Today's News (2020/7/12): COVID-19 Edition
Just the two editions today, but I think they're enough.
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Op-Ed: People ask me if I’ve recovered from COVID-19. That’s not an easy question to answer
By David Lat
July 9, 2020
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-07-09/op-ed-people-ask-me-if-ive-recovered-from-covid-19-thats-not-an-easy-question-to-answer
“Are you recovered yet?”
I can’t count how many times I’ve been asked this question in the three months since I came home from the hospital after a near-death experience with COVID-19. I’m grateful for the concern. I don’t know if I would have made it through those 17 days in the hospital, including almost a week on a ventilator, without the thoughts, prayers and other support that I received from family, friends and strangers.
But when I answer this question, explaining the state of my lungs, cough, vocal cords and muscle weakness, I sometimes feel I’m disappointing the questioner, who just wanted a simple “yes.”
So why can’t I just say “yes” when asked if I’ve recovered? Because, to be honest, I don’t know if that’s true.
When it comes to COVID-19, what is “recovery”? One definition is “a return to a normal state of health, mind or strength.” But what is “normal”?
According to the COVID-19 dashboard maintained by Johns Hopkins University, more than 6 million people around the world, including more than 900,000 in the United States, have recovered from COVID-19. But I suspect that not everyone counted in this statistic feels recovered.
Was I recovered when I came home from the hospital? Or when I tested negative for COVID-19 after having previously tested positive? Or when I tested positive for antibodies? Or when my lingering cough, which stuck with me for two months after I left the hospital, finally went away?
Recovering from a severe case of COVID-19 is not like switching a light on or off. It’s more like a dimmer switch, where the light gets brighter, then darker, then brighter again. And the process of recovering often takes much longer than many patients and their loved ones expect.
When I was discharged on April 1, my husband and parents-in-law picked me up to take me home. My father-in-law is hilarious, and, even though I had just survived a near-death experience, I soon found myself laughing uncontrollably at his commentary on our car ride - laughing, then wheezing, then finding it hard to breathe.
He kindly volunteered to remain silent for the rest of the ride. I wondered how long it would take for me to be able to really laugh again.
Or walk. When we got home, walking the 20 or so feet from the car to the front door left me gasping for air and about to collapse. Before I came down with COVID-19, I could run for miles; after returning from the hospital, I needed a wheelchair to go even half a block.
During my 2½ weeks in the hospital, I wasn’t able to shower, so taking a long, hot shower was high on my list of things to do upon arriving home. But I couldn’t stand up long enough, so I had to take a bath that first day home. I placed a plastic stool inside the bathtub so I could sit down for future showers.
In just the past few weeks or so, I have improved dramatically, and many of my issues have resolved themselves. I graduated from the wheelchair to walking short distances to walking a few miles. My voice, hoarse because of how the ventilator damaged my vocal cords, slowly returned. I regained the 20 pounds I had lost (and then some). My cough, so forceful it made my chest and shoulders ache, finally went away. I can laugh again.
But I’m still not back to normal, if normal means the way I was before COVID-19. I can’t jog - to say nothing of run - for more than a few minutes. I took a gallon of milk out of the refrigerator the other day for my son, and it felt like a 30-pound barbell. I tried reading a book about fire engines to him, and my voice, while much better than before, can’t make the “whoo-whoo” noise of a fire truck.
I recently returned to the hospital for a follow-up visit with my pulmonologist. He gave me some breathing tests and reviewed my chest X-rays, and on the whole, my lungs have improved. But they’re not back yet. The tests showed “decreased total lung capacity” and “moderate reduction in gas exchange.”
How significant and lasting is this? I’ll know more after my September follow-up. But I do know I’m a lot better off than many other COVID-19 survivors.
“I’ve seen many COVID-19 patients whose lungs are so damaged they need transplants,” my pulmonologist told me. “You’re lucky.”
Indeed I am. Although I might have lung issues, there are many other things I haven’t had. I haven’t experienced dangerous blood clotting or strokes. I haven’t had cognitive or psychological issues, such as memory deficits or delirium. I haven’t had heart, kidney or liver problems. I haven’t had gastrointestinal difficulties, muscle aches or fatigue. I doubt the survivors who do face such challenges feel very recovered.
The next time you chat with someone who had a serious case of COVID-19, try asking, “How’s your recovery going?” instead of “Are you recovered yet?” For all too many of us, the answer to the second question is either “no” or “I don’t know” - and when that will change is anyone’s guess.
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State of the Union
twitter.com/CNNSotu
12 July 2020
https://twitter.com/CNNSotu/status/1282326797493981185
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos calls on schools to reopen despite CDC guidelines that say children meeting in groups can put everyone at risk: "There is going to be the exception to the rule. But the rule should be that kids go back to school this fall" #CNNSOTU
[EMBEDDED VIDEO AT LINK]
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Fauci is sidelined by the White House as he steps up blunt talk on pandemic
Trump hasn’t consulted with the scientist since early June, telling Hannity ‘he’s ‘a nice man but he’s made a lot of mistakes.’
By Yasmeen Abutaleb, Josh Dawsey and Laurie McGinley
July 11, 2020 at 2:43 p.m. PDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/07/11/fauci-trump-coronavirus/
For months, Anthony S. Fauci has played a lead role in America’s coronavirus pandemic, as a diminutive, Brooklyn-accented narrator who has assessed the risk and issued increasingly blunt warnings as the nation’s response has gone badly awry.
But as the Trump administration has strayed from the advice of many of its scientists and public health experts, the White House has moved to sideline Fauci, scuttled some of his planned TV appearances and largely kept him out of the Oval Office for more than a month even as coronavirus infections surge in large swaths of the country.
In recent days, the 79-year-old scientist and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has found himself directly in the president’s crosshairs. During a Fox News interview Thursday with Sean Hannity, Trump said Fauci “is a nice man, but he’s made a lot of mistakes.” And when Greta Van Susteren asked him last week about Fauci’s assessment that the country was not in a good place, Trump said flatly: “I disagree with him.”
Fauci no longer briefs Trump and is “never in the Oval [Office] anymore,” said a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. Fauci last spoke to the president during the first week of June, according to a person with knowledge of Trump’s calendar.
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American Passports Are Worthless Now (Map)
Oh the places you can’t go
Indi Samarajiva
Jul 9 2020
https://medium.com/@indica/the-plague-states-of-america-53b20678a80e
America is not united anymore and it’s barely a state. They have crashed right through failed state into a plague state, unwelcome across the world. This has been predicted, including here. Now it has come to pass. Just look at the map.
Americans have gone from having access to most of the world to being banned from most of it. Today, Americans are only allowed in a few Caribbean islands and the Balkans. An American passport is now worthless. Worse than worthless, it’s a plague.
In the absence of a humane government, America is now ruled by COVID-19. Welcome to the Plague States of America.
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GREAT WHITE Plays Concert In North Dakota With No Restrictions In Place: No Social Distancing, No Masks (Video)
11 July 2020
https://www.blabbermouth.net/news/great-white-plays-concert-in-north-dakota-with-no-restrictions-in-place-no-social-distancing-no-masks-video/
GREAT WHITE played an outdoor show this past Thursday night (July 9) in Dickinson, North Dakota as part of "First On First: Dickinson Summer Nights". Video footage of the concert is available below. More video, shot from a different location, can be found here.
While numerous events have been imposing restrictions, such as wearing masks and social distancing, "First On First" has no such rules in place.
"We do not have restrictions, believe it or not, we don't have any," April Getz, an event coordinator for Odd Fellows, which organizes, runs and comes up with the funding for the events, told The Dickinson Press. "It's one of those things where if people feel comfortable coming down and mixing and mingling, that's their personal choice. We're leaving it up to everybody that chooses to attend."
As of Saturday (July 11), there have been a total of 4,243 confirmed coronavirus cases in North Dakota. A total of 87 people have died so far in the state as a result of COVID-19. 83 percent of those who have tested positive for COVID-19 in North Dakota to date have recovered from the virus.
An average of around 3,700 tests are being conducted daily in North Dakota, where the positivity rate has remained relatively low. 4,327 tests were conducted Friday, yielding a 2% positivity rate.
North Dakota's pandemic-high number of active cases came May 21, when 670 residents were infected.
In the face of the coronavirus pandemic, thousands of concerts and festivals have either been postponed or canceled, as social distancing and self-quarantining make performing live music and attending live shows all but impossible.
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At fraternities, an alarming spike in cases
By Joe Heim and Tim Craig
July 11, 2020
https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/at-fraternities-an-alarming-spike-in-cases/
Leaders agonizing about whether, and how, to safely reopen colleges and universities this fall now have another worry: the frat house.
In recent weeks, as students have trickled back onto campus, public health officials have been warning about an alarming spike in coronavirus cases that appear related to fraternity housing and parties that had been a staple of the college experience.
With students often crammed into houses that were hard to police and regulate before the pandemic, public health officials say they believe major changes are needed to better protect the health of students and the broader community in college towns from coast to coast.
The concerns center on how easily the virus spreads during social gatherings - particularly those that are indoors. There is also skepticism about whether students in group housing will follow safety precautions, including eliminating roommates and communal dinners, and wearing masks.
“There’s no doubt that this is a massive change, a massive transition for all of us,” said Judson Horras, president and chief executive of the North American Interfraternity Conference, a fraternity membership organization representing 6,000 undergraduate chapters and 250,000 fraternity members. “It won’t look like a normal fall this fall with social events.”
In a sign of the growing concern, the leadership at the University of California at Berkeley sent an urgent appeal Wednesday to students, noting that the number of coronavirus cases on campus had more than doubled in just a week. The majority of cases have been traced back to fraternity or sorority social gatherings, UC-Berkeley University Health Services’ medical director, Anna Harte, and assistant vice chancellor, Guy Nicolette, wrote in a letter to students.
“At the rate we are seeing increases in cases, it’s becoming harder to image bringing our community back in the way we are envisioning,” Harte and Nicolette wrote.
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As death toll rises, pressure mounts on governors to pass mask requirements
By Derek Hawkins and Marisa Iati
July 11, 2020
https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/as-death-toll-rises-pressure-mounts-on-governors-to-pass-mask-requirements/
Governors across the country are facing increasing pressure to pass statewide mask requirements and mount a more coherent pandemic response as coronavirus cases soar to record levels, daily deaths rise and hospitals in the South and West face a crush of patients.
A growing chorus of local officials and health experts have warned that infections could continue to spiral out of control unless governors issue public health measures that apply to everyone.
“We’ve been begging for a uniform response from the state,” said Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba, a Democrat, of Jackson, Miss., where hospital intensive care unit beds were nearing full capacity.
“It’s of great concern to us here in Jackson, not only because we are the most populous city by a factor of three, but because we’re the capital city, and the capital of health care,” Lumumba told ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Saturday. “Other cities, as their numbers increase, it is likely our hospitals that will receive the increased burden.”
Here are some significant developments:
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Larry Brilliant on How Well We Are Fighting Covid-19
Three months ago, the epidemiologist weighed in on what we must do to defeat this new threat. We went back to ask: How are we doing, and what comes next?
Steven Levy
9 July 2020
https://www.wired.com/story/larry-brilliant-on-how-well-are-we-fighting-covid-19/
It seems like a century ago that I first interviewed Larry Brilliant about the novel coronavirus. But it’s been just a little over three months since I spoke to then-75-year-old Brilliant, an epidemiologist who aided in the eradication of smallpox, and who for years has been warning the world of a pandemic that looks very much like the one we have now. (One of the tools in sounding the alarm was the movie Contagion, for which Brilliant was an adviser.) In that interview, he was able to provide clarity, gravity, and even a measure of hope to our unique and terrifying circumstances. The response was tremendous; it was the second-most-read story in the history of WIRED.
Brilliant’s vita includes roles with the World Health Organization, Google, and the Grateful Dead, but his life’s work has been anticipating and dealing with pandemics. (He is currently CEO of Pandefense Advisory, a team of experts assisting in responses to the coronavirus.) So it was vital that I return for a second conversation, to update what is both the biggest story of our time and the most baffling.
...
It seems like the longer it goes, the less we know about it. Every week something new comes up that contradicts what we thought we already knew.
No, no-you know a lot more about it now than you did three months ago. Yes, there are absolutely more questions today than there were 100 days ago. But part of that is because we’re getting more sophisticated in our ability to ask questions. Three months ago, we had only had a couple hundred cases of this novel virus. We have now got over 11 million cases, and a half a million deaths globally. The virus has been speeding along at an exponential speed, but so has science. So now we can begin to understand that this virus attacks the circulatory system, it attacks the vascular and nervous systems, it attacks the respiratory system, it attacks our ability to bring in oxygen. That’s why people can go to the hospital and be on their phone, not in any respiratory distress, but have oxygen saturation in the 50s, which in the old days we’d think of as you’re near death. It also makes you understand why you can get these Covid toes, why you can lose your sense of taste or smell, why you can have a stroke. This virus attacks blood vessels, it creates blood clots. That is probably one of the reasons why it causes strokes. We have a very large number of deaths due to kidney failure, and we are having terrible results from the ventilators that we were so obsessed about early on, though lately it’s looking a little better, because we’ve learned more about how to use them for this disease. We have learned a tremendous amount about this virus, about how it infects people, how it kills, how it spreads, but the big surprise to me is the kind of pan-organ nature of its attack. It gives the lie to anybody who thought that a comparison with influenza was in the ballpark.
You paint quite a picture.
This is a big fucking deal. If I would not be excommunicated from the world of science, I would call this an evil virus, but I can’t do that because I can’t impugn motives to it. But if I could, I would call it that. It’s certainly pernicious. This is the worst pandemic in our lifetime. And it is the first time we have had a pandemic in the United States in which we have had such a total, abysmal failure of our federal government.
Yet you say we’ve made progress. How much better are my odds of survival than they were three months ago?
Number one, you’re better off because you’re three months closer to a treatment or a prevention. Number two, the treatments are getting better, so the outcomes in hospitals are getting better. We already have convalescent plasma [with antibodies from recovered Covid-19 patients] that’s doing an amazing job. And number three, depending on where you live, by flattening the curve, it is far less likely that you would have died in a corridor in a hospital because there was no room in an ICU, or there was no oxygen to give you. But I think now almost 100 percent of all the ICU beds in Phoenix are full.
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‘You can’t do that’: Chris Wallace scolds Betsy DeVos for trying to illegally cut off school funding
July 12, 2020
By David Edwards
https://www.rawstory.com/2020/07/you-cant-do-that-chris-wallace-scolds-betsy-devos-for-trying-to-illegally-cut-off-school-funding/
Fox News host Chris Wallace on Sunday challenged Trump administration Education Secretary Betsy DeVos over a threat to cut off funding for schools that do not agree to gathering students together during the coronavirus pandemic.
“Both you and the president have threatened to cut off funding for schools systems that don’t open fully in the fall,” Wallace explained during an interview with DeVos. “Are you and the president unilaterally going to cut off funding that’s been approved by Congress - and most of the money goes to disadvantaged students or students with disabilities?”
Wallace continued: “And secondly, isn’t cutting off funding exactly the wrong answer? Don’t you want to spend more money to make schools safer, whether it’s with plastic shields or health checks, various other systems?”
“Doesn’t it make more sense to increase funding for schools where it’s unsafe rather than cut off funding?” he asked.
DeVos doubled down on her threat to defund the education system.
“If schools aren’t going to reopen and not fulfill that promise, they shouldn’t get the funds,” the education secretary opined. “Then give it to the families to decide to go to a school that is going to meet that promise.”
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Cory Doctorow #BLM
twitter.com/doctorow
4:33 PM · Jul 12, 2020
https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1282458029770719232/photo/1
Annotated COVID Cases h/t Fipi Lele
[IMAGE OF CASE COUNTS ANNOTATED WITH TRUMP QUOTES ABOUT COVID-19 AT LINK]
Also posted to ソ-ラ-バ-ド-のおん;
comments at Dreamwidth. Please comment there.
- Op-Ed: People ask me if I’ve recovered from COVID-19. That’s not an easy question to answer
- Education Secretary Betsy DeVos calls on schools to reopen despite CDC guidelines that say children meeting in groups can put everyone at risk
- Fauci is sidelined by the White House as he steps up blunt talk on pandemic
- American Passports Are Worthless Now (Map)
- GREAT WHITE Plays Concert In North Dakota With No Restrictions In Place: No Social Distancing, No Masks (Video)
- At fraternities, an alarming spike in cases
- As death toll rises, pressure mounts on governors to pass mask requirements
- Larry Brilliant on How Well We Are Fighting Covid-19
- ‘You can’t do that’: Chris Wallace scolds Betsy DeVos for trying to illegally cut off school funding
- Trump-quote annotated COVID case graph by Fipi Lele
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Op-Ed: People ask me if I’ve recovered from COVID-19. That’s not an easy question to answer
By David Lat
July 9, 2020
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-07-09/op-ed-people-ask-me-if-ive-recovered-from-covid-19-thats-not-an-easy-question-to-answer
“Are you recovered yet?”
I can’t count how many times I’ve been asked this question in the three months since I came home from the hospital after a near-death experience with COVID-19. I’m grateful for the concern. I don’t know if I would have made it through those 17 days in the hospital, including almost a week on a ventilator, without the thoughts, prayers and other support that I received from family, friends and strangers.
But when I answer this question, explaining the state of my lungs, cough, vocal cords and muscle weakness, I sometimes feel I’m disappointing the questioner, who just wanted a simple “yes.”
So why can’t I just say “yes” when asked if I’ve recovered? Because, to be honest, I don’t know if that’s true.
When it comes to COVID-19, what is “recovery”? One definition is “a return to a normal state of health, mind or strength.” But what is “normal”?
According to the COVID-19 dashboard maintained by Johns Hopkins University, more than 6 million people around the world, including more than 900,000 in the United States, have recovered from COVID-19. But I suspect that not everyone counted in this statistic feels recovered.
Was I recovered when I came home from the hospital? Or when I tested negative for COVID-19 after having previously tested positive? Or when I tested positive for antibodies? Or when my lingering cough, which stuck with me for two months after I left the hospital, finally went away?
Recovering from a severe case of COVID-19 is not like switching a light on or off. It’s more like a dimmer switch, where the light gets brighter, then darker, then brighter again. And the process of recovering often takes much longer than many patients and their loved ones expect.
When I was discharged on April 1, my husband and parents-in-law picked me up to take me home. My father-in-law is hilarious, and, even though I had just survived a near-death experience, I soon found myself laughing uncontrollably at his commentary on our car ride - laughing, then wheezing, then finding it hard to breathe.
He kindly volunteered to remain silent for the rest of the ride. I wondered how long it would take for me to be able to really laugh again.
Or walk. When we got home, walking the 20 or so feet from the car to the front door left me gasping for air and about to collapse. Before I came down with COVID-19, I could run for miles; after returning from the hospital, I needed a wheelchair to go even half a block.
During my 2½ weeks in the hospital, I wasn’t able to shower, so taking a long, hot shower was high on my list of things to do upon arriving home. But I couldn’t stand up long enough, so I had to take a bath that first day home. I placed a plastic stool inside the bathtub so I could sit down for future showers.
In just the past few weeks or so, I have improved dramatically, and many of my issues have resolved themselves. I graduated from the wheelchair to walking short distances to walking a few miles. My voice, hoarse because of how the ventilator damaged my vocal cords, slowly returned. I regained the 20 pounds I had lost (and then some). My cough, so forceful it made my chest and shoulders ache, finally went away. I can laugh again.
But I’m still not back to normal, if normal means the way I was before COVID-19. I can’t jog - to say nothing of run - for more than a few minutes. I took a gallon of milk out of the refrigerator the other day for my son, and it felt like a 30-pound barbell. I tried reading a book about fire engines to him, and my voice, while much better than before, can’t make the “whoo-whoo” noise of a fire truck.
I recently returned to the hospital for a follow-up visit with my pulmonologist. He gave me some breathing tests and reviewed my chest X-rays, and on the whole, my lungs have improved. But they’re not back yet. The tests showed “decreased total lung capacity” and “moderate reduction in gas exchange.”
How significant and lasting is this? I’ll know more after my September follow-up. But I do know I’m a lot better off than many other COVID-19 survivors.
“I’ve seen many COVID-19 patients whose lungs are so damaged they need transplants,” my pulmonologist told me. “You’re lucky.”
Indeed I am. Although I might have lung issues, there are many other things I haven’t had. I haven’t experienced dangerous blood clotting or strokes. I haven’t had cognitive or psychological issues, such as memory deficits or delirium. I haven’t had heart, kidney or liver problems. I haven’t had gastrointestinal difficulties, muscle aches or fatigue. I doubt the survivors who do face such challenges feel very recovered.
The next time you chat with someone who had a serious case of COVID-19, try asking, “How’s your recovery going?” instead of “Are you recovered yet?” For all too many of us, the answer to the second question is either “no” or “I don’t know” - and when that will change is anyone’s guess.
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State of the Union
twitter.com/CNNSotu
12 July 2020
https://twitter.com/CNNSotu/status/1282326797493981185
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos calls on schools to reopen despite CDC guidelines that say children meeting in groups can put everyone at risk: "There is going to be the exception to the rule. But the rule should be that kids go back to school this fall" #CNNSOTU
[EMBEDDED VIDEO AT LINK]
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Fauci is sidelined by the White House as he steps up blunt talk on pandemic
Trump hasn’t consulted with the scientist since early June, telling Hannity ‘he’s ‘a nice man but he’s made a lot of mistakes.’
By Yasmeen Abutaleb, Josh Dawsey and Laurie McGinley
July 11, 2020 at 2:43 p.m. PDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/07/11/fauci-trump-coronavirus/
For months, Anthony S. Fauci has played a lead role in America’s coronavirus pandemic, as a diminutive, Brooklyn-accented narrator who has assessed the risk and issued increasingly blunt warnings as the nation’s response has gone badly awry.
But as the Trump administration has strayed from the advice of many of its scientists and public health experts, the White House has moved to sideline Fauci, scuttled some of his planned TV appearances and largely kept him out of the Oval Office for more than a month even as coronavirus infections surge in large swaths of the country.
In recent days, the 79-year-old scientist and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has found himself directly in the president’s crosshairs. During a Fox News interview Thursday with Sean Hannity, Trump said Fauci “is a nice man, but he’s made a lot of mistakes.” And when Greta Van Susteren asked him last week about Fauci’s assessment that the country was not in a good place, Trump said flatly: “I disagree with him.”
Fauci no longer briefs Trump and is “never in the Oval [Office] anymore,” said a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. Fauci last spoke to the president during the first week of June, according to a person with knowledge of Trump’s calendar.
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American Passports Are Worthless Now (Map)
Oh the places you can’t go
Indi Samarajiva
Jul 9 2020
https://medium.com/@indica/the-plague-states-of-america-53b20678a80e
America is not united anymore and it’s barely a state. They have crashed right through failed state into a plague state, unwelcome across the world. This has been predicted, including here. Now it has come to pass. Just look at the map.
Americans have gone from having access to most of the world to being banned from most of it. Today, Americans are only allowed in a few Caribbean islands and the Balkans. An American passport is now worthless. Worse than worthless, it’s a plague.
In the absence of a humane government, America is now ruled by COVID-19. Welcome to the Plague States of America.
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GREAT WHITE Plays Concert In North Dakota With No Restrictions In Place: No Social Distancing, No Masks (Video)
11 July 2020
https://www.blabbermouth.net/news/great-white-plays-concert-in-north-dakota-with-no-restrictions-in-place-no-social-distancing-no-masks-video/
GREAT WHITE played an outdoor show this past Thursday night (July 9) in Dickinson, North Dakota as part of "First On First: Dickinson Summer Nights". Video footage of the concert is available below. More video, shot from a different location, can be found here.
While numerous events have been imposing restrictions, such as wearing masks and social distancing, "First On First" has no such rules in place.
"We do not have restrictions, believe it or not, we don't have any," April Getz, an event coordinator for Odd Fellows, which organizes, runs and comes up with the funding for the events, told The Dickinson Press. "It's one of those things where if people feel comfortable coming down and mixing and mingling, that's their personal choice. We're leaving it up to everybody that chooses to attend."
As of Saturday (July 11), there have been a total of 4,243 confirmed coronavirus cases in North Dakota. A total of 87 people have died so far in the state as a result of COVID-19. 83 percent of those who have tested positive for COVID-19 in North Dakota to date have recovered from the virus.
An average of around 3,700 tests are being conducted daily in North Dakota, where the positivity rate has remained relatively low. 4,327 tests were conducted Friday, yielding a 2% positivity rate.
North Dakota's pandemic-high number of active cases came May 21, when 670 residents were infected.
In the face of the coronavirus pandemic, thousands of concerts and festivals have either been postponed or canceled, as social distancing and self-quarantining make performing live music and attending live shows all but impossible.
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At fraternities, an alarming spike in cases
By Joe Heim and Tim Craig
July 11, 2020
https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/at-fraternities-an-alarming-spike-in-cases/
Leaders agonizing about whether, and how, to safely reopen colleges and universities this fall now have another worry: the frat house.
In recent weeks, as students have trickled back onto campus, public health officials have been warning about an alarming spike in coronavirus cases that appear related to fraternity housing and parties that had been a staple of the college experience.
With students often crammed into houses that were hard to police and regulate before the pandemic, public health officials say they believe major changes are needed to better protect the health of students and the broader community in college towns from coast to coast.
The concerns center on how easily the virus spreads during social gatherings - particularly those that are indoors. There is also skepticism about whether students in group housing will follow safety precautions, including eliminating roommates and communal dinners, and wearing masks.
“There’s no doubt that this is a massive change, a massive transition for all of us,” said Judson Horras, president and chief executive of the North American Interfraternity Conference, a fraternity membership organization representing 6,000 undergraduate chapters and 250,000 fraternity members. “It won’t look like a normal fall this fall with social events.”
In a sign of the growing concern, the leadership at the University of California at Berkeley sent an urgent appeal Wednesday to students, noting that the number of coronavirus cases on campus had more than doubled in just a week. The majority of cases have been traced back to fraternity or sorority social gatherings, UC-Berkeley University Health Services’ medical director, Anna Harte, and assistant vice chancellor, Guy Nicolette, wrote in a letter to students.
“At the rate we are seeing increases in cases, it’s becoming harder to image bringing our community back in the way we are envisioning,” Harte and Nicolette wrote.
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As death toll rises, pressure mounts on governors to pass mask requirements
By Derek Hawkins and Marisa Iati
July 11, 2020
https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/as-death-toll-rises-pressure-mounts-on-governors-to-pass-mask-requirements/
Governors across the country are facing increasing pressure to pass statewide mask requirements and mount a more coherent pandemic response as coronavirus cases soar to record levels, daily deaths rise and hospitals in the South and West face a crush of patients.
A growing chorus of local officials and health experts have warned that infections could continue to spiral out of control unless governors issue public health measures that apply to everyone.
“We’ve been begging for a uniform response from the state,” said Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba, a Democrat, of Jackson, Miss., where hospital intensive care unit beds were nearing full capacity.
“It’s of great concern to us here in Jackson, not only because we are the most populous city by a factor of three, but because we’re the capital city, and the capital of health care,” Lumumba told ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Saturday. “Other cities, as their numbers increase, it is likely our hospitals that will receive the increased burden.”
Here are some significant developments:
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Larry Brilliant on How Well We Are Fighting Covid-19
Three months ago, the epidemiologist weighed in on what we must do to defeat this new threat. We went back to ask: How are we doing, and what comes next?
Steven Levy
9 July 2020
https://www.wired.com/story/larry-brilliant-on-how-well-are-we-fighting-covid-19/
It seems like a century ago that I first interviewed Larry Brilliant about the novel coronavirus. But it’s been just a little over three months since I spoke to then-75-year-old Brilliant, an epidemiologist who aided in the eradication of smallpox, and who for years has been warning the world of a pandemic that looks very much like the one we have now. (One of the tools in sounding the alarm was the movie Contagion, for which Brilliant was an adviser.) In that interview, he was able to provide clarity, gravity, and even a measure of hope to our unique and terrifying circumstances. The response was tremendous; it was the second-most-read story in the history of WIRED.
Brilliant’s vita includes roles with the World Health Organization, Google, and the Grateful Dead, but his life’s work has been anticipating and dealing with pandemics. (He is currently CEO of Pandefense Advisory, a team of experts assisting in responses to the coronavirus.) So it was vital that I return for a second conversation, to update what is both the biggest story of our time and the most baffling.
...
It seems like the longer it goes, the less we know about it. Every week something new comes up that contradicts what we thought we already knew.
No, no-you know a lot more about it now than you did three months ago. Yes, there are absolutely more questions today than there were 100 days ago. But part of that is because we’re getting more sophisticated in our ability to ask questions. Three months ago, we had only had a couple hundred cases of this novel virus. We have now got over 11 million cases, and a half a million deaths globally. The virus has been speeding along at an exponential speed, but so has science. So now we can begin to understand that this virus attacks the circulatory system, it attacks the vascular and nervous systems, it attacks the respiratory system, it attacks our ability to bring in oxygen. That’s why people can go to the hospital and be on their phone, not in any respiratory distress, but have oxygen saturation in the 50s, which in the old days we’d think of as you’re near death. It also makes you understand why you can get these Covid toes, why you can lose your sense of taste or smell, why you can have a stroke. This virus attacks blood vessels, it creates blood clots. That is probably one of the reasons why it causes strokes. We have a very large number of deaths due to kidney failure, and we are having terrible results from the ventilators that we were so obsessed about early on, though lately it’s looking a little better, because we’ve learned more about how to use them for this disease. We have learned a tremendous amount about this virus, about how it infects people, how it kills, how it spreads, but the big surprise to me is the kind of pan-organ nature of its attack. It gives the lie to anybody who thought that a comparison with influenza was in the ballpark.
You paint quite a picture.
This is a big fucking deal. If I would not be excommunicated from the world of science, I would call this an evil virus, but I can’t do that because I can’t impugn motives to it. But if I could, I would call it that. It’s certainly pernicious. This is the worst pandemic in our lifetime. And it is the first time we have had a pandemic in the United States in which we have had such a total, abysmal failure of our federal government.
Yet you say we’ve made progress. How much better are my odds of survival than they were three months ago?
Number one, you’re better off because you’re three months closer to a treatment or a prevention. Number two, the treatments are getting better, so the outcomes in hospitals are getting better. We already have convalescent plasma [with antibodies from recovered Covid-19 patients] that’s doing an amazing job. And number three, depending on where you live, by flattening the curve, it is far less likely that you would have died in a corridor in a hospital because there was no room in an ICU, or there was no oxygen to give you. But I think now almost 100 percent of all the ICU beds in Phoenix are full.
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‘You can’t do that’: Chris Wallace scolds Betsy DeVos for trying to illegally cut off school funding
July 12, 2020
By David Edwards
https://www.rawstory.com/2020/07/you-cant-do-that-chris-wallace-scolds-betsy-devos-for-trying-to-illegally-cut-off-school-funding/
Fox News host Chris Wallace on Sunday challenged Trump administration Education Secretary Betsy DeVos over a threat to cut off funding for schools that do not agree to gathering students together during the coronavirus pandemic.
“Both you and the president have threatened to cut off funding for schools systems that don’t open fully in the fall,” Wallace explained during an interview with DeVos. “Are you and the president unilaterally going to cut off funding that’s been approved by Congress - and most of the money goes to disadvantaged students or students with disabilities?”
Wallace continued: “And secondly, isn’t cutting off funding exactly the wrong answer? Don’t you want to spend more money to make schools safer, whether it’s with plastic shields or health checks, various other systems?”
“Doesn’t it make more sense to increase funding for schools where it’s unsafe rather than cut off funding?” he asked.
DeVos doubled down on her threat to defund the education system.
“If schools aren’t going to reopen and not fulfill that promise, they shouldn’t get the funds,” the education secretary opined. “Then give it to the families to decide to go to a school that is going to meet that promise.”
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Cory Doctorow #BLM
twitter.com/doctorow
4:33 PM · Jul 12, 2020
https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1282458029770719232/photo/1
Annotated COVID Cases h/t Fipi Lele
[IMAGE OF CASE COUNTS ANNOTATED WITH TRUMP QUOTES ABOUT COVID-19 AT LINK]
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