Trump (and his administration), Abbott, DeSanits ... three peas in a pod. Hide numbers, alter numbers, don't report numbers, pretend it doesn't exist, "pray it away", say it enough times that it'll magically go away and it will... ("It's going to go away." "It's fading away.") Spoiler Texas Medical Center hospitals have stopped reporting key metrics showing the stress rising numbers of COVID-19 patients are placing on their facilities, undermining data that policy makers and the public have relied upon during the pandemic to gauge the spread of the coronavirus. The change came one day after the hospitals reported their base intensive care capacity had hit 100 percent for the first time during the pandemic, with projections showing the institutions — which together comprise the world’s largest medical complex — were on pace to exceed their “unsustainable surge capacity” by July 6. It also followed discussions between Gov. Greg Abbott and hospital executives in which the governor expressed displeasure with negative headlines about ICU capacity, sources familiar with the talks said. Abbott spokesman John Wittman said any insinuation that the governor directed the executives to stop publishing certain data is false. “The governor’s office believes all hospitals should be reporting accurate data to the state and to the public as often as possible,” Wittman said Sunday morning. “We demanded more information to share, not less.” The shift, in which TMC deleted charts from its online COVID-19 dashboard, also accompanied public confusion surrounding the hospitals’ ability to withstand a massive spike in cases that has followed Abbott’s May decisions to lift restrictions intended to slow the virus. [...] Friday morning, 24 hours after the four CEOs’ press conference, the TMC released no new data. After reporting 17 charts and graphs on most days for three months, the organization did not post from Thursday morning until Saturday at about 9 p.m. When the charts re-appeared, eight of the 17 original slides had been deleted — including any reference to hospital capacity or projections of future capacity — and the lone remaining slide referencing the risks associated with shrinking capacity had been altered. An “early warning” chart on Thursday reported base ICU capacity had reached 100 percent, and was marked with a red dot signifying a “warning.” On Saturday, the same chart no longer discussed ICU capacity but instead intensive care “census growth,” and was marked with an orange dot signifying “moderate concern.” The item acknowledged rising numbers of ICU COVID-19 patients but stated, “Currently TMC institutions are able to serve all patients requiring intensive care.” Boom, of Houston Methodist, said in an email late Friday that the TMC leaders are in discussions about how to “best educate” news media and the public on hospital capacity issues. “Therefore, the publicly released deck will, at the present time, not include projections or capacity until we can work together to improve the communication of and education around such data,” Boom said. Neither TMC CEO Bill McKeon nor any other hospital system in the medical center returned calls for comment Friday. A note posted on the TMC website Sunday morning said the charts posted Saturday night were “incomplete” and that “new slides as well as a number of updated slides that were absent yesterday” would be released later Sunday to “provide a more comprehensive and accurate description of the current status.” News media and public officials had been referring to the capacity projections for weeks without the TMC or its member hospitals raising any concerns. Angela Blanchard, a disaster expert and former BakerRipley CEO, said the decision by hospital executives to hold back data is troubling, given that still-inadequate testing capabilities make hospital capacity one of the best available metrics to track the virus. “From the beginning, we were told to work together to flatten the curve with the specific goal of keeping our hospitals from being overwhelmed. We sacrificed for that,” she said. “TMC needs to retain our trust by being forthright. If they're worried that the metric misses some nuance, they should explain it. We're not children." [...]
The TMC said they can take more patients. That’s the key thing to know, otherwise the media will distort your data like they did with the fake news that they had reached capacity (they hadn’t). This could discourage the sick from going to the hospital, which is a terrible result.
Nevada's Culinary Union to file lawsuit against Vegas Strip casinos Union citing unsafe work conditions for workers amid pandemic https://www.ktnv.com/news/coronavir...n-to-file-lawsuit-against-vegas-strip-casinos Caesars employee dies days after positive COVID-19 test https://www.fox5vegas.com/coronavir...cle_d5a73d16-b88f-11ea-81de-438d3ff3bad5.html
This is really pretty sad. I know it's just one person of 125,000+ but still, you just go to work, try to do your job, and maybe you're a little worried that it's not safe, and bam, your life is over. It's like mining coal.
Slate-Coronavirus cases are surging and ICUs are almost full. What happened? ... We ran into this civil libertarian streak in Texas. A lot of people rankled at the idea that the government was telling them they had to wear a mask to go out. So a couple of governments, including Harris County, said, Well, we’re going to require it. And the governor said, I’m going to have a state executive order that blocks local governments, cities, and counties from imposing fines or penalties for people who are not wearing masks. People ought to wear masks, but we’re not going to require it. The governor is getting a lot of pressure from the conservative end of his party to put personal freedoms ahead of restrictions. And as a political matter, he’s tried to straddle that. But it means that he has to tell the county judges they can’t do the things that they’ve been trying to do, and now that we’re looking at the numbers in Texas, the county judges have been on the right track. If they had been able to do what they were trying to do, we might not have the numbers that we have now. We might not be in the crisis situation that we’re approaching now. I went back to some video from May of Gov. Greg Abbott meeting with President Donald Trump. And it’s weird to watch now because it feels like he’s taking a victory lap. Coming out of March, we were slow to put restrictions in place in Texas, but we got restrictions in place. And by the beginning of April, they had things pretty locked down. And by the time you got to the end of April, it was actually looking pretty good. Then they took their foot off the brake. And not just that, but they hit the accelerator. The governor came out in late April and said we’re gonna have some phased-in reopenings. They started to do that, and the pressure to do that more quickly mounted very fast. And so the governor really sped up this phasing out of the restrictions. They were looking at something that they call the positivity rate, which is the ratio of positive coronavirus tests to all tests taken. If that’s over 10 percent, you’ve got problems. I think the latest number that I saw was 13 percent. We haven’t seen 10 percent since early April. So you see how this curve is going. About halfway through May, you started seeing the governor come into press conferences with a mask on, which we hadn’t been seeing before. We still haven’t seen the lieutenant governor with a mask on. The governor closed all the bars on Friday. He told restaurants to dial it back. And he kind of found a way for local officials to require people to wear masks. He said you can’t require an individual to wear a mask and you can’t fine him or jail him if they don’t, but you can require a business to require employees and customers to wear a mask. It just seems really complicated because it’s relying on a lot of individuals to do the work that you might expect the government to do. Part of the problem here is that they’ve worked themselves into a place where enforcement is very difficult. We had this famous incident where hair salons and barbershops were told not to open as part of the April restrictions. There was a hairstylist named Shelley Luther in the suburbs of Dallas, who basically said, I’m going to open my salon, and figuratively raised her middle finger. They took her to court. And the judge said: Look, the law here is clear. The governor’s order is that you can’t open. And she said if you put that in a court order, I will defy it. That’s straight-up contempt of court. So he put her in jail. It became this big symbolic freedom thing. The very conservative lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, paid her bail to get her out of jail. And the governor at that point said, I’m not going to allow local authorities, cities, and counties, to fine or jail people for violating my executive orders. It’s like he removed his own teeth. The problem now is that the governor can make an order. And people can say, Maybe I will. Maybe I won’t. After his last order on bars, the mayor of Abilene said, We’re not going to close our bars in Abilene. That’s a heck of a deal when a governor orders something and the mayor says that we’re not going to do that. He’s already removed his ability to do anything about it. Are people seeing Abbott’s moves here as an admission of failure? He actually said that about the bars. He was on television in El Paso. And they asked him: Would you have done anything different if you were doing this over again? He said, Yeah, I don’t think I would have opened the bars. That’s as close as he’s gotten to a Hey, I screwed up here. I want to return to a completely separate agent of chaos, which is the lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick. And in Texas, the lieutenant governor has a lot of power, and he’s more conservative than your governor. Just last week, he was going on Fox News and saying: Listen, we’re not going to reverse ourselves. We’re not going to go backward. Can you talk about Patrick and his role here? He’s really the political leader of the most conservative part of the Republican Party. He’s a former radio talk show host in Houston. You see him a lot on cable TV. People all over the country know him from earlier in the pandemic, when he suggested that he would rather have some people die than tank the economy to meet the coronavirus. He’s been very defensive of the people who are ignoring these kinds of restrictions and orders. So has the governor lost control of his lieutenant governor? I don’t think he ever had control of his lieutenant governor. In Texas, you don’t run as a ticket—they’re individually elected. Dan Patrick and Greg Abbott are representatives of different parts of the Republican Party. Abbott’s really the most powerful Republican in office, but he’s not the most adept Republican in office. That’s probably Dan Patrick. When you get long-lasting debates like the one over how to meet the coronavirus, and one speaker is Patrick and one speaker is Abbott, Patrick’s more consistent, he’s more effective, and he carries the day in a way that constrains what Greg Abbott’s able to do. ...
NYT- ‘Our Luck May Have Run Out’: California’s Case Count Explodes California was the first state to shut down and one of the most aggressive in fighting the virus. But the state that was so proactive in combating the spread of the coronavirus is now being forced to ask itself what went wrong. “To some extent I think our luck may have run out,” said Dr. Bob Wachter, a professor and chair of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. “This is faster and worse than I expected. You have to have a ton of respect for this thing. It is nasty and it just lurks and waits to stomp on you if you let your guard down for a second.” On Monday, the governors of New York and New Jersey said they were reconsidering plans to allow indoor dining in the coming days because they were so alarmed by the rise in coronavirus cases in the South and the West. The head start that California appeared to enjoy — the companies that allowed employees to work from home as early as February, the governor who warned residents in daily briefings to stay home and appeared to be listened to — was not protective enough in the long run. Younger people appear to account for the large surge in new cases, as they have in many other states. Latinos, who make up a large swath of the state’s essential work force, have also recently seen consistently high case counts. And just as in Texas and Florida, the state’s reopening appears to have triggered a large resurgence. Pressured in part by businesses, church groups and conservatives, Mr. Newsom ceded control of much of the timing of reopening to local officials who were eager to regain a sense of normalcy and stem economic losses. The result was a decentralized, haphazard process that sowed confusion and gave residents a false sense that they were in the clear. State Senator Richard Pan, a Sacramento physician who led the state’s push to tighten immunization requirements, said that the state might have flattened its curve at first, but that it never bent it down toward zero. “How this disease spreads is all about the margins,” Dr. Pan said. “All it takes is, like, 5 percent more people doing more high-risk behavior to change its direction.” Dr. Pan blames partisanship and misinformation spread by President Trump. On the weekend after June 20, when bars reopened in Los Angeles County, an estimated 500,000 people visited nightspots. Additionally, half of the restaurants visited by county inspectors are not complying with new public health rules, according to health officials. “I’m frustrated because it’s not that we don’t know what to do,” Dr. Pan said. “We know what to do. We’re just not doing it.” California was one of the earliest Unlike people in the Northeast, many Californians did not have a sense of urgency or immediacy toward the virus because infection rates had been so low for months. There were no overflowing morgues or ambulance sirens at all hours. In a state with 40 million people, outbreaks have been heterogeneous: San Quentin State Prison on the San Francisco Bay, food-processing plants in the Central Valley, nursing homes, dense urban neighborhoods filled with essential workers and family gatherings in remote rural communities have all accounted for clusters of cases. But health experts and state officials say the ultimate reasons for the surge lie in the millions of individual decisions made across the vast state. Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles blamed “irrational exuberance.” “A lot of people didn’t stick with the plan,” the mayor said in an interview on Friday. “The idea was, we would do a move, wait three weeks, check the impact, take the next move.” Instead, Mr. Garcetti said, the reopening “was like a tidal wave — one move led to the next, led to the next, led to the next. And then we had the protest on top of that, and other things. And we have yet to be able to identify where spread is happening and what we can do to crank it down.” Counties across the Bay Area banded together to announce the nation’s first stay-at-home order on March 16, followed by a statewide order three days later. Cellphone data showed that Californians moved around less than people in other states, and infection rates stabilized at a plateau well below the levels experts had projected, making military field hospitals and sports arenas and auditoriums — all mobilized in case of a shortage of beds — unnecessary. By May, with low case counts remaining steady, Mr. Newsom was coming under increasing pressure to reopen. Harmeet K. Dhillon, a civil rights attorney and member of the Republican National Committee, filed more than a dozen lawsuits related to the reopening. If residents could congregate at Costco, they should be able to go to church, she argued. Elon Musk, the head of Tesla, railed that his Bay Area car factory was forced to shut and threatened to move the company’s headquarters out of California. Mr. Newsom localized the reopening process, allowing counties to move at different speeds, repeatedly declaring that “localism is determinative,” and vowing to collaborate with county governments, not issue orders. Church congregations were allowed to meet with restrictions. Advocates for reopening like Ms. Dhillon felt vindicated. “I feel that our lawsuits were responsible for large sectors of California’s economy opening up much sooner than the governor originally intended,” she said, adding that she fielded countless calls from business owners. “People are absolutely devastated.” But Mr. Newsom was also criticized by those who worried the state was reopening too quickly. Dr. Sara Cody, the chief health officer of Santa Clara County and the architect of the Bay Area’s stay-at-home orders, said the system was bewildering to residents who cross county lines regularly. “For the public it’s incredibly confusing,” Dr. Cody said in an interview. “What’s the message? How can it be that something is OK here and in the adjoining county it’s not?” The measures have become even more disparate in the past few weeks. In Napa and Sonoma Counties, wine tastings and restaurant meals are permitted both indoors and outside. In San Francisco, restaurant dining is only available outdoors. Mayor London Breed of San Francisco announced last week that the city would postpone the reopening, scheduled for Monday, of hair and nail salons, massage shops, museums, tattoo parlors and outdoor bars. Diana Dooley, a former state secretary of Health and Human Services who dealt with the Ebola and Zika pandemics during her tenure, said she had watched “with great empathy” as the crisis gripped California. Initially, she said, “it looked like the Bay Area was driving the decisions.” And as the virus spread, Californians were generally compliant. “But after several months, the impatient people have made top-down orders very hard to enforce,” she said. The result, she said, is a sense in some parts of the state of “a kind of liberty gone rampant.” “People want to go to bars, they want to go to picnics,” she said. “These protest rallies have heightened that sense of ‘I want to be in a crowd.’ We’re coming up on the Fourth of July and people want to be in connection with each other.” “You can only lead if people follow,” Ms. Dooley said. “Newsom has done a pretty good job of creating awareness, and people in California are more inclined to believe this is serious. But what they can do about it, we’re still getting to.” David Townsend, a veteran Democratic political consultant in the state, said California’s size and political complexity pose a considerable challenge. Although the Legislature is overwhelmingly Democratic, more than a fifth of the electorate is Republican. “You have the Inland Empire doing one thing, Los Angeles doing another, Orange County — it’s pretty hard to corral everybody in California and get them to do the right thing. It’s just so big.” Mr. Townsend said the pressure would be tough for any governor. “How do you put the genie back into the bottle?” Mr. Townsend added. “I’m not sure there’s much more he can do.”
CDC official... HEALTH AND SCIENCE CDC says U.S. has ‘way too much virus’ to control pandemic as cases surge across country https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/29/cdc...y.html?__source=sharebar|twitter&par=sharebar
Why dont they report recovery numbers anymore? There were a lot of people recovering from it. At one point there were almost more recoveries being reported than cases. Also, is Covid-19 the only thing killing people this year? No more heart attacks, dying of old age or anything?
On google you can look up recoveries. According to latest info 811K people have recovered out of 2.64M reported cases. Yes people are dying of other causes. The deaths being reported aren't just total US deaths but deaths where COVID-19 is a factor.
Great photo. Doofus has mask at half mast, potentially exposing and potentially killing the TSA worker who's just trying to do her job. Fuhck, what is with our society? Who raised all these people to not think about others? Excellent and depressing article. Whole communities can be short-circuited by the behavior of 5% (according to one of th experts quoted). Assuming that's accurate, our country will never have this under control, pending some miraculous vaccine (and a miraculous willingness to be vaccinated).
Serious question, and it may be in this thread and I missed it, but are there any reported cases of someone getting the virus again after recovering? Seems I haven't seen/heard discussion on immunity for a while. EDIT: nvm...did some googling after this question popped up in my head "As of yet, we are unsure of the nature of human immunity to Coronavirus. A recently published study in monkeys has demonstrated that they produce antibodies to the virus, that protected them from a second infection a month later. Over the coming weeks, researches will be studying the antibody levels in the blood of people who have had COVID-19 to understand how strong their immunity is and how long it lasts. If the Coronavirus is like flu, we should expect to have some protection that will last months, until the strains circulating change substantially." EDIT2: yikes "How long does immunity to covid-19 last after infection? We really have no idea yet. There have been sporadic reports of some people in the world coming down with covid-19 twice, and so far it’s unclear why. It’s well documented that other coronavirus infections confer only temporary immunity, sometimes lasting no more than a few months. Covid-19 may follow the same pattern, but it’s too early to tell." https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/06/19/1004169/biggest-questions-about-immunity-to-covid-19/
Former radio talk show host is a fervent believer in donald trump, and will say/do anything to support/defend trump... https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...plea-captures-an-essential-truth-about-trump/
