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CR: COVID-19 --Political Talk


Mrs Whiggins

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17 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

This should not happen in the US. Period.

What is this guy's surly handle?

 

which one? because they're both 100% correct. someone needs to grow some balls and start telling unvaxed people they can't participate in society until they get it. fuck em.

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Witness the trajectory of flexible dose strategy implemented in setting of high demand.  We could have done something similar back in Jan/Feb. We would have hit the demand ceiling eventually, but we could have rolled things out faster and saved quite a few lives. 

 

 

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1 minute ago, Longhorn_Fan68 said:

which one? because they're both 100% correct. someone needs to grow some balls and start telling unvaxed people they can't participate in society until they get it. fuck em.

The guy that has been locked in his basement since March 2020. That person is likely struggling with mental illness. Either pre-existing or new onset. 

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There’s going to be a point in the near future when it becomes undeniable that pretty much only Republicans are dying from this thing.

The more traitorous supporters of Trump and the new voter suppression, anti-science, anti-gay, Putin supporting, American Institution destroying, big lie spewing GOP fans die, the better it will be for the long-term health of our beloved country.

It has become impossible in the Fox media/Facebook world to ever get them to turn from their ignorant hateful views. Sadly. So in the absence of a way to educate them, the more fake Christian, false “Patriots” who dirt nap, the better.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/17/us/arkansas-covid-19-vaccine.html

 

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Mountain Home, Arkansas - When the boat factory in this leafy Ozark Mountains city offered free coronavirus vaccinations this spring, Susan Johnson, 62, a receptionist there, declined the offer, figuring she was protected as long as she never left her house without a mask.

Linda Marion, 68, a widow with chronic pulmonary disease, worried that a vaccination might actually trigger Covid-19 and kill her. Barbara Billigmeier, 74, an avid golfer who retired here from California, believed she did not need it because “I never get sick.”

 

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Last week, all three were patients on 2 West, an overflow ward that is now largely devoted to treating Covid-19 at Baxter Regional Medical Center, the largest hospital in north-central Arkansas. Mrs. Billigmeier said the scariest part was that “you can’t breathe.” For 10 days, Ms. Johnson had relied on supplemental oxygen being fed to her lungs through nasal tubes.

Ms. Marion said that at one point, she felt so sick and frightened that she wanted to give up. “It was just terrible,” she said. “I felt like I couldn’t take it.”

 

 

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Yet despite their ordeals, none of them changed their minds about getting vaccinated. “It’s just too new,” Mrs. Billigmeier said. “It is like an experiment.”

While much of the nation tiptoes toward normalcy, the coronavirus is again swamping hospitals in places like Mountain Home, a city of fewer than 13,000 people not far from the Missouri border. A principal reason, health officials say, is the emergence of the new, far more contagious variant called Delta, which now accounts for more than half of new infections in the United States.

 

Spoiler

The variant has highlighted a new divide in America, between communities with high vaccination rates, where it causes hardly a ripple, and those like Mountain Home that are undervaccinated, where it threatens to upend life all over again. Part of the country is breathing a sigh of relief; part is holding its breath.

While infections rose in more than half the nation’s counties last week, those with low vaccination rates were far more likely to see bigger jumps. Among the 25 counties with the sharpest increases in cases, all but one had vaccinated under 40 percent of residents, and 16 had vaccinated under 30 percent, a New York Times analysis found.

In Baxter County, where the hospital is, fewer than a third of residents are fully vaccinated — below both the state and the national averages. Even fewer people are protected in surrounding counties that the hospital serves.

“It’s absolutely flooded,” said Dr. Rebecca Martin, a pulmonologist, as she made the rounds of 2 West one morning last week.

In the first half of June, the hospital averaged only one or two Covid-19 patients a day. On Thursday, 22 of the unit’s 32 beds were filled with coronavirus patients. Five more were in intensive care. In a single week, the number of Covid patients had jumped by one-third.

Overall, Arkansas ranks near the bottom of states in the share of population that is vaccinated. Only 44 percent of residents have received at least one shot.

“Boy, we’ve tried just about everything we can think of,” a retired National Guard colonel, Robert Ator, who runs the state’s vaccination effort, said in an interview. For about one in three residents, he said, “I don’t think there’s a thing in the world we could do to get them to get vaccinated.”

For that, the state is paying a price. Hospitalizations have quadrupled since mid-May. More than a third of patients are in intensive care. Deaths, a lagging indicator, are also expected to rise, health officials said.

Dr. José R. Romero, the state health director, said he still believed enough Arkansans were vaccinated, or immune from having contracted Covid-19, that the “darkest days” of December and January were behind them. “What I’m concerned about now is we’ll have a rise or surge,” he said, “then winter is going to add another surge, so we’re going to have a surge on top of a surge.”

Dr. Mark Williams, the dean of the College of Public Health at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, said the Delta variant was upending his projections for the pandemic. It is spreading through the state’s unvaccinated population “at a very fast rate,” he said, and threatens to strain the ability of hospitals to cope. “I would say we have definitely hit the alarming stage,” he said.

At Baxter Regional, many doctors and nurses are girding for another wave while still exhausted from battling the pandemic they thought had abated.

“I started having flashbacks, like PTSD,” said Dr. Martin, the pulmonologist, who obsesses over her patients’ care. “This is going to sound very selfish but unfortunately it’s true: The fact that people won’t get vaccinated means I can’t go home and see my kids for dinner.”

The Biden administration has pledged to help stem outbreaks by supplying Covid-19 tests and treatments, promoting vaccines with advertising campaigns and sending community health workers door to door to try to persuade the hesitant.

But not all those tactics are welcome. Dr. Romero said Arkansas would happily accept more monoclonal antibody therapies, a Covid-19 treatment often used in outpatient settings. But Mr. Ator, the vaccine coordinator, said door-knocking “would probably do more harm than good,” given residents’ suspicions of federal intentions.

Both said the Arkansas public had been saturated with vaccine promotions and incentives, including free lottery tickets, hunting and fishing licenses and stands offering shots at state parks and high school graduation ceremonies.

The last mass vaccination event was May 4, when the Arkansas Travelers, a minor-league baseball team, had its first game since the pandemic hit. Thousands gathered at the stadium in Little Rock to watch. Fourteen accepted shots.

Even health care workers have balked. Statewide, only about 40 percent are vaccinated, Dr. Romero said.

In April, the state legislature added yet another roadblock, making it essentially illegal for any state or local entity, including public hospitals, to require coronavirus vaccination as a condition of education or employment until two years after the Food and Drug Administration fully licenses a shot. That almost certainly means no such requirements can be issued until late in 2023.

Only fear of the Delta variant appears to be pushing some off the fence.

When the pandemic hit, Baxter Regional became a vaccine distribution center and inoculated 5,500 people. But only half of its 1,800 staff members accepted shots, according to Jonny Harvey, its occupational health coordinator. By early June, demand had tapered off so much that the hospital was administering an average of one a day.

Now, Mr. Harvey said, he is ordering enough vaccine to deliver 30 shots a day because people are increasingly anxious of the Delta variant. “I hate that we are having the surge,” he said. “But I do like that we are vaccinating people.”

At the state’s only academic medical center in Little Rock, run by the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, vaccines are also suddenly more popular. Over a recent two-week period, the share of the hospital’s staff who are vaccinated jumped to 86 percent from 75 percent.

But those encouraging signs are outweighed by the soaring number of Covid-19 patients. On Saturday, the Little Rock hospital held 51 patients, more than at any point since Feb. 2. In April, there was one coronavirus death. In June, there were six.

Dr. Williams, who has been charting the coronavirus’s trajectory, said the rise in infections and hospitalizations mirrored what he saw in October. And there are other troubling signs.

A larger share of those who are now becoming infected, he said, need hospitalization. And once there, Dr. Steppe Mette, the chief executive of the Little Rock hospital, said, they appeared to need a higher level of care than those who were sickened by the original variant. That is despite the fact that they are younger.

The average age of a coronavirus patient in Arkansas has dropped by nearly a decade since December — from 63 to 54 — a reflection of the fact that three-fourths of older Arkansans are at least partly vaccinated. But some patients at the Little Rock hospital are in their 20s or 30s.

“It’s really discouraging to see younger, sicker patients,” Dr. Mette said. “We didn’t see this degree of illness earlier in the epidemic.”

Young, pregnant coronavirus patients were once rare at the hospital. But recently, four or five of them ended up in intensive care. Three were treated with a machine called ECMO — short for extracorporeal membrane oxygenation — a step some consider a last resort after ventilators fail. The machine routes blood from the body and into equipment that adds oxygen, then pumps it back into the patient.

Ashton Reed, 25, a coordinator in a county prosecutor’s office, was about 30 weeks pregnant when she arrived at the hospital on May 26, critically ill. To save her life, doctors delivered her baby girl by emergency cesarean section, then hooked her up to the ECMO machine.

In a public service announcement later urging vaccination, her husband said she went from sinus trouble to life support in 10 days.

“I almost died,” she said. “My thoughts have definitely changed on the vaccine.”

Last month, the hospital had to reopen a coronavirus ward it had closed in late spring. On Monday, it reopened a second.

Many of the nurses there wore colorful stickers announcing they were vaccinated. Ashley Ayers, 26, a traveling nurse from Dallas, did not. Noting that vaccine development typically took years, she said she worried that the shot might impair her fertility — even though there is no evidence of that.

“I just think it was rushed,” she said.

David Deutscher, 49, one of her patients for nearly a week, is no longer a holdout. A heating and air conditioning specialist and Air Force veteran, he said he fought Covid for 10 days at home before he went to the hospital with a 105-degree fever.

The experience has shaken him to his core. He dissolved into tears describing it, apologizing for being an emotional wreck.

When he failed to improve with monoclonal antibody treatment, he said, “that was probably the most scared I have ever been.” He called a friend, the daughter of a medical researcher, from his hospital bed. “Please don’t let me die,” he said. 

He said he never got vaccinated because he figured a mask would suffice. In the past 21 years, he has had the flu once.

“Once I started feeling better,” Mr. Deutscher said, “I got on the phone and I just starting calling everybody to tell them to go get that vaccine.” He did not even wait to be discharged.

The coronavirus “is no joke,” he told his friends. Three of them got a shot.

Mr. Deutscher went home on July 9, bringing a song for one of his five grandchildren that he had written in his hospital bed. His theme was the value of life.

 

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29 minutes ago, cactusflinthead said:

My RN cousin in Abilene says some of her friends make more in a weekend in DFW than all week in Abilene. 

A lot depends on local nursing supply, since there has been a nursing shortage for more than thirty years at this point. Because we are losing so many nurses, my hospital contracted with multiple travel nurses for like two month contacts at a time. As RNs, travelers are generally fine, but they don't know the hospital system or charting or doctors, so we do a lot of hand-holding for them and a lot of anxiety parts of their job. These travel nurses make roughly double what us staff nurses make.

Abilene is also weird because one hospital bought the other hospital when the other hospital went bankrupt, so the employer (Hendricks Health iirc) has monopolized the area's nursing jobs. 

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Here’s what’s gonna happen. Covid cases will slowly but steadily go up again this summer then start to go up exponentially in late September. Reaching a peak once again just like last January in mid to late January then go down again after that and hopefully it then becomes just another kind of cold. Deaths this September through January will be less than last September through January but they’ll be there for sure. 

All because a bunch of total dipshits won’t get the vaccine. 98 percent of cases that lead to hospitalization and/or death will be unvaccinated. 

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1 minute ago, jimmyjazz said:

We can probably predict upcoming death rates by simply multiplying last year's mortality in the fall by (1-x), where "x" is the fraction that are fully vaccinated.

It's fucking brutal.

I'm not an epidemiologist.  

I do believe you are correct. And I also do believe Covid deaths last year are undercounted. I personally know several people who died last year and Covid was never attributed to it but I believe it played a part. I’m in my 40s and more people I know unexpectedly died last year from heart attacks and strokes than in any other single year of my life. Including people in their 40s and 50s and healthy people in their 60s.  

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15 minutes ago, JimmyJames said:

I do believe you are correct. And I also do believe Covid deaths last year are undercounted. I personally know several people who died last year and Covid was never attributed to it but I believe it played a part. I’m in my 40s and more people I know unexpectedly died last year from heart attacks and strokes than in any other single year of my life. Including people in their 40s and 50s and healthy people in their 60s.  

It's possible, but as someone who is likely a decade older than you, I can assert that I experienced the same kind of thing when I was your age.  There just comes a time when your circle of friends and acquaintances starts to die off from disease and other health issues.  I can only assume it's going to get uglier from here.

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18 minutes ago, JimmyJames said:

Here’s what’s gonna happen. Covid cases will slowly but steadily go up again this summer then start to go up exponentially in late September. Reaching a peak once again just like last January in mid to late January then go down again after that and hopefully it then becomes just another kind of cold. Deaths this September through January will be less than last September through January but they’ll be there for sure. 

All because a bunch of total dipshits won’t get the vaccine. 98 percent of cases that lead to hospitalization and/or death will be unvaccinated. 

I was looking at a COVID only hospitalization chart for a friend who lives south of Abiline in a county with a low population but also low vaccination numbers (28% overall with age 65+ at 59%). Friend is >65 and vaccinated but most of friend group there have decided not to get the shot and take their chances. Those odds are going to get problematic--I showed how the hospital numbers during the peak this winter were now equaled by the latest data and that the number had increased each week, beginning about three weeks ago. In their tiny hospital, it comprises the majority of patients. So your scenario certainly seems a possibility in lower vaccinated areas for sure.

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4 minutes ago, Mrs Whiggins said:

I was looking at a COVID only hospitalization chart for a friend who lives south of Abiline in a county with a low population but also low vaccination numbers (28% overall with age 65+ at 59%). Friend is >65 and vaccinated but most of friend group there have decided not to get the shot and take their chances. Those odds are going to get problematic--I showed how the hospital numbers during the peak this winter were now equaled by the latest data and that the number had increased each week, beginning about three weeks ago. In their tiny hospital, it comprises the majority of patients. So your scenario certainly seems a possibility in lower vaccinated areas for sure.

If not for the vaccine deaths this coming fall and winter would exceed last fall and winter. 
 

If the idiots would get the vaccine Covid would be pretty much done by now in America. Basically the only country where the vaccine is available to everyone over 12.
 

But it’s not over because the anti vaxxers have to prove their stupid point. It will get worse this fall and winter. 

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12 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

It's possible, but as someone who is likely a decade older than you, I can assert that I experienced the same kind of thing when I was your age.  There just comes a time when your circle of friends and acquaintances starts to die off from disease and other health issues.  I can only assume it's going to get uglier from here.

I get that but it started last summer and has continued until this spring. It’s too much of a coincidence to me. 

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What a piece of shit 

https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/sports/us-olympic-swimmer-michael-andrew-wont-get-vaccinated-2021-07-09/

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“All of us here have been through very strict protocols, with lots of testing, masks, socially distant, staying away from crowds — everything like that,” Michael Andrew said Thursday. “Going into Tokyo, the same thing, with testing every day. So we feel very safe and protected, knowing that we’re minimizing risk as much as possible. But personally, I have not had the vaccine yet and don’t plan on it in the distant future.”

Tina Andrew first revealed her son’s insistence on remaining unvaccinated for Tokyo, telling The Washington Post during the Olympic trials in Omaha, “He will do everything that is required, but he won’t take the vaccine.” Earlier in the year, Michael Andrew expressed personal doubts about vaccines, saying on a swimming podcast, “Just because everyone’s heading in one direction, why do we have to follow that direction?”


 

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1 hour ago, trauma babe said:

As RNs, travelers are generally fine, but they don't know the hospital system or charting or doctors, so we do a lot of hand-holding for them and a lot of anxiety parts of their job. These travel nurses make roughly double what us staff nurses make.

 

I don’t mind travel nurses in the OR because I’m there and I can line them out w what I need and how I like things. I can usually anticipate what they are not going to have and give them plenty of heads up to run and get shit (since JCAHO has taken over everything anything you might need is not allowed to be stored in the the OR apparently so it takes 10 minutes to get anything you ask for), but I sleep much better at night when nurses I know are taking care of my patients on the floor. Thankfully I don’t end up with many in the ICU, but my stress level would go way up if they were staffed by travelers. Not because they aren’t competent but because of the reasons you mention

Thank you so much for what you do. My bacon was saved many a time as a wet behind the ears intern and 2nd year resident by the ICU nurses. 

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My brother got it and nearly died. He was contrite at the hospital and a few propaganda network reprogramming and he back to being to being a good little denier, not so bad, vaccines are not necessary.


Thankfully we all get to share his medical bill since he doesn’t believe in socialism.

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44 minutes ago, Sawbonz said:

Thank you so much for what you do. My bacon was saved many a time as a wet behind the ears intern and 2nd year resident by the ICU nurses. 

Helping interns and residents grow as doctors is one of my favorite parts of my job.

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6 fully vaccinated people who attended an outdoor wedding caught the Delta variant, but people with Pfizer and Moderna shots survived, study says

Quote

 

Six fully vaccinated people who attended an outdoor wedding in Texas got COVID-19, a new study says.

All the breakthrough infections were in guests over 50.

There were two serious cases, including one death: an attendee who'd had India's Covaxin vaccine.

Six fully vaccinated people who attended an outdoor wedding in Texas in April came down with COVID-19, a new study says - a small outbreak that underscores how effective vaccines are against even variants of the virus.

Though the vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna may not knock out every COVID-19 case, especially now that the more infectious Delta variant dominates across the US, they are very good at preventing death from COVID-19.

The preprint study from Baylor College of Medicine found that only one person who'd recently gotten an Indian-made vaccine, Covaxin, died after attending the 92-person wedding near Houston.

The wedding took place in a "large, open-air tent" before the Delta variant was circulating widely in the US. Guests were required to be fully vaccinated at the event, though that policy operated on the honor system.

The study's authors said they suspect the Delta variant was introduced at the wedding by two people who had traveled from India and tested negative before their flight but developed symptoms in the US. All the COVID-19 patients said they'd had close encounters with those two people during the wedding, according to the study.

All six guests who contracted symptomatic COVID-19 after the wedding were over 50. Two had gotten the vaccine from Pfizer, two had gotten the vaccine from Moderna, and two had gotten an Indian-made vaccine called Covaxin, the study said. Their infections were confirmed with lab tests and viral sequencing for Delta, it said.

Each experienced some common symptoms of COVID-19, including fever, cough, fatigue, and body aches, the study said. Those who'd gotten the Moderna and Covaxin vaccines also lost their sense of smell.

One Covaxin recipient and one person who'd gotten Pfizer's vaccine came down with more severe infections, the study said. The latter was a man in his 60s with no known medical conditions that increase the odds of contracting COVID-19 - he was hospitalized and given Regeneron's monoclonal antibody treatment (the same one President Donald Trump received) 10 days after the wedding. The Covaxin recipient, a man in his late 60s (also with no COVID-19 comorbidities), died from complications of COVID-19. The other people who contracted symptomatic COVID-19 after the wedding had preconditions including hypertension and diabetes or were classified as overweight, the study said.

Both wedding attendees who had Covaxin got their second shots in India, just 12 days before the wedding, study author Timothy Farinholt from Baylor College of Medicine told Insider. He suspects that may be the reason why they got infected with the Delta variant in the first place, because their second shot hadn't had enough time to take full effect.

"It's very difficult with a sample size as small as this to give any sort of definitive or cut-and-dry answer as far as, 'oh, Pfizer is better than Moderna, or better than Covaxin,'" Farinholt said.

"What is important to glean from this is that it isn't over until we reach some sort of theoretical max vaccination point, and we start curbing the spread of whatever variant is currently predominant."

Vaccines help prevent severe sickness
Rochelle Walensky, the director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has said vaccinated people should still get a COVID-19 test if they experience symptoms like a runny nose, sore throat, or cough, which can be indicative of a mild Delta infection among fully vaccinated people.

"What I would say is if you have those upper-respiratory symptoms and you've been vaccinated, you should absolutely get a COVID-19 test," Walensky said during a White House COVID-19 briefing last week.

But she also stressed that preliminary data from the past few months suggested that 99.5% of coronavirus deaths in the US were occurring in unvaccinated people.

"Those deaths were preventable with a simple, safe shot," she said.

During the briefing, Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden's chief medical advisor, pointed to real-world data from Scotland and England suggesting that the vaccines authorized in the US are highly effective at preventing the most disastrous cases from this variant.

"Please get vaccinated," Fauci said. "It will protect you against the surging of the Delta variant."

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated who got the monoclonal antibody treatment. It was a person who'd gotten Pfizer's vaccine, not Covaxin.

https://news.yahoo.com/6-fully-vaccinated-people-caught-154610774.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly9kdWNrZHVja2dvLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAKpI1eMaL86_yAjZ-DRbzNNxpjLSV7JfdCaswjAQMrzujYEK0JiMkNBT-vjYKuINUDjrCUTKeVGuS7tGaeZaQKPckDlK_YJOwQ_p9AQX2wtczqtrYHd6O3xSI8VFIUSZToR2sETQ2ztI0s1sBEDes8HdVgjCie4-lKWvHfeyxaAm

 

The CDC now saying if you're symptomatic to get tested even if vaccinated is news to me.  I had thought we were told if vaccinated to not get tested.  

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23 hours ago, Paper_jam said:

I'm starting to think that adults who are willfully unvaccinated are basically not much different from drunk drivers, but for some reason only being one of those things gets you in a shitload of trouble.

 

Agree.  At this point, hospitals treating unvaccinated covid patients should be like taking your pet to the 24hr animal clinic.  Show us your credit card, prepay everything 100%, or go home and treat yourself with bleach and UV lights.

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