating what medicine hospitals provide to patients.

Activist judges are dirty liberals. Conservatives judges are really freedom justices!

[Zorral]

"Do Republicans Actually Want the Pandemic to End?"

Why, no, no they do not.  Of course, we all know that as They've done but make it ever more clear for years now.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/31/opinion/republicans-anti-vax-covid.html

Quote

 

President Barack Obama promised unity. In his 2008 campaign, he said he would heal the nation’s political divides and end more than a decade of partisan rancor.

To keep this promise, Obama needed allies, or at least partners, in the Republican Party. But they said no. If they could block Obama — if they could withhold support on anything significant he planned to do — then they could make him break his promise. Republicans would obstruct and Obama would get the blame. Which, you might remember, is what happened. By the 2010 midterm elections, Obama was a divisive president.

Joe Biden, in his 2020 campaign for president, promised to get the coronavirus pandemic under control. With additional aid to working families and free distribution of multiple effective vaccines, he would lead the United States out of its ongoing public health crisis.

I think you can see where this is going.

Rather than work with him to vaccinate the country, Biden’s Republican opposition has, with only a few exceptions, done everything in its power to politicize the vaccine and make refusal to cooperate a test of partisan loyalty. The party is, for all practical purposes, pro-Covid. If it’s sincere, it is monstrous. And if it’s not, it is an unbelievably cynical and nihilistic strategy. Unfortunately for both Biden and the country, it appears to be working. ....

 

Since Their determination to keep covid raging for the sake of Their power, which means ever more transmissible and dangerous variants to development, that race all around the globe, is there a possibility that these genocidal plotters such as de Santis and that judge could be put on trial in the international courts for crimes against humanity, and then executed?

I suppose not. 

[Fragile Bird]

I see some guy named Robert David Steele, another right-wing, conspiracy, Covid-19 isn’t real, nut-case, has died of Covid-19. He was doing a bus campaign through Florida when he became ill. His associates are claiming he was murdered by hospital staff as a way to attack DeSantis, and he died after being forced onto a ventilator and because the doctors refused to give him hydroxychloroquine. Steele himself said he was not vaccinated and said he would fully recover from his illness. He was reported sick on Aug. 17.

This is a guy who showed up on Alex Jones’ show and claim NASA kidnapped children for slave colonies on Mars.

[DireWolfSpirit]

 Not 100% sure what Tonga is like but I'm pretty sure it's close to a tropical paradise compared to where I've been during the pandemic.

This story about a lady stuck in the virus free Tonga for 18 months.

Sounds like some awesome fortune, oh and she's in a beach house the whole time!

https://www.insider.com/tourist-stuck-in-tonga-covid-19-pandemic-2021-8?amp&utm_source=taboola

[HoodedCrow]

Sadly, the dead man was not given dewormer in the early days. Maybe what needs to happen is give people a chance to opt into the hydrochloroquine with no ventilators project
 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

1 hour ago, HoodedCrow said:

Sadly, the dead man was not given dewormer in the early days. Maybe what needs to happen is give people a chance to opt into the hydrochloroquine with no ventilators project
 

Why be so limiting? Let them also opt into using bright lights to shine into their bodies as they put disinfect in their lungs.

Isn't that what freedumb is all about?

[Rippounet]

16 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

I like this lockdown song better than whatever it was Eric Clapton did.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6bEESkZWn4&t=11s

There was also this one, which is still topical:

"Have The New Jab" - "Hallelujah" adapted by the Marsh Family
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnbOKH9Oe9s

 

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

On 8/29/2021 at 10:26 AM, Fragile Bird said:

All other age groups are over 80% with one shot, except, strangely, the 80+ group, at 77% and 74%. I don't know if those people just don't give a damn or what. The Canadian National figure, from Statistics Canada, for those over 80 is 95% with one shot and 92.5% fully vaccinated, so I have no idea what the heck is going on. I do know that other provinces have very high numbers of seniors in old age homes (Quebec has the highest number) and perhaps the vaccination efforts in those facilities account for it.

The most astonishing number is the age 18-24: 98.8% of the people in that age group have their first shot, and 85% are fully vaccinated. The group right before them, 25-29, are at 90.8% and 80.9%. The 12-17 group comes in at 81% and 70%, I sure hope a lot more get vaccinated this week, with school starting after Labour Day, in 9 days.

The overall number for Toronto as of Aug. 23, when the report was updated, is 73.4% of the population has had their first shot and 67.6% are fully vaccinated. Tomorrow will see the next update. The province of Ontario as a whole is at 73.3% of the population with one shot and 67.5% fully vaccinated, slightly above Canada as a whole.

In Alberta, our problem is 20-29 year olds. Almost 50% are not fully vaccinated and 1/3rd haven't even had their first shot yet. College starts next week.

Ages 12-39 generally are not great but they are improving. At this rate, 12+ might hit 80% by the end of the year. 

In other news:

 

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

 

[The Anti-Targ]

3 hours ago, Rippounet said:

There was also this one, which is still topical:

"Have The New Jab" - "Hallelujah" adapted by the Marsh Family
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnbOKH9Oe9s

 

Their 'Total Eclipse of the Heart' cover is great too.

First day we can get take out today. We're doing kebab salad (healthy) and loaded fries (comfort).

I wonder if a group of people walking the street naked except for wearing a mask might be an effective anti anti-mask mandate protest action.

[VigoTheCarpathian]

COVID hospital surge is expected to peak in two weeks in our metro area, ICUs are at 93% and regular beds at 92%.  The rural part of the state with low vaccination numbers already have national guard deployed, setting up field hospitals, and are at 100%.

Our emergency department and urgent care wait times are insane, and admin staff are being asked to volunteer to help with patient concierge and non-clinical help.  I enjoy it and miss being around patient care, so will bedoing shifts for the next few weeks.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

Can't talk about vax remixes without this:

 

[IheartIheartTesla]

Really, people? Dolly Parton singing a parody of 'Jolene' ('vaccine, vaccine' in case anyone was curious) while getting the Moderna vaccine she partially funded is not the clear winner?

[The Anti-Targ]

Looks like the white flag is truly being waved in parts of Europe and in the UK. Some health officials saying that everyone will eventually get infected as there is no stopping the virus now, vaccination is only 50% effective at preventing infection (still >90% at preventing severe disease), herd immunity is an impossibility (something our modellers were saying a few months ago).

The "only" thing we need to do to maintain a permanent elimination strategy and keep the virus out permanently aside from the odd outbreak is to sacrifice our tourism industry, and look to other industries that don't involve large numbers of overseas visitors coming here every year. If we do better than any country has managed so far and reach 80% vaccination rate. We will still face over 5,000 deaths in a fairly short space of time if we let the disease into the country and it becomes endemic. That's a helluva lot fewer deaths than if we let the disease run riot from the beginning, but it's still a lot of dead people. I think an ongoing elimination strategy would still save a few thousand lives from COVID deaths. Be interesting to see the modelling on that over a 5 or 10 year timeframe with perhaps 3 outbreaks with lockdowns per year.

Honestly, purely for the purposes of increasing our knowledge of how we can (or can't) manage future pandemics I think NZ should be encouraged to maintain an indefinite elimination strategy. If we can manage it for several years even while it's become endemic in the world, then that provides valuable information to the scientific and medical community, and probably several PhD theses in public health and epidemiology. And if we can't keep it out for very much longer despite trying our hardest, then that is also useful information, and different PhD theses. Maybe also sociology theses, how does the public handle intermittent lockdowns more or less in perpetuity. Though I can't imagine it will be in perpetuity. More effective therapies at preventing death and long COVID should be being developed, as well as more effective vaccines that are more like 80% or 90% effective at preventing infection and transmission.

I am personally totally fine with 3 lockdowns per year.