Yes, it's so strange (not just here, but Facebook in general) that the people who say it's a hoax and that it their right to go out and not wear a mask,are the same ones that blame the rise entirely on BLM protests. I guess they don't have the right to go out. And their cases aren't a hoax.
Where is the liberal outrage at these homophobic posts? I suppose it's OK to use these? Certainly not in my book. Silence speaks volumes... #rightsideofhistory
For those of you who don't understand my point of view, here are some thoughts: 1) I suspect 25% of America has had this virus. Most of which have no idea they had it. 2) These increases in cases may or may not be troubling. Increased testing plus a shift in WHO is being tested (more younger people who weren't tested before) could mean that actually cases may NOT be increasing, we're just now finding out about them. This could also explain increasing positive results. 3) The death rates in America have fallen off a cliff since April. This is GOOD news. They may or may not spike again with the "new" cases - since many of the new cases are young people, who have a tiny chance of death. Plus health care has improved for the virus. 4) There is still hospital capacity - the TMC story was fake news last week, and was clarified by the actual hospital CEOs. 5) We DO need to protect the vulnerable - masks + social distancing + staying at home as much as possible. 6) This virus CAN be contained - Europe has done a nice job of not having relapses. The solution appears to exist. Masks + distancing + protect the vulnerable appears to be the current solution.
What do you think of the President continuing to ignore the problem and, in particular, not wearing a mask as an example?
let's keep the politics out of this. This is bigger than politics. The fact that you immediately go there is pretty immature, in my view. I laid out my thoughts. Haven't seen yours.
6) This virus CAN be contained - Europe has done a nice job of not having relapses. The solution appears to exist. Masks + distancing + protect the vulnerable appears to be the current solution. So if it's as simple as Masks + distancing, why is America failing so miserably
*After months of ignorance, today he posts his thoughts* I LAID OUT MY THOUGHTS *Twenty minutes later* HAVENT SEEN YOURS
He took the time to play politics, but not respond to my post. It was a reasonable request. And I've shared my thoughts many times.
My thoughts are things would improve if we had leadership that espoused the virtue and value of things like social distancing and mask wearing. (So.... you have my thoughts) Unfortunately, we don't have that leadership at the federal level and we have inconsistent leadership at the state level. Of course politics are involved. The President is ignoring the problem. He is not leading by example. To ignore that is truly, in your own word, "immature". How do you think the President should help with mask wearing and distancing? Or do you not want to answer that question because you just hate admitting that the President is capable of making mistakes?
Wow. You can't get past politics. You saw my points of view - I mask up. Let's focus on people's safety first.
Keep an eye on what's happening in day care centers for preview of what to expct. I'm glad I no longer have school age children... Coronavirus cases take big jump in Texas day care centers Dallas Morning News 6/30/20 Texas’ day care centers have reported a total of 950 coronavirus cases, marking an increase of 540 cases in less than two weeks. The latest count includes 643 staff members and 307 children at 668 licensed child care centers, the Texas Health and Human Services Commission reported Tuesday. Until recently, day care centers had remained relatively insulated. On May 21, Texas had reported only 67 coronavirus cases in licensed facilities, according to KVUE-TV in Austin. The commission doesn’t track deaths, hospitalizations and recoveries linked to coronavirus in day cares, a spokeswoman said Tuesday. Child care centers remained open during the early stages of the pandemic for children of essential workers. On May 18, Gov. Greg Abbott allowed day cares to open for nonessential workers but with emergency regulations that included prescreening requirements and guidelines for entry and child pickup. The state repealed the emergency requirements June 12, but 11 days later Abbott directed the Health and Human Services Commission to reinstitute guidelines because of a spike in cases. The commission implemented similar emergency rules June 25 but didn’t include social distancing regulations or require masks for employees or children. Stephanie Rubin, CEO of Texans Care for Children in Austin, said June 19 that there always has been an “acceptable risk” when it comes to the spread of germs and parents enrolling their children in day care centers. “That’s something parents have accepted for a long time,” Rubin said. “But in these days of COVID-19, I think parents are really concerned about that prospect.” Thousands of licensed child care centers across the state have closed during the pandemic. In February, before coronavirus hit North Texas, the state’s 17,279 licensed and registered child care centers and homes were caring for an estimated 1.1 million children, according to the Health and Human Services Commission. As of June 19, there were 12,196 facilities open. Tori Mannes, president and CEO of ChildCareGroup — a nonprofit that operates eight centers, partners with local school districts and manages subsidy programs for hundreds across the state — has said maintaining extra safety requirements while operating with lower enrollment can be expensive for businesses that operate on a razor-thin budget even during normal times. “We are doing everything we can to support and sustain our child care providers because when we get to the other side of COVID-19, our economy and the workforce are going to need child care centers to be open and operational,” Mannes said.
We all wish your point of view was real. It would mean Covid is under control, has lost 2 steps and can't get a dunk up against the Toronto Raptors. I'm sure you know that it takes up to 3 weeks for deaths to take toll. You just don't contract it and die the next day. Yelling mission accomplished beforehand does nothing. It only mimics talking points of those that hide behind 'fake news'. 4.) You guys claim to be opened minded individuals. Would it not be possible that Abbott had hospital CEOS take back comments from their own people to cover up the debacle that has been their 'leadership'? Cover ups are nothing new in the US, right or left. 6.) You say don't make it political, but when idiots believe their freedom is being crushed because they have to wear a mask or social distance and they see the 'leader' of the country mocking people who do wear masks, it's political. Europe has it under control because they sacrificed and now their Euroleagues are going strong with no set backs, even after having 60,000+ at their own BML protests.
Black Lives Matter protests did not cause an uptick in covid-19 cases Stay-at-home tendencies actually increased DEMONSTRATING CAN be a dangerous activity, even in the best of circumstances. During a pandemic, it can be lethal. When mass protests against police brutality broke out in America earlier this month, following the death of George Floyd at the hands of policemen in Minneapolis, public-health experts worried they would lead to a surge in infections. Anthony Fauci, a leading member of the White House’s coronavirus task-force, called the protests “the perfect set-up” for the spread of the virus. Eric Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles, warned that the gatherings could become “super-spreader events”. This was more than scaremongering. SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes covid-19, is spread through droplets of moisture produced when an infected person speaks, coughs or sneezes. Large, crowded gatherings can contribute to the spread of the virus, especially when those involved are shouting and chanting slogans—projecting droplets farther into the air. Police tactics such as spraying tear-gas, herding protesters into contained areas and rounding up troublemakers into police vans and jail cells also increase the risk of infection. But the available evidence suggests that this month’s Black Lives Matter protests have not contributed to a surge in covid-19 cases. In a new working paper, researchers from Bentley University, the University of Colorado and San Diego State University used mobile-phone data from SafeGraph, a geolocation data firm, and covid-19 case data from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention to determine whether the protests were associated with less social-distancing behaviour and more covid-19 cases. In fact, the opposite was true. Using data from 315 American cities with at least 100,000 people, covering the period mid-May to mid-June, the researchers compared the experience of the 281 cities where protests erupted with the 34 where they did not. One third of protesting cities saw large-scale gatherings with 1,000 or more attendees, making those particular regions more susceptible to another outbreak. Nonetheless, they found that the protests had no significant effect one way or the other on the incidence of covid-19. They also found one possible—and surprising—reason for this. Protests were actually associated with an increase in social-distancing behaviour; for example, residents overall spent an additional 0.18 hours, or 11 minutes, per day at home (see chart). In other words, any time that residents spent protesting in the streets was more than offset by time other people spent baking bread and watching Netflix. These results could be driven by a number of factors. Those choosing not to protest might have avoided going outside because of worry for their personal safety amid increased crime and violence. That some businesses were temporarily closed because of looting made going out even less appealing. Some residents may have stayed home because of a higher perceived risk of catching the coronavirus. Finally, increased road closures and blockages may have also discouraged citizens from leaving their homes. As cases soar across the country, particularly in states such as Texas and Arizona, many Americans will be eager to point fingers. So far, the evidence suggests that protesters are not to blame. Link to working paper: https://www.nber.org/papers/w27408
Ok... ignoring politics... How do you propose we get people to social distance and wear masks since you and I both agree those should help stem the tide?
I wonder what those daycare centers were doing to prevent spread. Our (former) daycare did a lot, never closed (although for a long time only took kids of essential workers), and have yet to have a case. A lot rides on the teachers and staff; they have to live responsibly to make sure they don't get sick outside of work. Another proposal I saw was to have middle and high schools do remote schooling, and spread elementary kids throughout all those buildings to keep class size down and space between one another.
I finally gave in to try to figure out who half of you are conversing with. What the hell, people? Do you actually think bigtexxx is interested in an honest discussion or that any of that is productive? He's either an idiot or someone gets off on acting like one.
Internal Messages Reveal Crisis at Houston Hospitals as Coronavirus Cases Surge Texas was one of the first states in the nation to ease social distancing mandates. In Houston, the number of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 has quadrupled since Memorial Day. “It’s time to be alarmed,” one expert said. HOUSTON — At Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital on Sunday, the medical staff ran out of both space for new coronavirus patients and a key drug needed to treat them. With no open beds at the public hospital, a dozen COVID-19 patients who were in need of intensive care were stuck in the emergency room, awaiting transfers to other Houston area hospitals, according to a note sent to the staff and shared with reporters. A day later, the top physician executive at the Houston Methodist hospital system wrote to staff members warning that its coronavirus caseload was surging: “It has become necessary to consider delaying more surgical services to create further capacity for COVID-19 patients,” Dr. Robert Phillips said in the note, an abrupt turn from three days earlier, when the hospital system sent a note to thousands of patients, inviting them to keep their surgical appointments. And at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, staff members were alerted recently that the hospital would soon begin taking in cancer patients with COVID-19 from the city’s overburdened public hospital system, a highly unusual move for the specialty hospital. These internal messages highlight the growing strain that the coronavirus crisis is putting on hospital systems in the Houston region, where the number of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 has nearly quadrupled since Memorial Day. As of Tuesday, more than 3,000 people were hospitalized for the coronavirus in the region, including nearly 800 in intensive care. “To tell you the truth, what worries me is not this week, where we’re still kind of handling it,” said Roberta Schwartz, Houston Methodist’s chief innovation officer, who’s been helping lead the system’s efforts to expand beds for COVID-19 patents. “I’m really worried about next week.” What’s happening in Houston draws eerie parallels to New York City in late March, when every day brought steep increases in the number of patients seeking care at overburdened hospitals — though, so far, with far fewer deaths. But as coronavirus cases surge in Texas, state officials here have not reimplemented the same lockdown measures that experts say helped bring New York’s outbreak under control, raising concern among public health officials that Houston won’t be able to flatten the curve. “The time to act and time to be alarmed is not when you’ve hit capacity, but it’s much earlier when you start to see hospitalizations increase at a very fast rate,” said Lauren Ancel Meyers, a professor of integrative biology who leads the University of Texas at Austin COVID-19 Modeling Consortium. “It is definitely time to take some kind of action. It is time to be alarmed.” Even as new cases and hospitalizations soar, the number of daily deaths in Texas has remained relatively low. On Tuesday, the state reported nearly 7,000 new cases, a record, but only 21 new deaths. All told, New York state has reported nearly 25,000 confirmed deaths from COVID-19. Texas has recorded fewer than 2,500, including 378 in Harris County, which includes Houston. But experts caution that rising hospitalizations today will likely result in a spike in deaths in the coming weeks, and those who require ICU care for COVID-19 but recover often leave the hospital with lasting health problems. Meyers and others said that while hospitals across the United States generally are more prepared than they were in March and April — personal protective equipment is more plentiful, advances in therapeutics have helped patients and ventilators aren’t in short supply — the lack of government measures to slow the spread in Texas and other states puts them at a disadvantage. Texas was one of the first states in the nation to ease social distancing mandates, beginning two months ago when daily coronavirus cases remained relatively low compared with some states. Restaurants reopened first, with gradually loosening capacity restrictions; bars, hair salons, bowling alleys and other businesses soon followed. In Houston, where Gov. Greg Abbott had until recently blocked local officials from issuing public mask requirements, it was common to see the majority of people shopping at neighborhood supermarkets or big-box hardware stores with no face coverings. But to date, Abbott has resisted a return to the lockdown, other than an order last week closing bars and further limiting the capacity at restaurants. This week, after the top elected leader in Dallas County asked for the authority to issue a new stay-at-home order locally, Abbott dismissed the idea, saying the official was asking to “force poverty” on people. “Closing down Texas again will always be the last option,” the governor said last week, emphasizing his commitment to protecting the state’s economy. Experts noted that it can take two weeks or longer for social distancing measures to lead to decreases in cases and hospitalizations. “The hospitalizations you see today, they’re not just going to linearly increase in the next two weeks,” said Dr. Clay Johnston, dean of the Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin. “They’re going to accelerate. When you overwhelm the hospitals, you’re in big trouble. That to me is the impossible task that the governor faces. It’s like steering a giant tanker through a tiny strait without any maps.” Although hospital executives in Houston stress that they have the ability to add additional intensive care beds in the region to meet the growing demand — for a few more weeks, at least — the strain on hospitals is already being felt in other ways. Houston Fire Chief Samuel Peña said his paramedics sometimes have to wait for more than an hour while emergency room workers scramble to find beds and staffers to care for patients brought in by ambulance — a bottleneck that’s tying up emergency medical service resources and slowing emergency response times across the region. Part of the problem, Peña said, is that when his crews arrive at a hospital with a patient suspected of having COVID-19, the hospital may have a physical bed open for them, but not enough nurses or doctors to staff it. That’s a problem that’s likely to deepen as a growing number of medical workers have been testing positive for the virus, according to internal hospital reports. Just as New York hospitals did four months ago, some Houston hospitals have posted on traveling nurse websites seeking nurses for “crisis response jobs.” “If they don’t have the nursing staff, then you can’t place the patient,” Peña said. “Then our crews have to sit with the patient in the ER until something comes open. It has a huge domino effect.” The crisis in Houston has accelerated rapidly in recent weeks, at times resulting in muddled messaging from both hospital leaders and public officials. On June 24, several hospital executives affiliated with the Texas Medical Center — a sprawling medical campus that’s home to most of Houston’s major hospital systems — issued a statement warning that COVID-19 hospitalizations were growing at an “alarming rate” and could soon put an unsustainable strain on hospital resources. But the following day, after Abbott issued an executive order directing hospitals to limit elective surgeries — a measure intended to preserve hospital capacity but one that also hurts hospital revenues — the CEOs of four hospitals in the medical center abruptly dialed back their earlier warnings at a hastily organized news conference. They said they hadn’t meant to alarm the public. The hospitals still had room to add ICU beds, they said, both to treat COVID-19 and to continue caring for other patients. “I think the Texas Medical Center’s purpose was to really urge people to do the right things in the community, and do so by talking about capacity, but really ended up unintentionally sounding an alarm bell too loudly,” Dr. Marc Boom, president and CEO of Houston Methodist, which is part of the Texas Medical Center, said at the news conference. “We clearly do have capacity.” https://www.propublica.org/article/...-houston-hospitals-as-coronavirus-cases-surge
Part 2 of the above article: The shifting messages upset Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, the county’s top elected official. She vented her frustrations Monday during a virtual news conference from her home, where she’s on self-quarantine after a member of her staff tested positive for the coronavirus. Hidalgo said the “diluted” messaging from some hospital leaders “weakens our community’s ability” to stop the virus. “The goal is not to have doctors and nurses that we’re bringing in from out of town,” Hidalgo said. “The goal is not to have basic general population beds that we need for dialysis and heart attacks and strokes and pregnant women who need to give birth turned into ICU beds. The goal is not to see how much room we can make for people to go and be there and die in a hospital bed. That is not the point of any of this.” In an interview Tuesday, Boom said he didn’t intend to suggest that there wasn’t reason to be deeply concerned about the number of COVID-19 patients filling hospital wards. He said he and other executives were trying to thread the needle between sounding the alarm about the growing but still manageable strain on hospital resources, while trying to reassure people who might need to come to the hospital for other ailments. “Honestly, in a way, it’s backfired, and I’m very sorry for that because what has happened has actually been the exact opposite of what we were trying to accomplish,” he said of his attempt to clarify the earlier warning about hospital capacity. “I never wanted to confuse the public. The message really was, ‘Hey guys, we don’t want panic, because when people panic, bad things happen.’” Hospitals in Houston and elsewhere in the country temporarily halted outpatient visits and elective surgeries in March and April as the coronavirus pandemic took hold on the East Coast — a move that not only hurt hospital revenues, Boom said, but also forced many patients to delay critical procedures, including heart surgeries. Boom and other hospital leaders said the earlier restrictions also led some patients to avoid going to the hospital after suffering symptoms of heart attacks or strokes, leading to potentially deadly delays in care. Vivian Ho, an economics professor at Rice University, said hospitals want to protect their fiscal health and the health of patients, both those with COVID-19 and those with other conditions, while also preventing themselves from becoming overwhelmed down the line. Elective surgeries deliver a far better financial return than ICU wards full of patients with COVID-19. “They would prefer to tell the public that this is extremely dangerous,” she said, “but they can’t, in part, because they have to keep performing these elective surgeries, and for the most part, that is safe.” Not all hospitals are equally equipped to respond to a surge in COVID-19 demand, accompanied by a loss of more profitable business, Ho said. Hospital systems like Houston Methodist have “the financial resources to sort of convert anything into an ICU just because they have more money, more cash on hand,” she said. Houston’s public hospitals, Ben Taub and Lyndon B. Johnson, don’t have those same resources. “The problem is that, of course, there are going to be more patients who are going to be going to Ben Taub” because the virus is disproportionately affecting Black and Latino people in low-income communities, and Ben Taub is traditionally the safety net for those without health insurance, Ho said. “I don’t know to what extent they are able to send patients to the other hospitals.” Harris Health System officials said that capacity limits at both of its public hospitals have forced doctors to transfer coronavirus patients elsewhere, including sending some to hospitals in nearby cities. The Sunday note to the staff at Lyndon B. Johnson said that the hospital had reached maximum occupancy in its COVID-19 units. That day, nearly 50% of the patients tested for the virus had it, more than double the rate from a week before. The hospital had run out of remdesivir, an antiviral drug that’s shown some effectiveness in treating COVID-19. And for now, all elective surgeries were being canceled to preserve bed and staffing capacity. There appeared to be no letup in sight; the note to the staff warned that Monday would likely be worse. “Sunday,” it said, “is typically a lower volume day.” https://www.propublica.org/article/internal-messages-reveal-crisis-at-houston-hospitals-as-coronavirus-cases-surge
