PART 1. January 21, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday confirmed the first U.S. case of a deadly new coronavirus that has killed six people in China.”
PART 2. January 29, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “If it’s not contained shortly, I think we are looking at a pandemic..”….. “With isolated cases of the dangerous new coronavirus cropping up in a number of states, public health officials say it is only a matter of time before the virus appears in New York City.”
PART3. February 3, 2020. “The Wuhan coronavirus spreading from China is now likely to become a pandemic that circles the globe…”..Trump appeared to downplay concerns about the flu-like virus …We’re gonna see what happens, but we did shut it down..” (D)
PART 4. February 9, 2020. Coronavirus. “A study published Friday in JAMA found that 41% of the first 138 patients diagnosed at one hospital in Wuhan, China, were presumed to be infected in that hospital.….
PART 5. February 12, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “In short, shoe-leather public health and basic medical care—not miracle drugs—are generally what stop outbreaks of emerging infections..”
POST 6. February 18, 2020. Coronovirus. “Amid assurances that the (ocean liner) Westerdam was disease free, hundreds of people disembarked in Cambodia…” “ One was later found to be infected”…. “Over 1,000… passengers were in…transit home”…. “This could be a turning point””
PART 7. February 20, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. With SARS preparedness underway in NJ LibertyHealth/ Jersey City Medical Center, where I was President, proposed that our 100 bed community hospital with all single-bedded rooms, be immediately transformed into an EMERGENCY SARS ISOLATION Hospital.
PART 8. February 24, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…every country’s top priority should be to protect its health care workers. This is partly to ensure that hospitals themselves do not become sites where the coronavirus is spread more than it is contained.”
PART 9. February 27, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Responding to a question about the likelihood of a U.S. outbreak, President Trump said, “I don’t think it’s inevitable…”It probably will. It possibly will,” he continued. “It could be at a very small level, or it could be at a larger level.”
Part 10. March 1, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Stop Surprise Medical Bills for Coronavirus care. (&) Lessons Learned (or not) In California and Washington State from community acquired cases.
PART 11. March 5, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Gov. Andrew Cuomo… would require employers to pay workers and protect their jobs if they are quarantined because of the coronavirus.”
Part 12. March 10, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Tom Bossert, Donald Trump’s former homeland security advisor…(said) that due to the coronavirus outbreak, “We are 10 days from the hospitals getting creamed.”
Part 13.. March 14, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “If I’m buying real estate in New York, I’ll listen to the President….If I’m asking about infectious diseases, I’m going to listen to Tony Fauci,”
PART 14. March 17, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “ “Most physicians have never seen this level of angst and anxiety in their careers”…. One said “I am sort of a pariah in my family.”
PART 15. March 22, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…Crimson Contagion” and imagining an influenza pandemic, was simulated by the Trump administration….in a series of exercises that ran from last January to August.
PART 16. March 27, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. I am not a clinician or a medical ethicist but articles on Coronavirus patient triage started me Googling………to learn about FUTILE TREATMENT
PART 17. April 2, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Florida allows churches to continue holding services. Gun stores deemed “essential.” “New York’s private and public hospitals unite to manage patient load and share resources.
PART 18. April 9, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The federal government’s emergency stockpile of personal protective equipment (PPE) is depleted, and states will not be receiving any more shipments, administration staff told a House panel.
PART 19. April 13, 2020 CORONOAVIRUS. “…overlooked in the United States’ halting mobilization against the novel coronavirus: the personal aides, hospice attendants, nurses and occupational or physical therapists who deliver medical or support services to patients in their homes.”
POST 22. April 29, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. ..the “ACS released a list of 10 issues that should be addressed before a healthcare organization resumes elective surgeries[JM1] ….”
POST 23. May 3, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. … what Dr. Fauci really wants,…”is just to go to a baseball game. That will have to wait. The level of testing for the virus is not adequate enough to allow for such mass gatherings.’ (K)
POST 24. May 7, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie said: “there are going to be deaths no matter what”… but that people needed to get back to work.
POST 25. May 10, 2020, CORONAVIRUS. “It is scary to go to work,” said Kevin Hassett, a top economic adviser to the president. “I think that I’d be a lot safer if I was sitting at home than I would be going to the West Wing.”
POST 26. May 14, 2020. CORONAVIRUS, “Deep cleaning is not a scientific concept”….”there is no universal protocol for a “deep clean” to eradicate the coronavirus”
POST 27. May 19, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Hospital…executives…are taking pay cuts…to help offset the financial fallout from COVID-19.” As “front line” layoffs and furloughs accelerate…
POST 28. May 23, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. ““You’ve got to be kidding me,”..”How could the CDC make that mistake? This is a mess.” CDC conflates viral and antibody tests numbers.
PART 29. May 22, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The economy did not close down. It closed down for people who, frankly, had the luxury of staying home,” (Governor Cuomo). But not so for frontline workers!
POST 30. June 3,202. CORONAVIRUS. “The wave of mass protests across the United States will almost certainly set off new chains of infection for the novel coronavirus, experts say….
Post 32. June 16, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Could the Trump administration be pursuing herd immunity by “inaction”? “ If Fauci didn’t exist, we’d have to invent him.”
POST 34. June 26, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. CDC Director Redfield… “the number of coronavirus infections…could be 10 times higher than the confirmed case count — a total of more than 20 million.” As Florida, Texas and Arizona become eipicenters!
POST 35. June 29, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Pence: “We slowed the spread. We flattened the curve. We saved lives..” While Dr. Fauci “warned that outbreaks in the South and West could engulf the country…”
POST 36. July 2, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “There’s just a handful of interventions proven to curb the spread of the coronavirus. One of them is contact tracing, and “it’s not going well,” (Dr. Anthony Fauci)..
POST 37. June 8, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. When “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.”
POST 38. July 15, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Some Lessons Learned, or not. AdventHealth CEO Terry Shaw: I wouldn’t hesitate to go to Disney as a healthcare CEO — based on the fact that they’re working extremely hard to keep people safe,” (M)
POST 39. July, 23,2020. CORONAVIRUS. A Tale of Two Cities. Seattle becomes New York (rolls back reopening) while New York becomes Seattle (moves to partial phase 4 reopening)
POST 40. July 27, 2020. CORONAVIRUS.” One canon of medical practice is that you order a test only if you can act on the result. And with a turnaround time of a week or two, you cannot. What we have now is often not testing — it’s testing theater.”
POST 41. August 2, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Whenever a vaccine for the coronavirus becomes available, one thing is virtually certain: There won’t be enough to go around. That means there will be rationing.”
POST 44. September 1, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The CDC…modified its coronavirus testing guidelines…to exclude people who do not have symptoms of Covid-19.” (While Dr. Fauci was undergoing surgery.) A White House official said: “Everybody is going to catch this thing eventually..”
POST 45. September 9, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Trump on Fauci. ‘You inherit a lot of people, and you have some you love, some you don’t. I like him. I don’t agree with him that often but I like him.’
POST 46. September 17, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Bill Gates used to think of the US Food and Drug Administration as the world’s premier public-health authority. Not anymore. And he doesn’t trust the Centers for Disease Control and Protection either….”
POST 47. September 24, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Perry N. Halkitis, dean of the School of Public Health at Rutgers University…called New York City’s 35 percent rate for eliciting contacts “very bad.” “For each person, you should be in touch with 75 percent of their contacts within a day,” he said”
POST 48. October 1, 2020. “…you can actually control the outbreak if you do the nonpharmaceutical interventions (social distancing and masks). In the United States we haven’t done them. We haven’t adhered to them; we’ve played with them.” (A)
POST 49. October 4, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. RAPID RESPONSE. “The possibility that the president and his White House entourage were traveling superspreaders is a nightmare scenario for officials in Minnesota, Ohio, New Jersey and Pennsylvania…”
POST 50. October 6, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Monday October 5th will go down as one of the most fraught chapters in the history of American public Health (and national security).
POST 51. October 12, 2020. Rather than a hodge-podge of Emergency Use Authorizations, off-label “experimentation”, right-to-try arguments, and “politicized” compassionate use approvals maybe we need to designate REGIONAL EMERGING VIRUSES REFERRAL CENTERS (REVRCs).
POST 52. October 18, 2020. ZIKA/ EBOLA/ CANDIDA AURIS/ SEVERE FLU/ Tracking. “… if there was a severe flu pandemic, more than 33 million people could be killed across the world in 250 days… Boy, do we not have our act together.” —”- Bill Gates. July 1, 2018
POST 54. October 22, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. POST 54A. New Jersey’s Coronavirus response, led by Governor Murphy and Commissioner of Health Persichilli started with accelerated A+ traditional, evidence-based Public Health practices, developed over years of experience with seasonal flu, swine flu, Zika, and Ebola.
POST 55. October 26, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. The Testing Conundrum: “ It’s thus very possible to be antigen negative but P.C.R. positive, while still harboring the virus in the body..”
POST 57. November 3, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Dr. Deborah Birx: the US is entering its “most deadly phase” yet, one that requires “much more aggressive action,”
POST 58. November 4, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…the president has largely shuttered the White House Coronavirus Task Force and doubled down on anti-science language…”
POST 59. November 5, 2020. Coronavirus. “The United States on Wednesday recorded over 100,000 new coronavirus cases in a single day for the first time since the pandemic began..
POST 61. November 7, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Joe Biden’s top priority entering the White House is fighting both the immediate coronavirus crisis and its complex long-term aftermath…” “Here are the key ways he plans to get US coronavirus cases under control.”
POST 62. November 8, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The United States reported its 10 millionth coronavirus case on Sunday, with the latest million added in just 10 days,…”
POST 63. November 9, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “New York City-based Mount Sinai Health System has opened a center to help patients recovering from COVID-19 and to study the long-term impact of the disease….”
POST 64. November 10, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “It works! Scientists have greeted with cautious optimism a press release declaring positive interim results from a coronavirus vaccine phase III trial — the first to report on the final round of human testing.”
POST 65. November 11, 2020. CORONAVIRUS, “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention took a stronger stance in favor of masks on Tuesday, emphasizing that they protect the people wearing them, rather than just those around them…
POST 66. November.12, 2020. CORONAVIRUS.”… as the country enters what may be the most intense stage of the pandemic yet, the Trump administration remains largely disengaged.”… “President-elect Biden has formed a special transition team dedicated to coordinating the coronavirus response across the government…”
POST 67. November 13, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “When all other options are exhausted, the CDC website says, workers who are suspected or confirmed to have COVID-19 (and “who are well enough to work”) can care for patients who are not severely immunocompromised — first for those who are also confirmed to have COVID-19, then those with suspected cases.”
POST 68. November 14, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. The CDC “now is hewing more closely to scientific evidence, often contradicting the positions of the Trump administration.”..” “A passenger aboard the first cruise ship to set sail in the Caribbean since the start of the pandemic has tested positive for coronavirus..”
POST 69. November 15, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Colorado Gov. Jared Polis will issue a new executive order outlining steps hospitals will need to take to ready themselves for a surge in COVID-19 hospitalizations and directing the hospitals to finalize plans for converting beds into ICU beds, adding staffing and scaling back on or eliminating elective procedures….
POST 70. November 16, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “White House coronavirus task force member Dr. Atlas criticized Michigan’s new Covid-19 restrictions..urging people to “rise up” against the new public health measures.
POST 71. November 17, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. ”Hospitals overrun as U.S. reports 1 million new coronavirus cases in a week.” “But in Florida, where the number of coronavirus infections remains the third-highest in the nation, bars and schools remain open and restaurants continue to operate at full capacity.”
POST 72. November 18, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The Health and Human Services Department will not work with President-elect Joe Biden’s (PANDEMIC) team until the General Services Administration makes a determination that he won the election,….”
POST 73. November 19, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…officials at the CDC…urged Americans to avoid travel for Thanksgiving and to celebrate only with members of their immediate households…” When will I trust a vaccine? to the last question I always answer: When I see Tony Fauci take one….”
POST 74. November 20, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Pfizer…submitted to the FDA for emergency use authorization for their coronavirus vaccine candidate. —FDA issued an EUA for the drug baricitinib, in combination with remdesivir, as WHO says remdesivir doesn’t do much of anything.
POST 75. November 21, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The president and CEO of one of the nation’s largest non-profit health systems says he won’t be wearing a mask at work because he’s recovered from COVID-19, and doing so would only be a “symbolic gesture” because he considers himself immune from the virus….
POST 76. November 23, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” Ventilators..”just keep people alive while the people caring for them can figure out what’s wrong and fix the problem. And at the moment, we just don’t have enough of those people.”
POST 77. November 26, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Pope Francis: “When I got really sick at the age of 21, I had my first experience of limit, of pain and loneliness.”.. “….Aug. 13, 1957. I got taken to a hospital…”….” I remember especially two nurses from this time.”…” They fought for me to the end, until my eventual recovery.”
POST 78. November 27, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Kelby Krabbenhoft is no longer president and CEO of Sioux Falls, S.D.-based Sanford Health.” “…for not wearing a face covering… “ because “He considered himself immune from the virus.”
POST 79. November 28, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Mayo Clinic. “”Our surge plan expands into the garage…”..””Not where I’d want to put my grandfather or my grandmother,” … though it “may have to happen.”
POST 81. December 1, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Dr. Atlas, … who espoused controversial theories and rankled government scientists while advising President Trump on the coronavirus pandemic, resigned…”
POST 82. December 3, 2020. CORONAVIRIUS. The NBA jumped to the front of the line for Coronavirus testing….while front line nurses often are still waiting. Who will similarly “hijack” the vaccine?
POST 83. December 4, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “California Gov. Gavin Newsom says he will impose a new, regional stay-at-home order for areas where capacity at intensive care units falls below 15%.”… East Tennessee –“This is the first time the health care capability benchmark has been in the red..”
POST 84. December 6, 2020. CPRONAVIRUS. “ More than 100,000 Americans are in the hospital with COVID-19…” “We’re seeing C.D.C. …awaken from (its) politics-induced coma…”…Dr. Fauci “to be a chief medical adviser in Biden’s incoming administration..”.. “Trump administration leaves states to grapple with how to distribute scarce vaccines..”
POST 85. December 7, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…Florida, Gov. DeSantis’ administration engaged in a pattern of spin and concealment that misled the public on the gravest health threat the state has ever faced..”.. “NY Gov. Cuomo said…the state will implement a barrage of new emergency actions..”… Rhode Island and Massachusetts open field hospitals… “Biden Names Health Team to Fight Pandemic”
POST 86. December 9, 2020. If this analysis seems a bit incomprehensible it is because “free Coronavirus test” is often an oxymoron! with charges ranging from as little as $23 to as much as $2,315… Laws (like for free Coronavirus tests) are Like Sausages. Better Not to See Them Being Made. (Please allow about 20 seconds for the text to download. Thanx!)
POST 87. December 10, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…Rudolph W. Giuliani, the latest member of President Trump’s inner circle to contract Covid-19, has acknowledged that he received at least two of the same drugs the president received. He even conceded that his “celebrity” status had given him access to care that others did not have.”
POST 88. December 11, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “As COVID-19 cases surge, the federal government is releasing data about hospital capacity at facilities around the country….”The new data paints the picture of how a specific hospital is experiencing the pandemic,”…
PART 89. December 12, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. THE VACCINE!!! “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” Winston Churchill
POST 90. December 14, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…the first doses of a Covid-19 vaccine have been given to the American public..”…” Each person who receives a vaccine needs two doses, and it’s up to states to allocate their share of vaccines.”
POST 91. December 15, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “UPMC will first give (vaccination) priority to those in critical jobs. That includes a range of people working in critical units, from workers cleaning the emergency room and registering patients to doctors and nurses.. “Finally, if needed, UPMC will use a lottery to select who will be scheduled first.”
POST 92. December 17, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “..each state — and each hospital system — has come up with its own (vaccination) plan and priorities. The result has been a sometimes confusing constellation of rules and groupings that has left health care workers wondering where they stand.” (Trump appointee July 4th email “…we need to establish herd, and it only comes about allowing the non-high risk groups expose themselves to the virus. PERIOD,”)
POST 93. December 19, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. On NPR Congresswoman Shalala (D-Florida) said she wouldn’t jump the vaccination line in Miami; then added she would get vaccinated in Washington this week. This, even though Congress has failed to pass “essential” Coronavirus legislation. So who are our “essential” workers?
POST 94. December 21, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “A doctor at an L.A. County public hospital said the number of COVID-19 patients is “increasing exponentially, without an end in sight.”.. “I haven’t done ICU medicine since I was a resident — you don’t want me adjusting your ventilator,” he said. “That’s the challenge, actually — it isn’t so much space, it’s staff…”
POST 96. December 26, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Achieving herd immunity against the coronavirus could require as much as 90 percent of the population to be vaccinated, Anthony Fauci…”…”..he hesitated to state a number as high as 90% weeks ago because many Americans still seemed skeptical about vaccine….”
POST 97. December 27, 2020. “A new variant of the coronavirus that has been spreading through the UK and other countries has not yet been detected in the United States..”.. . But if new-wave medicines like antivirals and antibody therapy contributed to the development of viral variants, it will be “a reminder for all the medical community that we need to use these treatment options carefully.”
POST 99. December 29, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “ICUs are being overwhelmed across many parts of California. Statewide aggregate ICU availability has been at 0% since Christmas Eve…. a surge on top of a surge on top of a surge.”… “hospitals are getting close to the point where they would begin putting COVID-positive patients under the care of COVID-positive staff who are asymptomatic.”
POST 100. December 29, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Front line hospital workers – in the ER, ICUs, EMS, acute medical care, behavioral health – are amongst the most courageous, heroic and dedicated colleagues you will ever meet.
POST 101. December 30, 2020.CORONAVIRUS. Is there a point where the increasing Coronavirus trajectory so far exceeds the slow growth of the vaccination rate that reaching herd immunity through vaccinations becomes less likely?
POST 102. January 2, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “We’ve taken the people with the least amount of resources and capacity and asked them to do the hardest part of the vaccination — which is actually getting the vaccines administered into people’s arms,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health. “Ultimately, the buck seems to stop with no one,”…
POST 103. January 4, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. Dr. Fauci said “that the United States would not follow Britain’s lead in front-loading first vaccine injections, potentially delaying the administration of second doses…Dr. Moore – ”British officials “seem to have abandoned science completely now and are just trying to guess their way out of a mess.”
POST 104. January 6, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Paramedics in Southern California are being told to conserve oxygen and not to bring patients to the hospital who have little chance of survival…”
POST 105. January 8, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. POST 105. January 8, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Facing a shortage of vaccinators, the Association of Immunization Managers… recommends relaxing regulation or adjusting licensing requirements. At least two states, Massachusetts and New York, have changed their laws in recent weeks to expand those who are eligible to give shots.”
POST 106. January 9, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. The riots at the Capitol could have been a superspreader event. “From what I saw… you had a large congregation of individuals who were in close contact for an extended period of time and almost universally unmasked…. many coming and going on buses as well, also unmasked, and hanging out in hotel lobbies.”
POST 107. January 8, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Our job is to make sure the vaccine isn’t politicized the way masks were politicized,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said after getting her vaccine. South Carolina Rep.-elect Nancy Mace, a Republican, wrote that “Congress shouldn’t be putting themselves first in line for the COVID-19 vaccination when the average American can’t get it.”
POST 108. January 9, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. (vaccination)”Line-cutters will be named and shamed. It’s inevitable, as will be the congressional hearings and front-page investigative stories ferreting out who saved their own skin at the expense of others.”
POST 109.January 9, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “President-elect Joe Biden will aim to release nearly every available dose of the coronavirus vaccine when he takes office, a break with the Trump administration’s strategy of holding back half of US vaccine production to ensure second doses are available.
POST 110. January 13, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. ““The (federal) government is changing the way it allocates Covid vaccine doses, now basing it on how quickly states can administer shots and the size of their elderly population.”… “New York State sent a letter to hospitals saying if they don’t use their vaccine allocations by the end of this week, they won’t receive any further allocations.”
POST 111. January 14, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Visitors from Toronto to New York to Buenos Aires have long flocked to Florida for sun, surf and shopping. Now they are coming for the Covid-19 vaccine….
POST 112. January 14, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. CHINA – “Eleven million people are under lockdown in Hebei province after a new cluster of coronavirus infections.
PART 113. January 17, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. The Next President Actually Has a Covid Plan… New York City and other places in the state expect to exhaust their supply of doses as early as next week… Charles Barkley said during the “NBA on TNT” broadcast that pro athletes should get the first round of the vaccine…..
POST 114. January 18, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “When government programs that have been unattended, underfunded and bogged down by red tape suddenly have to meet a huge demand in a crisis, they can’t cope and people suffer….”
POST 115. January 21, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. A year ago today an unnumbered POST was headlined “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday confirmed the first U.S. case of a deadly new coronavirus that has killed six people in China.” The CORONAVIRUS CONTENT TRACKING PROJECT started with HISTORIOGRAPHY and over time moved to LESSONS LEARNED, RAPID RESPONSE, and THE VACCINATION PROGRAM. Now 115 POSTS later – the BIDEN CORONAVIRUS PLAN.
POST 116. January 22, 2021. President Biden – “We’re entering what may be the toughest and deadliest period of the virus. We must set aside politics and finally face this pandemic as one nation.”
POST 117. January 23, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. 1.Dr. Fauci:“The idea that you can get up here….”and.. let the science speak”… “It is somewhat of a liberating feeling.” 2.updated CDC guidance:”.. providers could give the second dose up to six weeks after the first dose..” 3.Dr. Fauci: people would be “taking a chance” if they follow the CDC’s updated guidance.
POST 118. January 24, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Unfortunately, we’ve let this virus spread extensively and are launching the vaccination campaign at the height of the threat,” Dr. Meyers said. “The more the virus spreads before the vaccine reaches people, the fewer deaths we can prevent with the vaccine.”
POST 119. January 27, 2010. CORONAVIRUS. Amazon is offering its help to President Joe Biden with the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines. Washington’s governor, Jay Inslee, included the help of companies like Starbucks, Costco and Microsoft in a plan to vaccinate 45,000 residents a day.
POST 120. January 28, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The fact that four vaccines backed by the federal government seem to be less effective against the (South African) B.1.351 variant has unsettled federal officials and vaccine experts alike. Facing this uncertainty, many researchers said it was imperative to get as many people vaccinated as possible — quickly. Lowering the rate of infection could thwart the contagious variants while they are still rare, and prevent other viruses from gaining new mutations that could cause more trouble.”
POST 121. January 30, 2021. CORONVIRUS. Will our communities become stratified by which vaccine is distributed? 95%ters v. 72%ters? Will the easier distribution of the J&J vaccine drive its inequitable distribution to” hard-hit, marginalized, and medically underserved communities.” (thanx! to XJ/LA)
POST 123. February 4, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Nursing homes across the country are facing the same struggle, as workers have been more reluctant than residents to be vaccinated…
POST 124. February 5, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. Dr. Osterholm ” …it may be time to..go with a ‘first-dose only’ approach, so more people over the age of 65 can have at least some protection right away. He said that would require delaying second doses until this summer.” Dr.Fauci “warned against this practice, and cautioned people about “the danger” that could come with focusing only on the first dose.”
POST 125. June 9, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “States are rolling back Covid-19 restrictions as new cases trend down from record highs across the country. But experts warn it might be too much too soon as variants pose an increased risk and the pandemic… is far from over.”
POST 126. February 11, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “There will be more coronavirus outbreaks in the future. Bats and other mammals are rife with strains and species of this abundant family of viruses. Some of these pathogens will inevitably spill over the species barrier and cause new pandemics. It’s only a matter of time.” (A)
POST 127. February 12, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “… Trump only agreed to be hospitalized when aides told him that he could walk to Marine One or he could wait until his case progressed and he would be carried out.”
POST 128. February 14, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new research on Wednesday that found wearing a cloth mask over a surgical mask offers more protection against the coronavirus, as does tying knots on the ear loops of surgical masks…
POST 129. February 15, 2021, CORONAVIRUS. “ “The CDC released its much-anticipated, updated guidance to help school leaders decide how to safely bring students back into classrooms, or keep them there.”…” For politicians, parents and school leaders looking for a clear green light to reopen schools, this is not it.”
POST 130. February 16, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “A second person who had contracted the Ebola virus died this week in the Democratic Republic of Congo, marking another outbreak just three months after the nation outlasted the virus’s second-worst outbreak in history…”
POST 131. February 17, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “It really is right now – a race between how quickly new variants, particularly the U.K. variant, can spread in the United States and how quickly we can get people vaccinated”
POST 132. February 20, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “In Texas, where over 2.5 million people are still without power, the state health department said this week’s vaccine shipments wouldn’t arrive until Wednesday at the earliest.”
POST 133. February 23, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Going off your meds is a surefire way to aggravate your doctor. What if a whole country did it?” The United Kingdom has veered into uncharted territory by changing tack and introducing a revised COVID-19 vaccination protocol, one that involves distributing the second dose at 12 weeks, rather than the prescribed 21 days.”
POST 134. February 24, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. The first tranche of the J&J (single dose) vaccine must go to K-12 teachers, so schools can open safely in the first 100 days of the Biden Administration. The federal government…”can set up its own vaccination centers in regions with eligible populations it’s trying to target.” We owe our front-line teachers nothing less!
POST 135. February 27, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “As Chief Executive Officers of New York’s major health care systems, we would like to provide facts to clear up confusion in the public and the media regarding decisions to discharge patients to nursing homes during New York’s spring coronavirus surge.”
POST 136. March 2, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. ““The governors of Texas and Mississippi both announced on Tuesday they would be lifting their states’ mask mandates and rolling back many of their Covid-19 health mandates..”…while “The US could experience a “fourth surge” of coronavirus before the majority of the country is vaccinated.”
POST 137. March 4, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The clamor for hard-to-get Covid-19 vaccines has created armies of anxious Americans who have resorted to hunting for leftovers on the fringes of the country’s patchwork vaccination system. They haunt pharmacies at the end of the day in search of an extra, expiring dose. They drive from clinic to clinic hoping that someone was a no-show to their appointment. They cold-call pharmacies like eager telemarketers: Any extras today? Maybe tomorrow? Some pharmacists have even given them a nickname: vaccine lurkers.” (H)
POST 138. March 6, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “New cases are decreasing in the third wave because we are past the holidays, not because of vaccinations. It is a common misconception that the decrease we are seeing in new cases, hospitalizations, and deaths in the U.S. is due to vaccinations. The two aren’t related; at least yet.”
POST 139. March 8, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. CDC Issues First Set of Guidelines on How Fully Vaccinated People Can Visit Safely with Others…” In practice, that means fully vaccinated grandparents may visit unvaccinated healthy adult children and healthy grandchildren of the same household without masks or physical distancing.” (C)
POST 140. March 9, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “In West Virginia, they are bracing for the second wave….. Not coronavirus but opioid overdoses, with one scourge driving a resurgence of the other.
POST 141. March 11, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. Today is the first anniversary of the WHO declaration that the novel coronavirus was a Public Health Emergency of International Concern… “To truly prepare itself against the next pandemic, the U.S. has to reimagine what preparedness looks like.”
POST 142. March 15, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Candida auris is a superbug, a pathogen that can evade drugs made to kill it—and early signs suggest the COVID-19 pandemic may be propelling infections of the highly dangerous yeast. That’s because C. auris is particularly prominent in hospital settings, which have been flooded with people this year due to the coronavirus.”
POST 143. March 17, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The Trump administration sought to suppress Covid-19 testing in the United States last year by softening guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on who needed to be tested, a House panel said Monday.”
POST 144. March 20, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. ““The vaccine hesitancy we are seeing isn’t just about Covid vaccines,”… “It is a general reflection of Americans’ lack of trust in science, the pharmaceutical industry, and large health care institutions. We need a full court press on science and vaccine education right now to prevent more aggressive Covid-19 variants from developing and taking hold.”
POST 145. March 25, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Efforts to disseminate Covid-19 vaccines as widely as possible are hitting an unexpected obstacle: health-care workers who decline the shots.
POST 146. March 30, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. Dr. Osterholm told Becker’s: “This is the perfect storm,”…”Here is Europe locking down and having problems containing B.1.1.7, even with vaccinations and previous infection histories. Here we are opening up as wide as we can. We are literally just walking into the mouth of the virus saying, ‘Don’t worry.’” (M)
POST 147. April 5, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The pandemic helped cement the shift to “a philosophy of really focusing on the role of the physician in reasoning through ambiguous and unknown problems as the focus of education, rather than teaching students that the role of physician was to memorize a body of knowledge that was already in existence and good enough for what usually happens.”
POST 148. April 7, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. While the Biden administration accelerates vaccinations to ward off numerous variants and as more young people are being hospitalized, states, even with increasing case rates are on paths to fully reopen. Politics v. public health!
POST 149. April 10, 2021. CORONAVIRIUS. “From Michigan to Massachusetts, COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations are on the rise again. Deaths will soon follow. “ ”.. the Biden administration is facing renewed calls to delay second vaccine doses and blanket more of the U.S. population with an initial shot.”
POST 150. April 10, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The use of so-called COVID-19 “vaccine passports” is quickly becoming a divisive issue across the US – with several states, including New York, embracing the idea, while others have already moved to ban them.”
POST 151. April 14, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. the J&J vaccination pause. “ Federal officials are concerned that doctors may not be trained to spot or treat the rare disorder if recipients of the vaccine develop symptoms of it…” “…a standard treatment for blood clots — use of an anticoagulant drug — could be dangerous or even fatal in such cases…”
POST 152. April 15, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s director said Saturday authorities are considering mixing COVID-19 vaccines because the country’s domestically made doses “don’t have very high protection rates,”
POST 153. April 18, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “At least 35 hospitals across Michigan were listed Thursday as nearing capacity and three were at full capacity for COVID-19 patients..”.. We can manufacture beds. We can open up beds. We can create entire wings of the hospital if we have to, but if we don’t have staff for those beds, we’ve got nothing.”..
POST 154. April 19, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Breakthrough infections, which occur when fully vaccinated people are infected by the pathogen that their shots were designed to protect against, are an entirely expected part of any vaccination process.” “Pfizer’s chief executive said that a third dose of the company’s Covid-19 vaccine was “likely” to be needed within a year of the initial two-dose inoculation — followed by annual vaccinations.”
“Why it matters: The remarks by the Gao Fu at a news conference in the southwestern city of Chengdumark mark the first time a Chinese health official has spoken publicly about the low efficacy of vaccines made in China.
China has sent millions of doses of its coronavirus vaccine around the world.
Driving the news: Gao said officials were looking at two options designed “to solve the problem that the efficacy of … existing vaccines is not high,” according to the South China Morning Post.
One is mixing vaccines, known as “sequential immunization,” and the other is to “adjust the dosage, the interval between doses or increase the number of doses,” the SCMP reports…
The big picture: China’s government has only approved locally made vaccines for use against the virus.
Sinopharm announced just before its coronavirus vaccine was approved for use late last year that its vaccine was 79.3% effective, though experts said important data was missing.
China’s health regulator approved Sinovac’s vaccine last February. Several phase 3 trials in Brazil, Turkey and Indonesia have shown efficacy rates of 50.38% to 91.25%, Axios’ Shawna Chen notes.” (A)
“Chinese vaccines “don’t have very high protection rates,” said the director of the China Centers for Disease Control, Gao Fu, at a conference Saturday in the southwestern city of Chengdu.
Beijing has distributed hundreds of millions of doses abroad while trying to promote doubt about the effectiveness of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine made using the previously experimental messenger RNA, or mRNA, process.
“It’s now under formal consideration whether we should use different vaccines from different technical lines for the immunization process,” Gao said…
Experts say mixing vaccines, or sequential immunization, might boost effectiveness. Researchers in Britain are studying a possible combination of Pfizer-BioNTech and the traditional AstraZeneca vaccine.” (B)
“Everyone should consider the benefits mRNA vaccines can bring for humanity,” Gao said. “We must follow it carefully and not ignore it just because we already have several types of vaccines already.”
Gao previously questioned the safety of mRNA vaccines. He was quoted by the official Xinhua News Agency as saying in December he couldn’t rule out negative side effects because they were being used for the first time on healthy people, saying “there is a safety concern.”
Chinese state media and popular health and science blogs also questioned the safety and effectiveness of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, though large-scale trials and the rollout of the vaccines in the U.S. have established its safety.
China currently has five vaccines in use in its mass immunization campaign, three inactivated-virus vaccines from Sinovac and Sinopharm, a one-shot vaccine from CanSino, and the last from Gao’s team in partnership with Anhui Zhifei Longcom.
The effectiveness of the vaccines range from just over 50% to 79%, based on what the companies have said.
The shot from Gao’s team, was given emergency use approval a month ago, and has not publicly disclosed data yet about its efficacy.
Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccines, which are primarily being used in developed countries, have both been shown to be about 95% in protecting against COVID-19 in studies…
Vaccines made by Sinovac, a private company, and Sinopharm, a state-owned firm, have made up the majority of Chinese vaccines distributed to several dozen countries including Mexico, Turkey, Indonesia, Hungary, Brazil and Turkey.
However, the companies have not publicly published peer-reviewed data on the final stage clinical trial research and been criticized for a lack of transparency.
Sinovac’s vaccine, for example, raised concerns when it was found to have different efficacy rates from each of the trials it conducted in different countries, ranging from around 50% to over 83%.
A Sinovac spokesman, Liu Peicheng, acknowledged varying levels of effectiveness have been found but said that can be due to the age of people in a study, the strain of virus and other factors.
Beijing has yet to approve any foreign vaccines for use in mainland China.
The Sinovac spokesman, Liu, said studies find protection “may be better” if time between vaccinations is longer than the current 14 days but gave no indication that might be made standard practice.” (C)
“At the time of writing, no phase III trial data for any of the Chinese vaccine candidates have been published in a peer reviewed journal. CanSinoBIO has said it intends to but has given no timeframe…
Which of China’s vaccines have been approved outside of China?
Sinopharm’s first vaccine has received the most emergency use approvals so far, nearly 30, including in Bahrain, Guyana, Hungary, Serbia, and the UAE. Hungary was the first EU country to approve use of a Chinese vaccine, with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán among those who have received it.
Several countries have approved Sinovac’s CoronaVac jab for emergency use, including Brazil, Chile (where the vaccine has been trialled), Indonesia, Laos, Mexico, and Turkey.
Mexico and Pakistan have given emergency use approval to the CanSinoBIO vaccine.
The Anhui Zhifei Longcom vaccine has received approval for use in Uzbekistan.
Which cuntries have received Chinese vaccines?
Chinese firms have appeared keen to supply countries with plenty of doses of their vaccines, beyond those merely required to carry out clinical trials. For example, 223 million doses of Sinopharm jabs have already been distributed to various countries around the world. In some countries, the value of deals remains undisclosed but the New York Times reported that Hungary paid $36 per dose for the Sinopharm jab.21 In Senegal, a lower price was achieved22—just $19 per dose in a deal supplying 200 000 Sinopharm doses to the African country.” (D)
“As potentially more dangerous coronavirus variants spread worldwide, scientists and clinicians have raced to discover how well the available COVID-19 vaccines protect against the mutant strains. Preliminary results from a large study of health care workers now suggest one dose of CoronaVac, a vaccine developed by a Chinese company, is still about 50% effective against symptomatic COVID-19 in a Brazilian city where more than three-fourths of new cases are caused by the highly transmissible variant known as P.1.
That real-world protection is about the same level clinical trials saw with two doses of CoronaVac against the standard, or “wild type,” pandemic coronavirus in the country, suggesting the variant’s mutations have not increased SARS-CoV-2’s ability to evade vaccine-evoked immune responses” (E)
“In an interview on Sunday with the Communist Party-run Global Times newspaper, Mr. Gao said his earlier comments had been misunderstood, and that discussion of how to improve the effectiveness of vaccines should be a universal question.
“The protection rates of all vaccines in the world are sometimes high, and sometimes low,” he said. “How to improve their efficacy is a question that needs to be considered by scientists around the world.”
Officials in Brazil said in January that the efficacy rate for the CoronaVac vaccine from the Beijing-based company Sinovac was just over 50 percent, which is the threshold that the World Health Organization has said would make a vaccine effective for general use. By comparison, Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech were found to be 90 percent effective in real-world conditions, researchers said last month.
Last month, the distributor in the United Arab Emirates of vaccines from China’s Sinopharm said it was offering a third dose in addition to the standard two-dose regimen for a “very small number” of people who were “not really responsive” to the vaccine.” (F)
“Beijing has yet to approve any foreign vaccines for use in China, where the coronavirus emerged in late 2019.
China has administered about 161m doses since vaccinations began last year – most people will require two shots – and aims to fully inoculate 40% of its 1.4 billion population by June.
Last month, authorities in Beijing resumed issuing visa processing for foreigners from dozens of countries, but only if they have been inoculated against Covid-19 with a Chinese-made vaccine.
The move raised questions about the motivations behind the demand, given China’s vaccines are not approved in many of the countries to which it has opened travel and that it will not accept foreign vaccines made elsewhere, including those approved by the World Health Organization.
By the middle of last month, China had approved five vaccines for either general or emergency use, including three that are also being distributed to other countries either through trade or aid.
The push to supply internationally has been labelled a “vaccine diplomacy” campaign to boost China’s place as a global health contributor, with take-up mostly in Asia, Africa and South America.” (G)
“Scientists say mixed results are not surprising for a vaccine with lower efficacy that has been tested in relatively small numbers of people. Mixed results have also been reported from trials of the COVID-19 vaccine developed by the University of Oxford, UK, and drug firm AstraZeneca. “If you’ve got a vaccine with really high efficacy, you don’t need a whole lot of numbers to get a clear picture. But when it’s complicated, then you really need bigger numbers to get a better handle on what’s going on,” says Bastian…
The roll out of CoronaVac, which uses an inactivated version of SARS-CoV-2 to induce an immune response1, could see more widespread use in other nations, says Adrian Esterman, a biostatistician at University of South Australia in Adelaide. Compared with the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine, which must be stored at −70 ºC, CoronaVac is stable at fridge temperatures and easier to distribute.
On the basis of the data reported so far, the vaccine seems safe, with only a few people experiencing mild symptoms such as headache.
A World Health Organization (WHO) team in China is reviewing manufacturing practices for Sinovac’s vaccine, and those produced by Chinese state-owned Sinopharm. If the WHO lists the vaccines for emergency use, that will accelerate their global distribution, says Bastian.” (H)
“China’s vaccine rollout has gotten off to a slow start. Now, as Beijing tries to boost vaccination rates across the country, citizens are having doubts about the safety and efficacy of the available inoculations.
As countries around the world try to combat the latest wave of coronavirus infections by expanding vaccine access, China is trying to boost its vaccination rate through a combination of rewards and punishments.
As of April 11, Beijing had administered 167.3 million doses of vaccine across the country but that’s still far from the goal of vaccinating 560 million people, or about 40% of the population, by the end of June.
Different cities and institutions have deployed different tactics to reach that goal. In some, citizens can get freebies for getting vaccinated, in others, teachers have asked parents to share whether they have been vaccinated, and in extreme cases, private companies have forced employees to get the jab or be fired…
Some Chinese citizens have cited concerns over safety and efficacy as grounds for refusing vaccination. On April 11, China’s leading disease control official said existing vaccines in China offered a low level of protection and that mixing different vaccines was one of the strategies being considered to boost their effectiveness…
While some Chinese citizens are loath to get vaccinated due to safety concerns, others say the relatively low efficacy of Chinese coronavirus vaccines is not really an issue. One thing that seems to have convinced many people to get the jab is the fact that large parts of the country haven’t reported any new cases in months.”…
China’s state-run Xinhua news agency reports that major vaccine manufacturers in the country have all increased manufacturing capacity and Gao Fu says China aims to vaccinate 70-80% of its citizens between the end of this year and the middle of next year.
But experts say that won’t help unless other countries vaccinate the majority of their population with effective vaccines, too.
“Otherwise, once the border is open, it’s like opening up a can of worms, people coming from the outside start to infect citizens and they have to start all over again,” said Wang.” (I)
“China’s locally developed COVID-19 vaccine candidate that uses messenger RNA (mRNA) technology could start late-stage clinical trial overseas as early as next month, official media said on Tuesday.
ARCoV, the China-developed mRNA vaccine candidate that is furthest along the clinical trial process, may get overseas approval to conduct Phase III clinical trial by as early as end-April, China National Radio said in an article on its website.
China has approved four locally developed coronavirus vaccines for general public use and a fifth for smaller-scale emergency use but none of them uses the mRNA platform. The country has administered more than 170 million vaccinations, the second-highest number of doses in the world after the United States.
The mRNA technology is used by rival shots developed by Pfizer Inc and its partner BioNTech, as well as by Moderna Inc. It contains instructions for human cells to produce proteins that mimic part of the coronavirus…
Ying said early stage trial data has shown that its vaccine is “fully comparable with two overseas mRNA vaccines,” without elaborating on the specific readings.” (J)
“As the coronavirus spread globally last year, New York-based Pfizer raced to partner with Germany’s BioNTech, an mRNA frontrunner that had hired Kariko as a senior vice president. Massachusetts-based Moderna, meanwhile, had $2.5 billion in funding from the U.S. government.
By contrast, several Chinese companies focused on older technologies that have proved far less potent…
Old-school Chinese-made Covid vaccines now in use from Sinovac Biotech Ltd. and China National Biotec Group Co. rely on particles from inactivated viruses and have protection rates much lower than the mRNA vaccines’ more than 90% effectiveness in preventing infections….
When Sinovac began working on a vaccine, it focused on a familiar method in order to develop a shot quickly, after efforts at exploring other alternatives didn’t yield promising results…
hile China has largely contained the spread of the coronavirus within its borders, more effective vaccinations and a wider take-up among its population would enable the country to reopen sooner, reducing the need for quarantines and lockdowns. China risks losing the edge gained by stamping out the virus if its inoculation drive is less effective than places where mRNA shots are the backbone of rollouts.
In Israel, where nearly 60% of the population has received the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, Covid cases, hospitalizations and deaths are plunging. As more adults get their shots in the U.S., which also relies largely on mRNA vaccines, President Joe Biden has predicted Americans will be celebrating July 4th with backyard barbecues once again.
China isn’t the only country that missed the boat with mRNA. While companies in Japan, India and Australia are significant players in fighting diseases like flu and polio, no company in the Asia-Pacific region now makes mRNA shots. “Basically, mRNA was put in the ‘too-hard’ basket for many years,” said Nigel McMillan, Program Director for Infectious Diseases & Immunology at Griffith University in Southport, Australia. (K)
PART 1. January 21, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday confirmed the first U.S. case of a deadly new coronavirus that has killed six people in China.”
PART 2. January 29, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “If it’s not contained shortly, I think we are looking at a pandemic..”….. “With isolated cases of the dangerous new coronavirus cropping up in a number of states, public health officials say it is only a matter of time before the virus appears in New York City.”
PART3. February 3, 2020. “The Wuhan coronavirus spreading from China is now likely to become a pandemic that circles the globe…”..Trump appeared to downplay concerns about the flu-like virus …We’re gonna see what happens, but we did shut it down..” (D)
PART 4. February 9, 2020. Coronavirus. “A study published Friday in JAMA found that 41% of the first 138 patients diagnosed at one hospital in Wuhan, China, were presumed to be infected in that hospital.….
PART 5. February 12, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “In short, shoe-leather public health and basic medical care—not miracle drugs—are generally what stop outbreaks of emerging infections..”
POST 6. February 18, 2020. Coronovirus. “Amid assurances that the (ocean liner) Westerdam was disease free, hundreds of people disembarked in Cambodia…” “ One was later found to be infected”…. “Over 1,000… passengers were in…transit home”…. “This could be a turning point””
PART 7. February 20, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. With SARS preparedness underway in NJ LibertyHealth/ Jersey City Medical Center, where I was President, proposed that our 100 bed community hospital with all single-bedded rooms, be immediately transformed into an EMERGENCY SARS ISOLATION Hospital.
PART 8. February 24, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…every country’s top priority should be to protect its health care workers. This is partly to ensure that hospitals themselves do not become sites where the coronavirus is spread more than it is contained.”
PART 9. February 27, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Responding to a question about the likelihood of a U.S. outbreak, President Trump said, “I don’t think it’s inevitable…”It probably will. It possibly will,” he continued. “It could be at a very small level, or it could be at a larger level.”
Part 10. March 1, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Stop Surprise Medical Bills for Coronavirus care. (&) Lessons Learned (or not) In California and Washington State from community acquired cases.
PART 11. March 5, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Gov. Andrew Cuomo… would require employers to pay workers and protect their jobs if they are quarantined because of the coronavirus.”
Part 12. March 10, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Tom Bossert, Donald Trump’s former homeland security advisor…(said) that due to the coronavirus outbreak, “We are 10 days from the hospitals getting creamed.”
Part 13.. March 14, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “If I’m buying real estate in New York, I’ll listen to the President….If I’m asking about infectious diseases, I’m going to listen to Tony Fauci,”
PART 14. March 17, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “ “Most physicians have never seen this level of angst and anxiety in their careers”…. One said “I am sort of a pariah in my family.”
PART 15. March 22, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…Crimson Contagion” and imagining an influenza pandemic, was simulated by the Trump administration….in a series of exercises that ran from last January to August.
PART 16. March 27, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. I am not a clinician or a medical ethicist but articles on Coronavirus patient triage started me Googling………to learn about FUTILE TREATMENT
PART 17. April 2, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Florida allows churches to continue holding services. Gun stores deemed “essential.” “New York’s private and public hospitals unite to manage patient load and share resources.
PART 18. April 9, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The federal government’s emergency stockpile of personal protective equipment (PPE) is depleted, and states will not be receiving any more shipments, administration staff told a House panel.
PART 19. April 13, 2020 CORONOAVIRUS. “…overlooked in the United States’ halting mobilization against the novel coronavirus: the personal aides, hospice attendants, nurses and occupational or physical therapists who deliver medical or support services to patients in their homes.”
POST 22. April 29, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. ..the “ACS released a list of 10 issues that should be addressed before a healthcare organization resumes elective surgeries[JM1] ….”
POST 23. May 3, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. … what Dr. Fauci really wants,…”is just to go to a baseball game. That will have to wait. The level of testing for the virus is not adequate enough to allow for such mass gatherings.’ (K)
POST 24. May 7, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie said: “there are going to be deaths no matter what”… but that people needed to get back to work.
POST 25. May 10, 2020, CORONAVIRUS. “It is scary to go to work,” said Kevin Hassett, a top economic adviser to the president. “I think that I’d be a lot safer if I was sitting at home than I would be going to the West Wing.”
POST 26. May 14, 2020. CORONAVIRUS, “Deep cleaning is not a scientific concept”….”there is no universal protocol for a “deep clean” to eradicate the coronavirus”
POST 27. May 19, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Hospital…executives…are taking pay cuts…to help offset the financial fallout from COVID-19.” As “front line” layoffs and furloughs accelerate…
POST 28. May 23, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. ““You’ve got to be kidding me,”..”How could the CDC make that mistake? This is a mess.” CDC conflates viral and antibody tests numbers.
PART 29. May 22, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The economy did not close down. It closed down for people who, frankly, had the luxury of staying home,” (Governor Cuomo). But not so for frontline workers!
POST 30. June 3,202. CORONAVIRUS. “The wave of mass protests across the United States will almost certainly set off new chains of infection for the novel coronavirus, experts say….
Post 32. June 16, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Could the Trump administration be pursuing herd immunity by “inaction”? “ If Fauci didn’t exist, we’d have to invent him.”
POST 34. June 26, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. CDC Director Redfield… “the number of coronavirus infections…could be 10 times higher than the confirmed case count — a total of more than 20 million.” As Florida, Texas and Arizona become eipicenters!
POST 35. June 29, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Pence: “We slowed the spread. We flattened the curve. We saved lives..” While Dr. Fauci “warned that outbreaks in the South and West could engulf the country…”
POST 36. July 2, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “There’s just a handful of interventions proven to curb the spread of the coronavirus. One of them is contact tracing, and “it’s not going well,” (Dr. Anthony Fauci)..
POST 37. June 8, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. When “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.”
POST 38. July 15, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Some Lessons Learned, or not. AdventHealth CEO Terry Shaw: I wouldn’t hesitate to go to Disney as a healthcare CEO — based on the fact that they’re working extremely hard to keep people safe,” (M)
POST 39. July, 23,2020. CORONAVIRUS. A Tale of Two Cities. Seattle becomes New York (rolls back reopening) while New York becomes Seattle (moves to partial phase 4 reopening)
POST 40. July 27, 2020. CORONAVIRUS.” One canon of medical practice is that you order a test only if you can act on the result. And with a turnaround time of a week or two, you cannot. What we have now is often not testing — it’s testing theater.”
POST 41. August 2, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Whenever a vaccine for the coronavirus becomes available, one thing is virtually certain: There won’t be enough to go around. That means there will be rationing.”
POST 44. September 1, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The CDC…modified its coronavirus testing guidelines…to exclude people who do not have symptoms of Covid-19.” (While Dr. Fauci was undergoing surgery.) A White House official said: “Everybody is going to catch this thing eventually..”
POST 45. September 9, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Trump on Fauci. ‘You inherit a lot of people, and you have some you love, some you don’t. I like him. I don’t agree with him that often but I like him.’
POST 46. September 17, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Bill Gates used to think of the US Food and Drug Administration as the world’s premier public-health authority. Not anymore. And he doesn’t trust the Centers for Disease Control and Protection either….”
POST 47. September 24, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Perry N. Halkitis, dean of the School of Public Health at Rutgers University…called New York City’s 35 percent rate for eliciting contacts “very bad.” “For each person, you should be in touch with 75 percent of their contacts within a day,” he said”
POST 48. October 1, 2020. “…you can actually control the outbreak if you do the nonpharmaceutical interventions (social distancing and masks). In the United States we haven’t done them. We haven’t adhered to them; we’ve played with them.” (A)
POST 49. October 4, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. RAPID RESPONSE. “The possibility that the president and his White House entourage were traveling superspreaders is a nightmare scenario for officials in Minnesota, Ohio, New Jersey and Pennsylvania…”
POST 50. October 6, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Monday October 5th will go down as one of the most fraught chapters in the history of American public Health (and national security).
POST 51. October 12, 2020. Rather than a hodge-podge of Emergency Use Authorizations, off-label “experimentation”, right-to-try arguments, and “politicized” compassionate use approvals maybe we need to designate REGIONAL EMERGING VIRUSES REFERRAL CENTERS (REVRCs).
POST 52. October 18, 2020. ZIKA/ EBOLA/ CANDIDA AURIS/ SEVERE FLU/ Tracking. “… if there was a severe flu pandemic, more than 33 million people could be killed across the world in 250 days… Boy, do we not have our act together.” —”- Bill Gates. July 1, 2018
POST 54. October 22, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. POST 54A. New Jersey’s Coronavirus response, led by Governor Murphy and Commissioner of Health Persichilli started with accelerated A+ traditional, evidence-based Public Health practices, developed over years of experience with seasonal flu, swine flu, Zika, and Ebola.
POST 55. October 26, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. The Testing Conundrum: “ It’s thus very possible to be antigen negative but P.C.R. positive, while still harboring the virus in the body..”
POST 57. November 3, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Dr. Deborah Birx: the US is entering its “most deadly phase” yet, one that requires “much more aggressive action,”
POST 58. November 4, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…the president has largely shuttered the White House Coronavirus Task Force and doubled down on anti-science language…”
POST 59. November 5, 2020. Coronavirus. “The United States on Wednesday recorded over 100,000 new coronavirus cases in a single day for the first time since the pandemic began..
POST 61. November 7, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Joe Biden’s top priority entering the White House is fighting both the immediate coronavirus crisis and its complex long-term aftermath…” “Here are the key ways he plans to get US coronavirus cases under control.”
POST 62. November 8, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The United States reported its 10 millionth coronavirus case on Sunday, with the latest million added in just 10 days,…”
POST 63. November 9, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “New York City-based Mount Sinai Health System has opened a center to help patients recovering from COVID-19 and to study the long-term impact of the disease….”
POST 64. November 10, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “It works! Scientists have greeted with cautious optimism a press release declaring positive interim results from a coronavirus vaccine phase III trial — the first to report on the final round of human testing.”
POST 65. November 11, 2020. CORONAVIRUS, “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention took a stronger stance in favor of masks on Tuesday, emphasizing that they protect the people wearing them, rather than just those around them…
POST 66. November.12, 2020. CORONAVIRUS.”… as the country enters what may be the most intense stage of the pandemic yet, the Trump administration remains largely disengaged.”… “President-elect Biden has formed a special transition team dedicated to coordinating the coronavirus response across the government…”
POST 67. November 13, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “When all other options are exhausted, the CDC website says, workers who are suspected or confirmed to have COVID-19 (and “who are well enough to work”) can care for patients who are not severely immunocompromised — first for those who are also confirmed to have COVID-19, then those with suspected cases.”
POST 68. November 14, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. The CDC “now is hewing more closely to scientific evidence, often contradicting the positions of the Trump administration.”..” “A passenger aboard the first cruise ship to set sail in the Caribbean since the start of the pandemic has tested positive for coronavirus..”
POST 69. November 15, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Colorado Gov. Jared Polis will issue a new executive order outlining steps hospitals will need to take to ready themselves for a surge in COVID-19 hospitalizations and directing the hospitals to finalize plans for converting beds into ICU beds, adding staffing and scaling back on or eliminating elective procedures….
POST 70. November 16, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “White House coronavirus task force member Dr. Atlas criticized Michigan’s new Covid-19 restrictions..urging people to “rise up” against the new public health measures.
POST 71. November 17, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. ”Hospitals overrun as U.S. reports 1 million new coronavirus cases in a week.” “But in Florida, where the number of coronavirus infections remains the third-highest in the nation, bars and schools remain open and restaurants continue to operate at full capacity.”
POST 72. November 18, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The Health and Human Services Department will not work with President-elect Joe Biden’s (PANDEMIC) team until the General Services Administration makes a determination that he won the election,….”
POST 73. November 19, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…officials at the CDC…urged Americans to avoid travel for Thanksgiving and to celebrate only with members of their immediate households…” When will I trust a vaccine? to the last question I always answer: When I see Tony Fauci take one….”
POST 74. November 20, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Pfizer…submitted to the FDA for emergency use authorization for their coronavirus vaccine candidate. —FDA issued an EUA for the drug baricitinib, in combination with remdesivir, as WHO says remdesivir doesn’t do much of anything.
POST 75. November 21, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The president and CEO of one of the nation’s largest non-profit health systems says he won’t be wearing a mask at work because he’s recovered from COVID-19, and doing so would only be a “symbolic gesture” because he considers himself immune from the virus….
POST 76. November 23, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” Ventilators..”just keep people alive while the people caring for them can figure out what’s wrong and fix the problem. And at the moment, we just don’t have enough of those people.”
POST 77. November 26, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Pope Francis: “When I got really sick at the age of 21, I had my first experience of limit, of pain and loneliness.”.. “….Aug. 13, 1957. I got taken to a hospital…”….” I remember especially two nurses from this time.”…” They fought for me to the end, until my eventual recovery.”
POST 78. November 27, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Kelby Krabbenhoft is no longer president and CEO of Sioux Falls, S.D.-based Sanford Health.” “…for not wearing a face covering… “ because “He considered himself immune from the virus.”
POST 79. November 28, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Mayo Clinic. “”Our surge plan expands into the garage…”..””Not where I’d want to put my grandfather or my grandmother,” … though it “may have to happen.”
POST 81. December 1, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Dr. Atlas, … who espoused controversial theories and rankled government scientists while advising President Trump on the coronavirus pandemic, resigned…”
POST 82. December 3, 2020. CORONAVIRIUS. The NBA jumped to the front of the line for Coronavirus testing….while front line nurses often are still waiting. Who will similarly “hijack” the vaccine?
POST 83. December 4, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “California Gov. Gavin Newsom says he will impose a new, regional stay-at-home order for areas where capacity at intensive care units falls below 15%.”… East Tennessee –“This is the first time the health care capability benchmark has been in the red..”
POST 84. December 6, 2020. CPRONAVIRUS. “ More than 100,000 Americans are in the hospital with COVID-19…” “We’re seeing C.D.C. …awaken from (its) politics-induced coma…”…Dr. Fauci “to be a chief medical adviser in Biden’s incoming administration..”.. “Trump administration leaves states to grapple with how to distribute scarce vaccines..”
POST 85. December 7, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…Florida, Gov. DeSantis’ administration engaged in a pattern of spin and concealment that misled the public on the gravest health threat the state has ever faced..”.. “NY Gov. Cuomo said…the state will implement a barrage of new emergency actions..”… Rhode Island and Massachusetts open field hospitals… “Biden Names Health Team to Fight Pandemic”
POST 86. December 9, 2020. If this analysis seems a bit incomprehensible it is because “free Coronavirus test” is often an oxymoron! with charges ranging from as little as $23 to as much as $2,315… Laws (like for free Coronavirus tests) are Like Sausages. Better Not to See Them Being Made. (Please allow about 20 seconds for the text to download. Thanx!)
POST 87. December 10, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…Rudolph W. Giuliani, the latest member of President Trump’s inner circle to contract Covid-19, has acknowledged that he received at least two of the same drugs the president received. He even conceded that his “celebrity” status had given him access to care that others did not have.”
POST 88. December 11, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “As COVID-19 cases surge, the federal government is releasing data about hospital capacity at facilities around the country….”The new data paints the picture of how a specific hospital is experiencing the pandemic,”…
PART 89. December 12, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. THE VACCINE!!! “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” Winston Churchill
POST 90. December 14, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…the first doses of a Covid-19 vaccine have been given to the American public..”…” Each person who receives a vaccine needs two doses, and it’s up to states to allocate their share of vaccines.”
POST 91. December 15, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “UPMC will first give (vaccination) priority to those in critical jobs. That includes a range of people working in critical units, from workers cleaning the emergency room and registering patients to doctors and nurses.. “Finally, if needed, UPMC will use a lottery to select who will be scheduled first.”
POST 92. December 17, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “..each state — and each hospital system — has come up with its own (vaccination) plan and priorities. The result has been a sometimes confusing constellation of rules and groupings that has left health care workers wondering where they stand.” (Trump appointee July 4th email “…we need to establish herd, and it only comes about allowing the non-high risk groups expose themselves to the virus. PERIOD,”)
POST 93. December 19, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. On NPR Congresswoman Shalala (D-Florida) said she wouldn’t jump the vaccination line in Miami; then added she would get vaccinated in Washington this week. This, even though Congress has failed to pass “essential” Coronavirus legislation. So who are our “essential” workers?
POST 94. December 21, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “A doctor at an L.A. County public hospital said the number of COVID-19 patients is “increasing exponentially, without an end in sight.”.. “I haven’t done ICU medicine since I was a resident — you don’t want me adjusting your ventilator,” he said. “That’s the challenge, actually — it isn’t so much space, it’s staff…”
POST 96. December 26, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Achieving herd immunity against the coronavirus could require as much as 90 percent of the population to be vaccinated, Anthony Fauci…”…”..he hesitated to state a number as high as 90% weeks ago because many Americans still seemed skeptical about vaccine….”
POST 97. December 27, 2020. “A new variant of the coronavirus that has been spreading through the UK and other countries has not yet been detected in the United States..”.. . But if new-wave medicines like antivirals and antibody therapy contributed to the development of viral variants, it will be “a reminder for all the medical community that we need to use these treatment options carefully.”
POST 99. December 29, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “ICUs are being overwhelmed across many parts of California. Statewide aggregate ICU availability has been at 0% since Christmas Eve…. a surge on top of a surge on top of a surge.”… “hospitals are getting close to the point where they would begin putting COVID-positive patients under the care of COVID-positive staff who are asymptomatic.”
POST 100. December 29, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Front line hospital workers – in the ER, ICUs, EMS, acute medical care, behavioral health – are amongst the most courageous, heroic and dedicated colleagues you will ever meet.
POST 101. December 30, 2020.CORONAVIRUS. Is there a point where the increasing Coronavirus trajectory so far exceeds the slow growth of the vaccination rate that reaching herd immunity through vaccinations becomes less likely?
POST 102. January 2, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “We’ve taken the people with the least amount of resources and capacity and asked them to do the hardest part of the vaccination — which is actually getting the vaccines administered into people’s arms,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health. “Ultimately, the buck seems to stop with no one,”…
POST 103. January 4, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. Dr. Fauci said “that the United States would not follow Britain’s lead in front-loading first vaccine injections, potentially delaying the administration of second doses…Dr. Moore – ”British officials “seem to have abandoned science completely now and are just trying to guess their way out of a mess.”
POST 104. January 6, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Paramedics in Southern California are being told to conserve oxygen and not to bring patients to the hospital who have little chance of survival…”
POST 105. January 8, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. POST 105. January 8, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Facing a shortage of vaccinators, the Association of Immunization Managers… recommends relaxing regulation or adjusting licensing requirements. At least two states, Massachusetts and New York, have changed their laws in recent weeks to expand those who are eligible to give shots.”
POST 106. January 9, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. The riots at the Capitol could have been a superspreader event. “From what I saw… you had a large congregation of individuals who were in close contact for an extended period of time and almost universally unmasked…. many coming and going on buses as well, also unmasked, and hanging out in hotel lobbies.”
POST 107. January 8, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Our job is to make sure the vaccine isn’t politicized the way masks were politicized,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said after getting her vaccine. South Carolina Rep.-elect Nancy Mace, a Republican, wrote that “Congress shouldn’t be putting themselves first in line for the COVID-19 vaccination when the average American can’t get it.”
POST 108. January 9, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. (vaccination)”Line-cutters will be named and shamed. It’s inevitable, as will be the congressional hearings and front-page investigative stories ferreting out who saved their own skin at the expense of others.”
POST 109.January 9, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “President-elect Joe Biden will aim to release nearly every available dose of the coronavirus vaccine when he takes office, a break with the Trump administration’s strategy of holding back half of US vaccine production to ensure second doses are available.
POST 110. January 13, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. ““The (federal) government is changing the way it allocates Covid vaccine doses, now basing it on how quickly states can administer shots and the size of their elderly population.”… “New York State sent a letter to hospitals saying if they don’t use their vaccine allocations by the end of this week, they won’t receive any further allocations.”
POST 111. January 14, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Visitors from Toronto to New York to Buenos Aires have long flocked to Florida for sun, surf and shopping. Now they are coming for the Covid-19 vaccine….
POST 112. January 14, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. CHINA – “Eleven million people are under lockdown in Hebei province after a new cluster of coronavirus infections.
PART 113. January 17, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. The Next President Actually Has a Covid Plan… New York City and other places in the state expect to exhaust their supply of doses as early as next week… Charles Barkley said during the “NBA on TNT” broadcast that pro athletes should get the first round of the vaccine…..
POST 114. January 18, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “When government programs that have been unattended, underfunded and bogged down by red tape suddenly have to meet a huge demand in a crisis, they can’t cope and people suffer….”
POST 115. January 21, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. A year ago today an unnumbered POST was headlined “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday confirmed the first U.S. case of a deadly new coronavirus that has killed six people in China.” The CORONAVIRUS CONTENT TRACKING PROJECT started with HISTORIOGRAPHY and over time moved to LESSONS LEARNED, RAPID RESPONSE, and THE VACCINATION PROGRAM. Now 115 POSTS later – the BIDEN CORONAVIRUS PLAN.
POST 116. January 22, 2021. President Biden – “We’re entering what may be the toughest and deadliest period of the virus. We must set aside politics and finally face this pandemic as one nation.”
POST 117. January 23, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. 1.Dr. Fauci:“The idea that you can get up here….”and.. let the science speak”… “It is somewhat of a liberating feeling.” 2.updated CDC guidance:”.. providers could give the second dose up to six weeks after the first dose..” 3.Dr. Fauci: people would be “taking a chance” if they follow the CDC’s updated guidance.
POST 118. January 24, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Unfortunately, we’ve let this virus spread extensively and are launching the vaccination campaign at the height of the threat,” Dr. Meyers said. “The more the virus spreads before the vaccine reaches people, the fewer deaths we can prevent with the vaccine.”
POST 119. January 27, 2010. CORONAVIRUS. Amazon is offering its help to President Joe Biden with the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines. Washington’s governor, Jay Inslee, included the help of companies like Starbucks, Costco and Microsoft in a plan to vaccinate 45,000 residents a day.
POST 120. January 28, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The fact that four vaccines backed by the federal government seem to be less effective against the (South African) B.1.351 variant has unsettled federal officials and vaccine experts alike. Facing this uncertainty, many researchers said it was imperative to get as many people vaccinated as possible — quickly. Lowering the rate of infection could thwart the contagious variants while they are still rare, and prevent other viruses from gaining new mutations that could cause more trouble.”
POST 121. January 30, 2021. CORONVIRUS. Will our communities become stratified by which vaccine is distributed? 95%ters v. 72%ters? Will the easier distribution of the J&J vaccine drive its inequitable distribution to” hard-hit, marginalized, and medically underserved communities.” (thanx! to XJ/LA)
POST 123. February 4, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Nursing homes across the country are facing the same struggle, as workers have been more reluctant than residents to be vaccinated…
POST 124. February 5, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. Dr. Osterholm ” …it may be time to..go with a ‘first-dose only’ approach, so more people over the age of 65 can have at least some protection right away. He said that would require delaying second doses until this summer.” Dr.Fauci “warned against this practice, and cautioned people about “the danger” that could come with focusing only on the first dose.”
POST 125. June 9, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “States are rolling back Covid-19 restrictions as new cases trend down from record highs across the country. But experts warn it might be too much too soon as variants pose an increased risk and the pandemic… is far from over.”
POST 126. February 11, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “There will be more coronavirus outbreaks in the future. Bats and other mammals are rife with strains and species of this abundant family of viruses. Some of these pathogens will inevitably spill over the species barrier and cause new pandemics. It’s only a matter of time.” (A)
POST 127. February 12, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “… Trump only agreed to be hospitalized when aides told him that he could walk to Marine One or he could wait until his case progressed and he would be carried out.”
POST 128. February 14, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new research on Wednesday that found wearing a cloth mask over a surgical mask offers more protection against the coronavirus, as does tying knots on the ear loops of surgical masks…
POST 129. February 15, 2021, CORONAVIRUS. “ “The CDC released its much-anticipated, updated guidance to help school leaders decide how to safely bring students back into classrooms, or keep them there.”…” For politicians, parents and school leaders looking for a clear green light to reopen schools, this is not it.”
POST 130. February 16, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “A second person who had contracted the Ebola virus died this week in the Democratic Republic of Congo, marking another outbreak just three months after the nation outlasted the virus’s second-worst outbreak in history…”
POST 131. February 17, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “It really is right now – a race between how quickly new variants, particularly the U.K. variant, can spread in the United States and how quickly we can get people vaccinated”
POST 132. February 20, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “In Texas, where over 2.5 million people are still without power, the state health department said this week’s vaccine shipments wouldn’t arrive until Wednesday at the earliest.”
POST 133. February 23, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Going off your meds is a surefire way to aggravate your doctor. What if a whole country did it?” The United Kingdom has veered into uncharted territory by changing tack and introducing a revised COVID-19 vaccination protocol, one that involves distributing the second dose at 12 weeks, rather than the prescribed 21 days.”
POST 134. February 24, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. The first tranche of the J&J (single dose) vaccine must go to K-12 teachers, so schools can open safely in the first 100 days of the Biden Administration. The federal government…”can set up its own vaccination centers in regions with eligible populations it’s trying to target.” We owe our front-line teachers nothing less!
POST 135. February 27, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “As Chief Executive Officers of New York’s major health care systems, we would like to provide facts to clear up confusion in the public and the media regarding decisions to discharge patients to nursing homes during New York’s spring coronavirus surge.”
POST 136. March 2, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. ““The governors of Texas and Mississippi both announced on Tuesday they would be lifting their states’ mask mandates and rolling back many of their Covid-19 health mandates..”…while “The US could experience a “fourth surge” of coronavirus before the majority of the country is vaccinated.”
POST 137. March 4, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The clamor for hard-to-get Covid-19 vaccines has created armies of anxious Americans who have resorted to hunting for leftovers on the fringes of the country’s patchwork vaccination system. They haunt pharmacies at the end of the day in search of an extra, expiring dose. They drive from clinic to clinic hoping that someone was a no-show to their appointment. They cold-call pharmacies like eager telemarketers: Any extras today? Maybe tomorrow? Some pharmacists have even given them a nickname: vaccine lurkers.” (H)
POST 138. March 6, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “New cases are decreasing in the third wave because we are past the holidays, not because of vaccinations. It is a common misconception that the decrease we are seeing in new cases, hospitalizations, and deaths in the U.S. is due to vaccinations. The two aren’t related; at least yet.”
POST 139. March 8, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. CDC Issues First Set of Guidelines on How Fully Vaccinated People Can Visit Safely with Others…” In practice, that means fully vaccinated grandparents may visit unvaccinated healthy adult children and healthy grandchildren of the same household without masks or physical distancing.” (C)
POST 140. March 9, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “In West Virginia, they are bracing for the second wave….. Not coronavirus but opioid overdoses, with one scourge driving a resurgence of the other.
POST 141. March 11, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. Today is the first anniversary of the WHO declaration that the novel coronavirus was a Public Health Emergency of International Concern… “To truly prepare itself against the next pandemic, the U.S. has to reimagine what preparedness looks like.”
POST 142. March 15, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Candida auris is a superbug, a pathogen that can evade drugs made to kill it—and early signs suggest the COVID-19 pandemic may be propelling infections of the highly dangerous yeast. That’s because C. auris is particularly prominent in hospital settings, which have been flooded with people this year due to the coronavirus.”
POST 143. March 17, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The Trump administration sought to suppress Covid-19 testing in the United States last year by softening guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on who needed to be tested, a House panel said Monday.”
POST 144. March 20, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. ““The vaccine hesitancy we are seeing isn’t just about Covid vaccines,”… “It is a general reflection of Americans’ lack of trust in science, the pharmaceutical industry, and large health care institutions. We need a full court press on science and vaccine education right now to prevent more aggressive Covid-19 variants from developing and taking hold.”
POST 145. March 25, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Efforts to disseminate Covid-19 vaccines as widely as possible are hitting an unexpected obstacle: health-care workers who decline the shots.
POST 146. March 30, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. Dr. Osterholm told Becker’s: “This is the perfect storm,”…”Here is Europe locking down and having problems containing B.1.1.7, even with vaccinations and previous infection histories. Here we are opening up as wide as we can. We are literally just walking into the mouth of the virus saying, ‘Don’t worry.’” (M)
POST 147. April 5, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The pandemic helped cement the shift to “a philosophy of really focusing on the role of the physician in reasoning through ambiguous and unknown problems as the focus of education, rather than teaching students that the role of physician was to memorize a body of knowledge that was already in existence and good enough for what usually happens.”
POST 148. April 7, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. While the Biden administration accelerates vaccinations to ward off numerous variants and as more young people are being hospitalized, states, even with increasing case rates are on paths to fully reopen. Politics v. public health!
POST 149. April 10, 2021. CORONAVIRIUS. “From Michigan to Massachusetts, COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations are on the rise again. Deaths will soon follow. “ ”.. the Biden administration is facing renewed calls to delay second vaccine doses and blanket more of the U.S. population with an initial shot.”
POST 150. April 10, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The use of so-called COVID-19 “vaccine passports” is quickly becoming a divisive issue across the US – with several states, including New York, embracing the idea, while others have already moved to ban them.”
POST 151. April 14, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. the J&J vaccination pause. “ Federal officials are concerned that doctors may not be trained to spot or treat the rare disorder if recipients of the vaccine develop symptoms of it…” “…a standard treatment for blood clots — use of an anticoagulant drug — could be dangerous or even fatal in such cases…”
POST 152. April 15, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s director said Saturday authorities are considering mixing COVID-19 vaccines because the country’s domestically made doses “don’t have very high protection rates,”
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the US Food and Drug Administration are recommending that the United States pause the use of Johnson & Johnson’s Covid-19 vaccine over six reported US cases of a “rare and severe” type of blood clot. One of the cases was fatal and one is currently in critical condition.
The six reported cases were among more than 6.8 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine administered in the United States.
All six cases occurred among women between the ages of 18 and 48, and symptoms occurred 6 to 13 days after vaccination, according to a joint statement on Tuesday from Dr. Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director of the CDC and Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research.
“CDC will convene a meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) on Wednesday to further review these cases and assess their potential significance,” the statement said. “FDA will review that analysis as it also investigates these cases. Until that process is complete, we are recommending a pause in the use of this vaccine out of an abundance of caution. This is important, in part, to ensure that the health care provider community is aware of the potential for these adverse events and can plan for proper recognition and management due to the unique treatment required with this type of blood clot.”
Johnson & Johnson issued a statement on Tuesday noting that the company has decided to “proactively delay the rollout” of its vaccine in Europe.
“We have been working closely with medical experts and health authorities, and we strongly support the open communication of this information to healthcare professionals and the public,” the statement said in part.
For people who have received the Johnson & Johnson shot, those who have developed severe headache, abdominal pain, leg pain or shortness of breath within three weeks after vaccination should contact their health care provider, according to the statement.
“It’s a very rare event. You’re talking about 1 per million, and when you give millions of doses of vaccines, you will see events like this that you couldn’t see in the clinical trial just because you didn’t have millions of people enrolled,” Dr. Carlos del Rio, executive associate dean of the Emory University School of Medicine at Grady Health System, told CNN’s John Berman and Poppy Harlow on Tuesday morning.
“But I want to congratulate the CDC and the FDA for very quickly jumping on it, halting the vaccinations until we know more, and really trying to understand what’s going on,” del Rio said. “I think vaccine safety has always been a priority — and I think this is exactly the right move until we understand what’s going on and what’s the way forward.”” (A)
“Speaking at the White House, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top expert on infectious disease, said the pause would allow the FDA and the CDC to investigate the clotting cases and “to make physicians more aware of this.”
A CDC committee will meet Wednesday to discuss the cases, and the FDA has launched an investigation into the cause of the clots and low platelet counts.
FDA officials emphasized that Tuesday’s action was not a mandate. Doctors and patients could still use J&J’s vaccine if they decide its benefits outweigh its risks for individual cases, said Dr. Peter Marks.
The agencies recommend that people who were given the J&J vaccine should contact their doctor if they experience severe headache, abdominal or leg pain or shortness of breath within three weeks.
J&J said in a statement that it was aware of the reports of blood clots, but that no link to its vaccine had been established. The company also said it would delay the rollout of its vaccine in Europe as a precaution.
U.S. health authorities cautioned doctors against using a typical clot treatment, the blood-thinner heparin.
European authorities investigating the AstraZeneca cases have concluded clots appear to be similar to a very rare abnormal immune response that sometimes strikes people treated with heparin, leading to a temporary clotting disorder.
While it’s not clear yet if the reports among J&J recipients are related, doctors would treat these kinds of unusual clots like they treat people who have the heparin reaction — with different kinds of blood thinners and sometimes an antibody infusion, said Dr. Geoffrey Barnes, a clot expert at the University of Michigan.
Even without J&J’s vaccine, White House officials said they remain on track to have enough supplies to vaccinate most American adults by the summer…
Asked if the government was overreacting to six cases out of more than 6 million vaccinations, the CDC’s Dr. Anne Schuchat said recommendations will come quickly.
Because these unusual clots require special treatment, “it was of the utmost importance to us to get the word out,” she said.” (B)
“No such issues have been reported with the Covid-19 vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna, health officials said…
The pause “will not have a significant impact” on the country’s vaccination plan, Jeff Zients, the White House Covid-19 Response Coordinator, said in a statement, adding that there is “more than enough supply” to meet President Joe Biden’s “goal of 200 million shots by his 100th day in office.”..
“I know that the information we’re providing today is going to be very concerning to Americans who have already received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine,” Dr. Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director for CDC, said during the briefing. “For people who got the vaccine more than a month ago, the risk is very low.”
For those who recently got the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, Schuchat advised to be aware of sudden, severe headaches, abdominal pain or shortness of breath…
It was not clear if the woman, who spoke to NBC News on the condition of anonymity, was one of the six people in question. In a statement, the FDA said it was unable to “confirm or share personally identifiable information,” citing HIPAA rules.
The woman said she got the vaccine on March 19 at a Nashville hospital and initially experienced normal reactions, such as a fever. Then, about a week later, she went to the emergency room with uncontrollable shaking, troubling breathing and a fever.
“Since then, [I] have just had a few strange symptoms that could have been chalked up to a viral infection, mostly just a headache that persisted for two weeks, and some leg pain and swelling,” she said in a phone interview from her hospital bed, “and then also just some random bruises that would appear throughout my body.”
When she went to the ER the week after her shot, she said that doctors did not find anything strange in her blood work, and nothing at that point to suggest clotting or low platelets — so she went home. But the symptoms continued to worsen over the following week.
“Then, when I went back to the ER, it was because my leg was so swollen that I couldn’t really walk, so at that time they found the DVTs or the clots in my legs,” she said, saying they were in both legs and she had a low platelet count.
She added that she has been in the hospital for about a week, and she was in the intensive care unit until Sunday. When asked if she had any regrets, she said, “No, absolutely not. I just want to be clear, vaccines are good and they save lives.”” (C)
“Dr. Janet Woodcock, the acting commissioner of the F.D.A., said at a news conference Tuesday that the pause was only expected to last “a matter of days,” although she said the time frame depends on “what we learn in the next few days.” Dr. Schuchat said at the same briefing that the pause was enacted in part to “prepare the health care system to recognize and treat patients appropriately.”
The move could complicate the nation’s vaccination efforts at a time when many states are confronting a surge in new cases and seeking to address vaccine hesitancy. Regulators in Europe and elsewhere are concerned about a similar issue with another coronavirus vaccine, developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University researchers, that has not been authorized for emergency use in the United States. At the news conference, Dr. Marks drew a connection between the two vaccines, saying the cases involving rare blood clots were very similar…
In the United States alone, 300,000 to 600,000 people a year develop blood clots, according to C.D.C. data. But the particular blood clotting disorder that the vaccine recipients developed, known as cerebral venous sinus thrombosis, is extremely rare. Dr. Schuchat described the condition as “a severe strokelike illness linked to low platelet counts.”…
Government experts are concerned that the blood clots are linked to an immune system response triggered by the vaccine. Federal officials said there was broad agreement in the senior ranks of the administration about the need to pause use of the vaccine while the cases are investigated.
Dr. Marks said that the federal government was not issuing an order to suspend the vaccine, adding that health providers may decide that for a particular patient, the benefits of a shot outweigh the risks. “We’re not going to stop that provider from administering the vaccine because it could be right,” he said…
It is common for regulators to investigate “safety signals” in new vaccines and other medical products. Very often, the signals prove not to be of concern. But the concerns about Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine mirror concerns about AstraZeneca’s, which European regulators began investigating last month after some recipients developed blood clots.
Out of 34 million people who received the vaccine in Britain, the European Union and three other countries, 222 experienced blood clots that were linked with a low level of platelets. The majority of these cases occurred within the first 14 days following vaccination, mostly in women under 60 years of age.” (D)
“In most clinical settings, an anticoagulant drug called heparin is administered to treat blood clots; however, health officials said using this drug in these instances could be dangerous, and they recommended alternative treatments.
Health officials don’t know the definitive cause of the blood clots but suspect similarities in cases of blood clots in a small number of people who received the AstraZeneca vaccine, which is made using the same technique as the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
The immune system of the person who got the vaccine may react to the vaccine by attacking the body’s own blood platelets or other parts of the coagulation system.
“That’s the leading theory or hypothesis about what’s going on,” acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock said.” (E)
“More than two dozen states took steps Tuesday to halt inoculations with Johnson & Johnson’s coronavirus vaccine, shortly after the Food and Drug Administration recommended to pause its use after reports some women developed a rare blood clotting disorder.
The states, like the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, stressed that they were acting out of an abundance of caution, as more than 6.8 million doses of J&J’s vaccine have been injected and only six of the blood clotting cases have so far been reported.
J&J said in a statement that “no clear causal relationship” has been identified between the rare type of blood clots and the vaccine, adding it is working closely with regulators to assess the data.
New York Health Commissioner Dr. Howard Zucker said the state will “immediately” stop administering the single-dose J&J inoculation, and will use Pfizer’s two-shot vaccine in its place for already scheduled appointments.
At least 25 other states, along with Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, also announced they are taking J&J’s vaccine doses out of their distribution plans.
Those precautions may not be in effect for long, however: Acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock said Tuesday that she expected the pause to last only for a matter of days.
Dr. Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director of the CDC, noted Tuesday that people who got the J&J vaccine more than a month ago are at very low risk for developing the blood clots. All six reported cases occurred in women ages 18 to 48, whose symptoms developed within two weeks after they received the shot.
New Jersey’s Department of Health said that all vaccination sites in the state “have been told to cancel or put on hold appointments for the J&J vaccine until further notice.” The agency said it will work with those sites to replace J&J appointments with an alternative two-dose vaccine.
Virginia “will cease all Johnson & Johnson vaccines” while the FDA investigates the “extremely rare possible side effect,” according to a statement from the state’s vaccination coordinator, Dr. Danny Avula.
Connecticut’s Department of Public Health recommended all Covid vaccine providers stop using J&J’s vaccine “for the time being” while the FDA and the CDC complete their review.
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and top health officials in his state issued a similar advisory.
Massachusetts’ Department of Public Health notified all vaccine providers in the state to stop administering the J&J vaccine, “effective immediately.”
The other states are Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Texas, Utah and West Virginia.” (F)
“Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and state health officials learned of the federal request for a pause at the same time as the general public. The state will follow the advice of medical professionals and stop the use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine while the investigation is underway.
“More than 6.8 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine have been administered in the U.S., and these adverse events appear to be extremely rare. However, out of an abundance of caution, we are following recommendations from FDA and CDC and pausing the use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine in Michigan,” said Dr. Joneigh Khaldun, the state’s chief medical executive, in a statement.
“As we learn more about this from our federal partners, we will update vaccine providers and Michiganders across the state. We encourage everyone to continue making appointments to be vaccinated with the safe and effective Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines at this time.”
It couldn’t come at a worse time for Michigan, which is in the throes of the most severe COVID-19 outbreak in the nation. Whitmer has repeatedly asked the federal government to surge more vaccines to the state, where the per-capita COVID-19 case rate hit a seven-day average of 510.5 cases per 100,000 people Tuesday, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention.” (G)
“The vaccine’s shelving has the governor doubling down on calls to President Joe Biden’s administration to deploy more vaccines to hot spots like Michigan. The government has sent more vaccination resources to the state, but not vaccines.
“With this latest development, it’s more important than ever for the federal government to implement a targeted strategy that allocates additional Pfizer and Moderna vaccines to hotspots like Michigan to slow the spread of COVID-19 and save lives,” Bobby Leddy, press secretary for the governor, told Detroit Free Press. “Gov. Whitmer will continue fighting for the vaccines we need to protect Michiganders, so we can get back to normal as soon as possible.”” (H)
“Michigan cannot rely on COVID-19 vaccinations alone to rein in rising COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations in the state, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, MD, said during an April 12 news briefing.
Dr. Walensky said Michigan should enact shutdown measures to help flatten the curve and emphasized the importance of social distancing, testing and contact-tracing.
“When you have an acute situation, an extraordinary number of cases like we have in Michigan, the answer is not necessarily to give vaccine[s],” she said during the briefing. “The answer to that is to really close things down, to go back to our basics.”
She said the positive effects from vaccinations are often not seen in areas experiencing serious COVID-19 outbreaks for two to six weeks.
“I think if we tried to vaccinate our way out of what is happening in Michigan, we would be disappointed that it took so long for the vaccine to work, to actually have the impact,” she said.” (I)
“The suspension “will not have a significant impact on our vaccination plan: Johnson & Johnson vaccine makes up less than 5% of the recorded shots in arms in the U.S. to date,” Jeff Zients, White House COVID-19 response coordinator, said in a statement.
“Based on actions taken by the president earlier this year, the U.S. has secured enough Pfizer (PFE) – Get Report and Moderna (MRNA) – Get Report doses for 300 million Americans.”
Further, “Over the last few weeks, we have made available more than 25 million doses of Pfizer and Moderna each week, and in fact this week we will make available 28 million doses of these vaccines,” Zients said.
“This is more than enough supply to continue the current pace of vaccinations of 3 million shots per day, and meet the president’s goal of 200 million shots by his 100th day in office — and continue on to reach every adult who wants to be vaccinated.”
The White House is “working now with our state and federal partners to get anyone scheduled for a J&J vaccine quickly rescheduled for a Pfizer or Moderna vaccine.”” (J)
“The emergence of possible safety issues with the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine is certainly unwelcome news, but it is far too early for either the general public or Wall Street to panic.
U.S. health authorities recommended a pause in the usage of the shot on Tuesday, following reports of severe blood clots in six women who received the shot. About 6.7 million people have received the vaccine so far in the U.S. J&J shares traded lower on Tuesday morning, while other vaccine makers such as Moderna rallied.
While the headline is scary, especially in a pandemic setting, there is no direct evidence that the vaccine is responsible for these rare cases. Moreover, such a pause is standard practice when possible safety issues arise in a new medication or vaccine. Regulators are historically quite sensitive to safety issues in vaccines, because they are meant for the entire public. In a nonpandemic setting, several years of safety data is typically collected before bringing a vaccine to market. No surprise then that regulators chose to err on the side of caution. For members of the public who are hesitant to take a vaccine, Tuesday’s action should boost confidence, not erode it.
It is possible that the regulators will allow J&J shots to resume in short order. But if not, the U.S. government has diversified its vaccine options, a decision that is looking increasingly prescient. As such, there is plenty of supply even if the J&J vaccine is mothballed over the long term. There were roughly 39 million doses of Pfizer ’s and Moderna’s vaccines delivered to care providers but yet to be administered as of Tuesday, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, and more supply is coming online.
There will be new challenges if the J&J vaccine doesn’t rejoin the mix. It requires only one dose, while Pfizer and Moderna each require two. If the J&J shot is no longer an option, the government will need to rethink how to supply rural and other hard-to-reach communities with vaccines.” (K)
“Dr. Scott Gottlieb said Tuesday that people should be “cautious not to overinterpret” the Food and Drug Administration’s decision to temporarily halt use of Johnson & Johnson’s coronavirus vaccine.
“Let’s start with what the FDA didn’t do,” the agency’s former commissioner said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “They didn’t revoke the emergency use authorization. They didn’t order this off the market.”
“This was a requested pause, which is an awkward regulatory step, but I think it reflects the level of caution on their part to not to appear to act too forcefully here,” said Gottlieb, a member of Pfizer’s board of directors.
The agency’s decision, announced Tuesday, came after six women out of millions vaccinated developed blood clots.
Gottlieb predicted that the move will nonetheless “fuel the hesitancy” from some people to get a Covid vaccine.
“Even if there isn’t a causal relationship, even if this is exceedingly rare, I think we’re going to see that whole conversation now get ignited on social media,” he said…
Gottlieb said he believes the J&J vaccine could come back into use “with some additional, perhaps, restrictions on its target populations in the interim while they continue to investigate this.”” (L)
F.States rush to replace J&J vaccine appointments after FDA recommends pause, by Kevin Breuninger, https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/13/states-rush-to-replace-jj-vaccine-appointments-after-fda-recommends-pause.html
PART 1. January 21, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday confirmed the first U.S. case of a deadly new coronavirus that has killed six people in China.”
PART 2. January 29, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “If it’s not contained shortly, I think we are looking at a pandemic..”….. “With isolated cases of the dangerous new coronavirus cropping up in a number of states, public health officials say it is only a matter of time before the virus appears in New York City.”
PART3. February 3, 2020. “The Wuhan coronavirus spreading from China is now likely to become a pandemic that circles the globe…”..Trump appeared to downplay concerns about the flu-like virus …We’re gonna see what happens, but we did shut it down..” (D)
PART 4. February 9, 2020. Coronavirus. “A study published Friday in JAMA found that 41% of the first 138 patients diagnosed at one hospital in Wuhan, China, were presumed to be infected in that hospital.….
PART 5. February 12, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “In short, shoe-leather public health and basic medical care—not miracle drugs—are generally what stop outbreaks of emerging infections..”
POST 6. February 18, 2020. Coronovirus. “Amid assurances that the (ocean liner) Westerdam was disease free, hundreds of people disembarked in Cambodia…” “ One was later found to be infected”…. “Over 1,000… passengers were in…transit home”…. “This could be a turning point””
PART 7. February 20, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. With SARS preparedness underway in NJ LibertyHealth/ Jersey City Medical Center, where I was President, proposed that our 100 bed community hospital with all single-bedded rooms, be immediately transformed into an EMERGENCY SARS ISOLATION Hospital.
PART 8. February 24, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…every country’s top priority should be to protect its health care workers. This is partly to ensure that hospitals themselves do not become sites where the coronavirus is spread more than it is contained.”
PART 9. February 27, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Responding to a question about the likelihood of a U.S. outbreak, President Trump said, “I don’t think it’s inevitable…”It probably will. It possibly will,” he continued. “It could be at a very small level, or it could be at a larger level.”
Part 10. March 1, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Stop Surprise Medical Bills for Coronavirus care. (&) Lessons Learned (or not) In California and Washington State from community acquired cases.
PART 11. March 5, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Gov. Andrew Cuomo… would require employers to pay workers and protect their jobs if they are quarantined because of the coronavirus.”
Part 12. March 10, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Tom Bossert, Donald Trump’s former homeland security advisor…(said) that due to the coronavirus outbreak, “We are 10 days from the hospitals getting creamed.”
Part 13.. March 14, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “If I’m buying real estate in New York, I’ll listen to the President….If I’m asking about infectious diseases, I’m going to listen to Tony Fauci,”
PART 14. March 17, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “ “Most physicians have never seen this level of angst and anxiety in their careers”…. One said “I am sort of a pariah in my family.”
PART 15. March 22, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…Crimson Contagion” and imagining an influenza pandemic, was simulated by the Trump administration….in a series of exercises that ran from last January to August.
PART 16. March 27, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. I am not a clinician or a medical ethicist but articles on Coronavirus patient triage started me Googling………to learn about FUTILE TREATMENT
PART 17. April 2, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Florida allows churches to continue holding services. Gun stores deemed “essential.” “New York’s private and public hospitals unite to manage patient load and share resources.
PART 18. April 9, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The federal government’s emergency stockpile of personal protective equipment (PPE) is depleted, and states will not be receiving any more shipments, administration staff told a House panel.
PART 19. April 13, 2020 CORONOAVIRUS. “…overlooked in the United States’ halting mobilization against the novel coronavirus: the personal aides, hospice attendants, nurses and occupational or physical therapists who deliver medical or support services to patients in their homes.”
POST 22. April 29, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. ..the “ACS released a list of 10 issues that should be addressed before a healthcare organization resumes elective surgeries[JM1] ….”
POST 23. May 3, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. … what Dr. Fauci really wants,…”is just to go to a baseball game. That will have to wait. The level of testing for the virus is not adequate enough to allow for such mass gatherings.’ (K)
POST 24. May 7, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie said: “there are going to be deaths no matter what”… but that people needed to get back to work.
POST 25. May 10, 2020, CORONAVIRUS. “It is scary to go to work,” said Kevin Hassett, a top economic adviser to the president. “I think that I’d be a lot safer if I was sitting at home than I would be going to the West Wing.”
POST 26. May 14, 2020. CORONAVIRUS, “Deep cleaning is not a scientific concept”….”there is no universal protocol for a “deep clean” to eradicate the coronavirus”
POST 27. May 19, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Hospital…executives…are taking pay cuts…to help offset the financial fallout from COVID-19.” As “front line” layoffs and furloughs accelerate…
POST 28. May 23, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. ““You’ve got to be kidding me,”..”How could the CDC make that mistake? This is a mess.” CDC conflates viral and antibody tests numbers.
PART 29. May 22, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The economy did not close down. It closed down for people who, frankly, had the luxury of staying home,” (Governor Cuomo). But not so for frontline workers!
POST 30. June 3,202. CORONAVIRUS. “The wave of mass protests across the United States will almost certainly set off new chains of infection for the novel coronavirus, experts say….
Post 32. June 16, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Could the Trump administration be pursuing herd immunity by “inaction”? “ If Fauci didn’t exist, we’d have to invent him.”
POST 34. June 26, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. CDC Director Redfield… “the number of coronavirus infections…could be 10 times higher than the confirmed case count — a total of more than 20 million.” As Florida, Texas and Arizona become eipicenters!
POST 35. June 29, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Pence: “We slowed the spread. We flattened the curve. We saved lives..” While Dr. Fauci “warned that outbreaks in the South and West could engulf the country…”
POST 36. July 2, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “There’s just a handful of interventions proven to curb the spread of the coronavirus. One of them is contact tracing, and “it’s not going well,” (Dr. Anthony Fauci)..
POST 37. June 8, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. When “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.”
POST 38. July 15, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Some Lessons Learned, or not. AdventHealth CEO Terry Shaw: I wouldn’t hesitate to go to Disney as a healthcare CEO — based on the fact that they’re working extremely hard to keep people safe,” (M)
POST 39. July, 23,2020. CORONAVIRUS. A Tale of Two Cities. Seattle becomes New York (rolls back reopening) while New York becomes Seattle (moves to partial phase 4 reopening)
POST 40. July 27, 2020. CORONAVIRUS.” One canon of medical practice is that you order a test only if you can act on the result. And with a turnaround time of a week or two, you cannot. What we have now is often not testing — it’s testing theater.”
POST 41. August 2, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Whenever a vaccine for the coronavirus becomes available, one thing is virtually certain: There won’t be enough to go around. That means there will be rationing.”
POST 44. September 1, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The CDC…modified its coronavirus testing guidelines…to exclude people who do not have symptoms of Covid-19.” (While Dr. Fauci was undergoing surgery.) A White House official said: “Everybody is going to catch this thing eventually..”
POST 45. September 9, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Trump on Fauci. ‘You inherit a lot of people, and you have some you love, some you don’t. I like him. I don’t agree with him that often but I like him.’
POST 46. September 17, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Bill Gates used to think of the US Food and Drug Administration as the world’s premier public-health authority. Not anymore. And he doesn’t trust the Centers for Disease Control and Protection either….”
POST 47. September 24, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Perry N. Halkitis, dean of the School of Public Health at Rutgers University…called New York City’s 35 percent rate for eliciting contacts “very bad.” “For each person, you should be in touch with 75 percent of their contacts within a day,” he said”
POST 48. October 1, 2020. “…you can actually control the outbreak if you do the nonpharmaceutical interventions (social distancing and masks). In the United States we haven’t done them. We haven’t adhered to them; we’ve played with them.” (A)
POST 49. October 4, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. RAPID RESPONSE. “The possibility that the president and his White House entourage were traveling superspreaders is a nightmare scenario for officials in Minnesota, Ohio, New Jersey and Pennsylvania…”
POST 50. October 6, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Monday October 5th will go down as one of the most fraught chapters in the history of American public Health (and national security).
POST 51. October 12, 2020. Rather than a hodge-podge of Emergency Use Authorizations, off-label “experimentation”, right-to-try arguments, and “politicized” compassionate use approvals maybe we need to designate REGIONAL EMERGING VIRUSES REFERRAL CENTERS (REVRCs).
POST 52. October 18, 2020. ZIKA/ EBOLA/ CANDIDA AURIS/ SEVERE FLU/ Tracking. “… if there was a severe flu pandemic, more than 33 million people could be killed across the world in 250 days… Boy, do we not have our act together.” —”- Bill Gates. July 1, 2018
POST 54. October 22, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. POST 54A. New Jersey’s Coronavirus response, led by Governor Murphy and Commissioner of Health Persichilli started with accelerated A+ traditional, evidence-based Public Health practices, developed over years of experience with seasonal flu, swine flu, Zika, and Ebola.
POST 55. October 26, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. The Testing Conundrum: “ It’s thus very possible to be antigen negative but P.C.R. positive, while still harboring the virus in the body..”
POST 57. November 3, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Dr. Deborah Birx: the US is entering its “most deadly phase” yet, one that requires “much more aggressive action,”
POST 58. November 4, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…the president has largely shuttered the White House Coronavirus Task Force and doubled down on anti-science language…”
POST 59. November 5, 2020. Coronavirus. “The United States on Wednesday recorded over 100,000 new coronavirus cases in a single day for the first time since the pandemic began..
POST 61. November 7, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Joe Biden’s top priority entering the White House is fighting both the immediate coronavirus crisis and its complex long-term aftermath…” “Here are the key ways he plans to get US coronavirus cases under control.”
POST 62. November 8, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The United States reported its 10 millionth coronavirus case on Sunday, with the latest million added in just 10 days,…”
POST 63. November 9, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “New York City-based Mount Sinai Health System has opened a center to help patients recovering from COVID-19 and to study the long-term impact of the disease….”
POST 64. November 10, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “It works! Scientists have greeted with cautious optimism a press release declaring positive interim results from a coronavirus vaccine phase III trial — the first to report on the final round of human testing.”
POST 65. November 11, 2020. CORONAVIRUS, “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention took a stronger stance in favor of masks on Tuesday, emphasizing that they protect the people wearing them, rather than just those around them…
POST 66. November.12, 2020. CORONAVIRUS.”… as the country enters what may be the most intense stage of the pandemic yet, the Trump administration remains largely disengaged.”… “President-elect Biden has formed a special transition team dedicated to coordinating the coronavirus response across the government…”
POST 67. November 13, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “When all other options are exhausted, the CDC website says, workers who are suspected or confirmed to have COVID-19 (and “who are well enough to work”) can care for patients who are not severely immunocompromised — first for those who are also confirmed to have COVID-19, then those with suspected cases.”
POST 68. November 14, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. The CDC “now is hewing more closely to scientific evidence, often contradicting the positions of the Trump administration.”..” “A passenger aboard the first cruise ship to set sail in the Caribbean since the start of the pandemic has tested positive for coronavirus..”
POST 69. November 15, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Colorado Gov. Jared Polis will issue a new executive order outlining steps hospitals will need to take to ready themselves for a surge in COVID-19 hospitalizations and directing the hospitals to finalize plans for converting beds into ICU beds, adding staffing and scaling back on or eliminating elective procedures….
POST 70. November 16, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “White House coronavirus task force member Dr. Atlas criticized Michigan’s new Covid-19 restrictions..urging people to “rise up” against the new public health measures.
POST 71. November 17, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. ”Hospitals overrun as U.S. reports 1 million new coronavirus cases in a week.” “But in Florida, where the number of coronavirus infections remains the third-highest in the nation, bars and schools remain open and restaurants continue to operate at full capacity.”
POST 72. November 18, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The Health and Human Services Department will not work with President-elect Joe Biden’s (PANDEMIC) team until the General Services Administration makes a determination that he won the election,….”
POST 73. November 19, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…officials at the CDC…urged Americans to avoid travel for Thanksgiving and to celebrate only with members of their immediate households…” When will I trust a vaccine? to the last question I always answer: When I see Tony Fauci take one….”
POST 74. November 20, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Pfizer…submitted to the FDA for emergency use authorization for their coronavirus vaccine candidate. —FDA issued an EUA for the drug baricitinib, in combination with remdesivir, as WHO says remdesivir doesn’t do much of anything.
POST 75. November 21, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The president and CEO of one of the nation’s largest non-profit health systems says he won’t be wearing a mask at work because he’s recovered from COVID-19, and doing so would only be a “symbolic gesture” because he considers himself immune from the virus….
POST 76. November 23, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” Ventilators..”just keep people alive while the people caring for them can figure out what’s wrong and fix the problem. And at the moment, we just don’t have enough of those people.”
POST 77. November 26, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Pope Francis: “When I got really sick at the age of 21, I had my first experience of limit, of pain and loneliness.”.. “….Aug. 13, 1957. I got taken to a hospital…”….” I remember especially two nurses from this time.”…” They fought for me to the end, until my eventual recovery.”
POST 78. November 27, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Kelby Krabbenhoft is no longer president and CEO of Sioux Falls, S.D.-based Sanford Health.” “…for not wearing a face covering… “ because “He considered himself immune from the virus.”
POST 79. November 28, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Mayo Clinic. “”Our surge plan expands into the garage…”..””Not where I’d want to put my grandfather or my grandmother,” … though it “may have to happen.”
POST 81. December 1, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Dr. Atlas, … who espoused controversial theories and rankled government scientists while advising President Trump on the coronavirus pandemic, resigned…”
POST 82. December 3, 2020. CORONAVIRIUS. The NBA jumped to the front of the line for Coronavirus testing….while front line nurses often are still waiting. Who will similarly “hijack” the vaccine?
POST 83. December 4, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “California Gov. Gavin Newsom says he will impose a new, regional stay-at-home order for areas where capacity at intensive care units falls below 15%.”… East Tennessee –“This is the first time the health care capability benchmark has been in the red..”
POST 84. December 6, 2020. CPRONAVIRUS. “ More than 100,000 Americans are in the hospital with COVID-19…” “We’re seeing C.D.C. …awaken from (its) politics-induced coma…”…Dr. Fauci “to be a chief medical adviser in Biden’s incoming administration..”.. “Trump administration leaves states to grapple with how to distribute scarce vaccines..”
POST 85. December 7, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…Florida, Gov. DeSantis’ administration engaged in a pattern of spin and concealment that misled the public on the gravest health threat the state has ever faced..”.. “NY Gov. Cuomo said…the state will implement a barrage of new emergency actions..”… Rhode Island and Massachusetts open field hospitals… “Biden Names Health Team to Fight Pandemic”
POST 86. December 9, 2020. If this analysis seems a bit incomprehensible it is because “free Coronavirus test” is often an oxymoron! with charges ranging from as little as $23 to as much as $2,315… Laws (like for free Coronavirus tests) are Like Sausages. Better Not to See Them Being Made. (Please allow about 20 seconds for the text to download. Thanx!)
POST 87. December 10, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…Rudolph W. Giuliani, the latest member of President Trump’s inner circle to contract Covid-19, has acknowledged that he received at least two of the same drugs the president received. He even conceded that his “celebrity” status had given him access to care that others did not have.”
POST 88. December 11, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “As COVID-19 cases surge, the federal government is releasing data about hospital capacity at facilities around the country….”The new data paints the picture of how a specific hospital is experiencing the pandemic,”…
PART 89. December 12, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. THE VACCINE!!! “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” Winston Churchill
POST 90. December 14, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…the first doses of a Covid-19 vaccine have been given to the American public..”…” Each person who receives a vaccine needs two doses, and it’s up to states to allocate their share of vaccines.”
POST 91. December 15, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “UPMC will first give (vaccination) priority to those in critical jobs. That includes a range of people working in critical units, from workers cleaning the emergency room and registering patients to doctors and nurses.. “Finally, if needed, UPMC will use a lottery to select who will be scheduled first.”
POST 92. December 17, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “..each state — and each hospital system — has come up with its own (vaccination) plan and priorities. The result has been a sometimes confusing constellation of rules and groupings that has left health care workers wondering where they stand.” (Trump appointee July 4th email “…we need to establish herd, and it only comes about allowing the non-high risk groups expose themselves to the virus. PERIOD,”)
POST 93. December 19, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. On NPR Congresswoman Shalala (D-Florida) said she wouldn’t jump the vaccination line in Miami; then added she would get vaccinated in Washington this week. This, even though Congress has failed to pass “essential” Coronavirus legislation. So who are our “essential” workers?
POST 94. December 21, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “A doctor at an L.A. County public hospital said the number of COVID-19 patients is “increasing exponentially, without an end in sight.”.. “I haven’t done ICU medicine since I was a resident — you don’t want me adjusting your ventilator,” he said. “That’s the challenge, actually — it isn’t so much space, it’s staff…”
POST 96. December 26, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Achieving herd immunity against the coronavirus could require as much as 90 percent of the population to be vaccinated, Anthony Fauci…”…”..he hesitated to state a number as high as 90% weeks ago because many Americans still seemed skeptical about vaccine….”
POST 97. December 27, 2020. “A new variant of the coronavirus that has been spreading through the UK and other countries has not yet been detected in the United States..”.. . But if new-wave medicines like antivirals and antibody therapy contributed to the development of viral variants, it will be “a reminder for all the medical community that we need to use these treatment options carefully.”
POST 99. December 29, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “ICUs are being overwhelmed across many parts of California. Statewide aggregate ICU availability has been at 0% since Christmas Eve…. a surge on top of a surge on top of a surge.”… “hospitals are getting close to the point where they would begin putting COVID-positive patients under the care of COVID-positive staff who are asymptomatic.”
POST 100. December 29, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Front line hospital workers – in the ER, ICUs, EMS, acute medical care, behavioral health – are amongst the most courageous, heroic and dedicated colleagues you will ever meet.
POST 101. December 30, 2020.CORONAVIRUS. Is there a point where the increasing Coronavirus trajectory so far exceeds the slow growth of the vaccination rate that reaching herd immunity through vaccinations becomes less likely?
POST 102. January 2, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “We’ve taken the people with the least amount of resources and capacity and asked them to do the hardest part of the vaccination — which is actually getting the vaccines administered into people’s arms,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health. “Ultimately, the buck seems to stop with no one,”…
POST 103. January 4, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. Dr. Fauci said “that the United States would not follow Britain’s lead in front-loading first vaccine injections, potentially delaying the administration of second doses…Dr. Moore – ”British officials “seem to have abandoned science completely now and are just trying to guess their way out of a mess.”
POST 104. January 6, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Paramedics in Southern California are being told to conserve oxygen and not to bring patients to the hospital who have little chance of survival…”
POST 105. January 8, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. POST 105. January 8, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Facing a shortage of vaccinators, the Association of Immunization Managers… recommends relaxing regulation or adjusting licensing requirements. At least two states, Massachusetts and New York, have changed their laws in recent weeks to expand those who are eligible to give shots.”
POST 106. January 9, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. The riots at the Capitol could have been a superspreader event. “From what I saw… you had a large congregation of individuals who were in close contact for an extended period of time and almost universally unmasked…. many coming and going on buses as well, also unmasked, and hanging out in hotel lobbies.”
POST 107. January 8, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Our job is to make sure the vaccine isn’t politicized the way masks were politicized,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said after getting her vaccine. South Carolina Rep.-elect Nancy Mace, a Republican, wrote that “Congress shouldn’t be putting themselves first in line for the COVID-19 vaccination when the average American can’t get it.”
POST 108. January 9, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. (vaccination)”Line-cutters will be named and shamed. It’s inevitable, as will be the congressional hearings and front-page investigative stories ferreting out who saved their own skin at the expense of others.”
POST 109.January 9, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “President-elect Joe Biden will aim to release nearly every available dose of the coronavirus vaccine when he takes office, a break with the Trump administration’s strategy of holding back half of US vaccine production to ensure second doses are available.
POST 110. January 13, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. ““The (federal) government is changing the way it allocates Covid vaccine doses, now basing it on how quickly states can administer shots and the size of their elderly population.”… “New York State sent a letter to hospitals saying if they don’t use their vaccine allocations by the end of this week, they won’t receive any further allocations.”
POST 111. January 14, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Visitors from Toronto to New York to Buenos Aires have long flocked to Florida for sun, surf and shopping. Now they are coming for the Covid-19 vaccine….
POST 112. January 14, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. CHINA – “Eleven million people are under lockdown in Hebei province after a new cluster of coronavirus infections.
PART 113. January 17, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. The Next President Actually Has a Covid Plan… New York City and other places in the state expect to exhaust their supply of doses as early as next week… Charles Barkley said during the “NBA on TNT” broadcast that pro athletes should get the first round of the vaccine…..
POST 114. January 18, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “When government programs that have been unattended, underfunded and bogged down by red tape suddenly have to meet a huge demand in a crisis, they can’t cope and people suffer….”
POST 115. January 21, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. A year ago today an unnumbered POST was headlined “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday confirmed the first U.S. case of a deadly new coronavirus that has killed six people in China.” The CORONAVIRUS CONTENT TRACKING PROJECT started with HISTORIOGRAPHY and over time moved to LESSONS LEARNED, RAPID RESPONSE, and THE VACCINATION PROGRAM. Now 115 POSTS later – the BIDEN CORONAVIRUS PLAN.
POST 116. January 22, 2021. President Biden – “We’re entering what may be the toughest and deadliest period of the virus. We must set aside politics and finally face this pandemic as one nation.”
POST 117. January 23, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. 1.Dr. Fauci:“The idea that you can get up here….”and.. let the science speak”… “It is somewhat of a liberating feeling.” 2.updated CDC guidance:”.. providers could give the second dose up to six weeks after the first dose..” 3.Dr. Fauci: people would be “taking a chance” if they follow the CDC’s updated guidance.
POST 118. January 24, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Unfortunately, we’ve let this virus spread extensively and are launching the vaccination campaign at the height of the threat,” Dr. Meyers said. “The more the virus spreads before the vaccine reaches people, the fewer deaths we can prevent with the vaccine.”
POST 119. January 27, 2010. CORONAVIRUS. Amazon is offering its help to President Joe Biden with the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines. Washington’s governor, Jay Inslee, included the help of companies like Starbucks, Costco and Microsoft in a plan to vaccinate 45,000 residents a day.
POST 120. January 28, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The fact that four vaccines backed by the federal government seem to be less effective against the (South African) B.1.351 variant has unsettled federal officials and vaccine experts alike. Facing this uncertainty, many researchers said it was imperative to get as many people vaccinated as possible — quickly. Lowering the rate of infection could thwart the contagious variants while they are still rare, and prevent other viruses from gaining new mutations that could cause more trouble.”
POST 121. January 30, 2021. CORONVIRUS. Will our communities become stratified by which vaccine is distributed? 95%ters v. 72%ters? Will the easier distribution of the J&J vaccine drive its inequitable distribution to” hard-hit, marginalized, and medically underserved communities.” (thanx! to XJ/LA)
POST 123. February 4, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Nursing homes across the country are facing the same struggle, as workers have been more reluctant than residents to be vaccinated…
POST 124. February 5, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. Dr. Osterholm ” …it may be time to..go with a ‘first-dose only’ approach, so more people over the age of 65 can have at least some protection right away. He said that would require delaying second doses until this summer.” Dr.Fauci “warned against this practice, and cautioned people about “the danger” that could come with focusing only on the first dose.”
POST 125. June 9, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “States are rolling back Covid-19 restrictions as new cases trend down from record highs across the country. But experts warn it might be too much too soon as variants pose an increased risk and the pandemic… is far from over.”
POST 126. February 11, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “There will be more coronavirus outbreaks in the future. Bats and other mammals are rife with strains and species of this abundant family of viruses. Some of these pathogens will inevitably spill over the species barrier and cause new pandemics. It’s only a matter of time.” (A)
POST 127. February 12, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “… Trump only agreed to be hospitalized when aides told him that he could walk to Marine One or he could wait until his case progressed and he would be carried out.”
POST 128. February 14, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new research on Wednesday that found wearing a cloth mask over a surgical mask offers more protection against the coronavirus, as does tying knots on the ear loops of surgical masks…
POST 129. February 15, 2021, CORONAVIRUS. “ “The CDC released its much-anticipated, updated guidance to help school leaders decide how to safely bring students back into classrooms, or keep them there.”…” For politicians, parents and school leaders looking for a clear green light to reopen schools, this is not it.”
POST 130. February 16, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “A second person who had contracted the Ebola virus died this week in the Democratic Republic of Congo, marking another outbreak just three months after the nation outlasted the virus’s second-worst outbreak in history…”
POST 131. February 17, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “It really is right now – a race between how quickly new variants, particularly the U.K. variant, can spread in the United States and how quickly we can get people vaccinated”
POST 132. February 20, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “In Texas, where over 2.5 million people are still without power, the state health department said this week’s vaccine shipments wouldn’t arrive until Wednesday at the earliest.”
POST 133. February 23, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Going off your meds is a surefire way to aggravate your doctor. What if a whole country did it?” The United Kingdom has veered into uncharted territory by changing tack and introducing a revised COVID-19 vaccination protocol, one that involves distributing the second dose at 12 weeks, rather than the prescribed 21 days.”
POST 134. February 24, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. The first tranche of the J&J (single dose) vaccine must go to K-12 teachers, so schools can open safely in the first 100 days of the Biden Administration. The federal government…”can set up its own vaccination centers in regions with eligible populations it’s trying to target.” We owe our front-line teachers nothing less!
POST 135. February 27, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “As Chief Executive Officers of New York’s major health care systems, we would like to provide facts to clear up confusion in the public and the media regarding decisions to discharge patients to nursing homes during New York’s spring coronavirus surge.”
POST 136. March 2, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. ““The governors of Texas and Mississippi both announced on Tuesday they would be lifting their states’ mask mandates and rolling back many of their Covid-19 health mandates..”…while “The US could experience a “fourth surge” of coronavirus before the majority of the country is vaccinated.”
POST 137. March 4, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The clamor for hard-to-get Covid-19 vaccines has created armies of anxious Americans who have resorted to hunting for leftovers on the fringes of the country’s patchwork vaccination system. They haunt pharmacies at the end of the day in search of an extra, expiring dose. They drive from clinic to clinic hoping that someone was a no-show to their appointment. They cold-call pharmacies like eager telemarketers: Any extras today? Maybe tomorrow? Some pharmacists have even given them a nickname: vaccine lurkers.” (H)
POST 138. March 6, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “New cases are decreasing in the third wave because we are past the holidays, not because of vaccinations. It is a common misconception that the decrease we are seeing in new cases, hospitalizations, and deaths in the U.S. is due to vaccinations. The two aren’t related; at least yet.”
POST 139. March 8, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. CDC Issues First Set of Guidelines on How Fully Vaccinated People Can Visit Safely with Others…” In practice, that means fully vaccinated grandparents may visit unvaccinated healthy adult children and healthy grandchildren of the same household without masks or physical distancing.” (C)
POST 140. March 9, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “In West Virginia, they are bracing for the second wave….. Not coronavirus but opioid overdoses, with one scourge driving a resurgence of the other.
POST 141. March 11, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. Today is the first anniversary of the WHO declaration that the novel coronavirus was a Public Health Emergency of International Concern… “To truly prepare itself against the next pandemic, the U.S. has to reimagine what preparedness looks like.”
POST 142. March 15, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Candida auris is a superbug, a pathogen that can evade drugs made to kill it—and early signs suggest the COVID-19 pandemic may be propelling infections of the highly dangerous yeast. That’s because C. auris is particularly prominent in hospital settings, which have been flooded with people this year due to the coronavirus.”
POST 143. March 17, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The Trump administration sought to suppress Covid-19 testing in the United States last year by softening guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on who needed to be tested, a House panel said Monday.”
POST 144. March 20, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. ““The vaccine hesitancy we are seeing isn’t just about Covid vaccines,”… “It is a general reflection of Americans’ lack of trust in science, the pharmaceutical industry, and large health care institutions. We need a full court press on science and vaccine education right now to prevent more aggressive Covid-19 variants from developing and taking hold.”
POST 145. March 25, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Efforts to disseminate Covid-19 vaccines as widely as possible are hitting an unexpected obstacle: health-care workers who decline the shots.
POST 146. March 30, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. Dr. Osterholm told Becker’s: “This is the perfect storm,”…”Here is Europe locking down and having problems containing B.1.1.7, even with vaccinations and previous infection histories. Here we are opening up as wide as we can. We are literally just walking into the mouth of the virus saying, ‘Don’t worry.'” (M)
POST 147. April 5, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The pandemic helped cement the shift to “a philosophy of really focusing on the role of the physician in reasoning through ambiguous and unknown problems as the focus of education, rather than teaching students that the role of physician was to memorize a body of knowledge that was already in existence and good enough for what usually happens.”
POST 148. April 7, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. While the Biden administration accelerates vaccinations to ward off numerous variants and as more young people are being hospitalized, states, even with increasing case rates are on paths to fully reopen. Politics v. public health!
POST 149. April 10, 2021. CORONAVIRIUS. “From Michigan to Massachusetts, COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations are on the rise again. Deaths will soon follow. “ ”.. the Biden administration is facing renewed calls to delay second vaccine doses and blanket more of the U.S. population with an initial shot.”
POST 150. April 10, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The use of so-called COVID-19 “vaccine passports” is quickly becoming a divisive issue across the US – with several states, including New York, embracing the idea, while others have already moved to ban them.”
POST 151. April 14, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. the J&J vaccination pause. “ Federal officials are concerned that doctors may not be trained to spot or treat the rare disorder if recipients of the vaccine develop symptoms of it…” “…a standard treatment for blood clots — use of an anticoagulant drug — could be dangerous or even fatal in such cases…”
“With millions of Americans being vaccinated against Covid-19 every day, a heated debate is underway — do these people need proof of immunization in the form of a vaccine passport?
Just like a national passport, a vaccine passport could allow the bearer entrance to a venue, like a crowded concert, or a foreign country that demands proof of vaccination in addition to a visa and valid national passport.
Vaccination cards from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention aren’t quite the same as a vaccine passport. Though they are a record of what vaccine a person got and when, they can easily be forged.
A vaccine passport is just proof that a person has been immunized against Covid-19. It could be in the form of a smartphone app or a written certificate, for those who don’t have smartphones.
Some health experts argue that such proof of vaccination can be the ticket back to normalcy. It could reward people for getting vaccinated by allowing them into a crowded concert or ballgame, and offer them peace of mind that the person next to them has been immunized, too — thus helping to make crowded places safer….
But critics point to privacy concerns and overreach by authorities…” (A)
“What are the Downsides?
It’s already been established that more research into coronavirus vaccination and transmission is needed, but experts believe equity could be an additional concern with vaccine passports.
“It is hard to imagine how vaccine passports could be put into place in a way that would make travel safer around the world in an equitable manner,” Mercedes Carnethon, vice chairwoman of preventive medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, says in an email.
While the U.S. has administered over 143 million doses of coronavirus vaccines, dozens of countries have yet to administer a single shot.
Should a coronavirus vaccine passport be put into place for international travel, it would clearly put countries that have less access to vaccines at a disadvantage.
WHO’s stance is that “national authorities and conveyance operators should not introduce requirements of proof of COVID-19 vaccination for international travel as a condition for departure or entry, given that there are still critical unknowns regarding the efficacy of vaccination in reducing transmission.” It added that “preferential vaccination of travellers could result in inadequate supplies of vaccines for priority populations considered at high risk of severe COVID-19 disease.”
There are also privacy concerns to consider, as people may not be willing to share their health data with companies.
“There’s always going to be hesitancy, whether it’s about getting the vaccine or giving information about their status,” Raymond says.
And it’s unclear how much interest U.S. citizens would have in such a system, given that people already seem to be willing to travel within the country regardless of their vaccination status. Young spring breakers have taken to Florida beaches, prompting officials to label the developments “warning signs” of a potential backslide in progress against the coronavirus.
In a country where the pandemic has demonstrated drastic political divides over coronavirus mitigation strategies, a vaccine passport system could be a hard sell.
“Our country has not shown a united front to date when it comes to [COVID-19] mitigation strategies, unlike countries in Europe, Asia and famously New Zealand who have gone through a series of rolling nationwide lockdowns as needed,” Carnethon says. “It seems that requiring visitors to the U.S. to show vaccine passports would be challenging to receive bipartisan support to put into place.” “(B)
“The World Health Organization (WHO) does not back the use of coronavirus vaccine passports for travel, a spokesperson said.
WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris said the world health agency does not back the use of these passports — proof that one has been vaccinated against COVID-19 — because it is not yet known if those who have been vaccinated against the virus can still transmit it. She cited equity concerns as another reason the WHO does not endorse the use of them at this time.
“We as WHO are saying at this stage we would not like to see the vaccination passport as a requirement for entry or exit because we are not certain at this stage that the vaccine prevents transmission,” Harris said during a United Nations news briefing, per Reuters.
In the U.S., the issue of vaccine passports has largely become partisan, with Republican lawmakers mostly against the concept.
“There are all those other questions, apart from the question of discrimination against the people who are not able to have the vaccine for one reason or another,” she added.
The news comes after the nation’s top infectious disease expert also spoke to vaccine passports, saying that the federal government won’t be mandating them for travelers or businesses after the pandemic is over.
“I doubt that the federal government will be the main mover of a vaccine passport concept,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, who also serves as President Biden’s chief medical adviser, told the Politico Dispatch podcast on Monday.
“They may be involved in making sure things are done fairly and equitably, but I doubt if the federal government is going to be the leading element of that,” he added.
Some argue that mandating vaccine passports could speed the re-opening of international travel. But the issue of vaccine passports is complicated and has been hotly debated around the world, with questions largely around how much governments, employers and venues have a right to know about a person’s vaccination status.” (C)
Last month, New York became the first state in the nation to formally launch a digital vaccine passport for Empire State residents to verify that they’ve been immunized against the coronavirus.
The state’s program, dubbed the “Excelsior Pass,” allows New Yorkers to prove their vaccination status, or a recent negative COVID-19 test, in order to gain entry to events and businesses.
Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden and the Times Union Center in Albany have already begun using the app. Smaller arts, entertainment and event venues are also expected to utilize the pass, Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s office has said…
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker has also said that he supports passports, but added that they should not be required to enter an event or facility.
“As long as it is your choice,” Pritzker told reporters, according to Patch.com. “If people ask you to show that for a particular venue or private venue, they have the ability and right to do that. You don’t have to show that to them. You don’t have to be to go to that venue or be engaged in that activity.”
Meanwhile, leaders in a slew of states — including Florida, Texas, Georgia, Tennessee, Missouri and Nebraska — have already expressed fierce opposition to any use of vaccine passports within their borders.
On Tuesday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued an executive order prohibiting state agencies or organizations that receive state funds from requiring COVID-19 vaccine passports.
“Government should not require any Texan to show proof of vaccination and reveal private health information just to go about their daily lives. That is why I have issued an Executive Order that prohibits government-mandated vaccine passports in Texas,” Abbott said in a statement. “We will continue to vaccinate more Texans and protect public health — and we will do so without treading on Texans’ personal freedoms.”
“It’s completely unacceptable for either the government or the private sector to impose upon you the requirement that you show proof of vaccine to just simply be able to participate in normal society,” DeSantis has said.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp said he was opposed to “state-mandated” vaccine passports on Tuesday.
“I do not and will not support any kind of state-mandated vaccine passport. While the development of multiple safe, highly effective COVID-19 vaccines has been a scientific miracle, the decision to receive the vaccine should be left up to each individual,” Kemp said on Twitter….
The Biden administration has said that it is working to create a set of standards for the many private companies making their own versions of passports — but will not make or require its own federal version.
“The government is not now, nor will we be supporting a system that requires Americans to carry a credential,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters at a briefing on Tuesday.” (D)
“Cathay Pacific airlines, convinced that digital proof of coronavirus vaccination will bring about the return of safe international travel, asked its pilots and crew to try out a new mobile app that showed their vaccination status on a recent flight from Hong Kong to Los Angeles…
And Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer, is offering electronic verification apps to patients vaccinated in its stores so they “can easily access their vaccine status as needed,” the company says.
Around the country, businesses, schools and politicians are considering “vaccine passports” — digital proof of vaccination against the coronavirus — as a path to reviving the economy and getting Americans back to work and play. Businesses especially fear that too many customers will stay away unless they can be assured that the other patrons have been inoculated.
But the idea is raising charged legal and ethical questions: Can businesses require employees or customers to provide proof — digital or otherwise — that they have been vaccinated when the coronavirus vaccine is ostensibly voluntary?
Can schools require that students prove they have been injected with what is still officially an experimental prophylaxis the same way they require long-approved vaccines for measles and polio? And finally, can governments mandate vaccinations — or stand in the way of businesses or educational institutions that demand proof?
Legal experts say the answer to all of these questions is generally yes, though in a society so divided, politicians are already girding for a fight. Government entities like school boards and the Army can require vaccinations for entry, service and travel — practices that flow from a 1905 Supreme Court ruling that said states could require residents to be vaccinated against smallpox or pay a fine.
“A community has the right to protect itself against an epidemic of disease which threatens the safety of its members,” Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote in Jacobson v. Massachusetts, the 1905 case.
Private companies, moreover, are free to refuse to employ or do business with whomever they want, subject to only a few exceptions, ones that do not include vaccination status. And states can probably override that freedom by enacting a law barring discrimination based on vaccination status…
One arm of the government has offered some help: The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has told employers that they can mandate coronavirus vaccination because public health comes first. If an employee cannot get vaccinated because of a disability or a sincerely held religious belief, and the company cannot make an accommodation, the agency said, “then it would be lawful for the employer to exclude the employee from the workplace.” (E)
“A southbound passenger train halted in southern Quebec near the Vermont border, where an elderly, bespectacled man boarded the train. This man, a physician named Dr. Hamilton, worked his way down the aisles, asking each passenger, “Been vaccinated?” Unless they had documentation proving that they had been, Hamilton asked them to display their arms, where he looked for a “fresh scar” indicating a recent inoculation. If he could find no scar, a local paper informed readers, he either vaccinated the passenger on the spot or asked them to leave the train before it entered the United States.
The year was 1885. U.S. border officials in the late 19th century did not expect travelers to carry the identification documents that international transit requires today—but they did often require passengers to provide evidence that they had been vaccinated from smallpox. Whether at ports of entry including New York’s Ellis Island and San Francisco’s Angel Island, or along the U.S. border with Canada or Mexico, officials expected border-crossers to prove their immunity. As an El Paso newspaper put it in 1910, travelers needed to show one of three things: “A vaccination certificate, a properly scarred arm, or a pitted face” indicating that they had survived smallpox.” (F)
““They’re coming whether we like it or not,” said Dr. Saad Omer, director of the Yale Institute for Global Health, referring to programs that verify a person’s vaccination status. But he said the conversations policymakers and private businesses have right now could help depoliticize this public health tool and maintain public trust.
What is the precedent?
For centuries, yellow fever haunted the world’s port cities. The highly infectious mosquito-borne disease spread easily and often was deadly, especially in warmer climates, sickening an estimated 200,000 and killing 30,000 people each year among unvaccinated populations, according to the CDC. To this day, there is no cure for yellow fever.
But in 1937, virologist and physician Max Theiler developed an effective vaccine to thwart the disease. Two decades later, the World Health Organization issued the International Certification for Vaccination or Prophylaxis, a yellow-colored paper also known as a Yellow Card. These certificates served as proof that the bearer had been vaccinated and did not pose a risk of carrying yellow fever or causing a potential outbreak. It remains a standard document for U.S.
Unlike the physical Yellow Cards, there are growing concerns about data privacy as documents.. verifying COVID-19 vaccination would exist and generally be accessed digitally. These digital health records would operate outside of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, or HIPAA, which protects people’s private medical information from being disclosed by health care providers, health plans, or businesses. And there are instances when HIPAA allows that information to be released, such as when it is in the public interest. More broadly, some people are concerned that their data could be used against them by law enforcement, accessed by hackers or sold to third-party vendors if regulators fail to offer appropriate oversight.” (G)
“On Etsy, eBay, Facebook and Twitter, little rectangular slips of paper started showing up for sale in late January. Printed on card stock, they measured 3 by 4 inches and featured crisp black lettering. Sellers listed them for $20 to $60 each, with a discount on bundles of three or more. Laminated ones cost extra.
All were forgeries or falsified copies of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention vaccination cards, which are given to people who have been inoculated against Covid-19 in the United States.
“We found hundreds of online stores selling the cards, potentially thousands were sold,” said Saoud Khalifah, the founder of Fakespot, which offers tools to detect fake listings and reviews online.
The coronavirus has made opportunists out of many people, like those who hoarded bottles of hand sanitizer at the start of the pandemic or those who cheated recipients out of their stimulus checks. Now online scammers have latched on to the latest profit-making initiative: the little white cards that provide proof of shots.
Online stores offering counterfeit or stolen vaccine cards have mushroomed in recent weeks, Mr. Khalifah said. The efforts are far from hidden, with Facebook pages named “vax-cards” and eBay listings with “blank vaccine cards” openly hawking the items.
Selling fake vaccination cards could break federal laws that forbid copying the C.D.C. logo, legal experts said. If the cards were stolen and filled out with false numbers and dates, they could also violate identity theft laws, they said….
The C.D.C. said it was “aware of cases of fraud regarding counterfeit Covid-19 vaccine cards.” It asked people not to share images of their personal information or vaccine cards on social media.” (H)
“Many technology and health care entities have banded together as the Vaccine Credential Initiative, to develop a broadly agreed-upon set of open standards, meaning that the software underlying a verification system is transparent and it can adapt easily to other systems, while safeguarding privacy. The W.H.O. has a similar initiative, the Smart Vaccination Certificate.
But several companies are creating closed, proprietary systems that they hope to sell to clients, and some apparently would have access to users’ information.
One concern is that a profusion of systems might not be compatible, defeating the purpose of making it easy to check someone’s status.
Another objection is that any requirement to prove vaccination status would discriminate against those who can’t get the shot or refuse to, and there is lingering uncertainty about how well inoculation prevents virus transmission.
For those reasons, the W.H.O. said this week that it does not support requiring proof of vaccination for travel — for now.” (I)
PART 1. January 21, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday confirmed the first U.S. case of a deadly new coronavirus that has killed six people in China.”
PART 2. January 29, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “If it’s not contained shortly, I think we are looking at a pandemic..”….. “With isolated cases of the dangerous new coronavirus cropping up in a number of states, public health officials say it is only a matter of time before the virus appears in New York City.”
PART3. February 3, 2020. “The Wuhan coronavirus spreading from China is now likely to become a pandemic that circles the globe…”..Trump appeared to downplay concerns about the flu-like virus …We’re gonna see what happens, but we did shut it down..” (D)
PART 4. February 9, 2020. Coronavirus. “A study published Friday in JAMA found that 41% of the first 138 patients diagnosed at one hospital in Wuhan, China, were presumed to be infected in that hospital.….
PART 5. February 12, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “In short, shoe-leather public health and basic medical care—not miracle drugs—are generally what stop outbreaks of emerging infections..”
POST 6. February 18, 2020. Coronovirus. “Amid assurances that the (ocean liner) Westerdam was disease free, hundreds of people disembarked in Cambodia…” “ One was later found to be infected”…. “Over 1,000… passengers were in…transit home”…. “This could be a turning point””
PART 7. February 20, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. With SARS preparedness underway in NJ LibertyHealth/ Jersey City Medical Center, where I was President, proposed that our 100 bed community hospital with all single-bedded rooms, be immediately transformed into an EMERGENCY SARS ISOLATION Hospital.
PART 8. February 24, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…every country’s top priority should be to protect its health care workers. This is partly to ensure that hospitals themselves do not become sites where the coronavirus is spread more than it is contained.”
PART 9. February 27, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Responding to a question about the likelihood of a U.S. outbreak, President Trump said, “I don’t think it’s inevitable…”It probably will. It possibly will,” he continued. “It could be at a very small level, or it could be at a larger level.”
Part 10. March 1, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Stop Surprise Medical Bills for Coronavirus care. (&) Lessons Learned (or not) In California and Washington State from community acquired cases.
PART 11. March 5, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Gov. Andrew Cuomo… would require employers to pay workers and protect their jobs if they are quarantined because of the coronavirus.”
Part 12. March 10, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Tom Bossert, Donald Trump’s former homeland security advisor…(said) that due to the coronavirus outbreak, “We are 10 days from the hospitals getting creamed.”
Part 13.. March 14, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “If I’m buying real estate in New York, I’ll listen to the President….If I’m asking about infectious diseases, I’m going to listen to Tony Fauci,”
PART 14. March 17, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “ “Most physicians have never seen this level of angst and anxiety in their careers”…. One said “I am sort of a pariah in my family.”
PART 15. March 22, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…Crimson Contagion” and imagining an influenza pandemic, was simulated by the Trump administration….in a series of exercises that ran from last January to August.
PART 16. March 27, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. I am not a clinician or a medical ethicist but articles on Coronavirus patient triage started me Googling………to learn about FUTILE TREATMENT
PART 17. April 2, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Florida allows churches to continue holding services. Gun stores deemed “essential.” “New York’s private and public hospitals unite to manage patient load and share resources.
PART 18. April 9, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The federal government’s emergency stockpile of personal protective equipment (PPE) is depleted, and states will not be receiving any more shipments, administration staff told a House panel.
PART 19. April 13, 2020 CORONOAVIRUS. “…overlooked in the United States’ halting mobilization against the novel coronavirus: the personal aides, hospice attendants, nurses and occupational or physical therapists who deliver medical or support services to patients in their homes.”
POST 22. April 29, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. ..the “ACS released a list of 10 issues that should be addressed before a healthcare organization resumes elective surgeries[JM1] ….”
POST 23. May 3, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. … what Dr. Fauci really wants,…”is just to go to a baseball game. That will have to wait. The level of testing for the virus is not adequate enough to allow for such mass gatherings.’ (K)
POST 24. May 7, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie said: “there are going to be deaths no matter what”… but that people needed to get back to work.
POST 25. May 10, 2020, CORONAVIRUS. “It is scary to go to work,” said Kevin Hassett, a top economic adviser to the president. “I think that I’d be a lot safer if I was sitting at home than I would be going to the West Wing.”
POST 26. May 14, 2020. CORONAVIRUS, “Deep cleaning is not a scientific concept”….”there is no universal protocol for a “deep clean” to eradicate the coronavirus”
POST 27. May 19, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Hospital…executives…are taking pay cuts…to help offset the financial fallout from COVID-19.” As “front line” layoffs and furloughs accelerate…
POST 28. May 23, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. ““You’ve got to be kidding me,”..”How could the CDC make that mistake? This is a mess.” CDC conflates viral and antibody tests numbers.
PART 29. May 22, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The economy did not close down. It closed down for people who, frankly, had the luxury of staying home,” (Governor Cuomo). But not so for frontline workers!
POST 30. June 3,202. CORONAVIRUS. “The wave of mass protests across the United States will almost certainly set off new chains of infection for the novel coronavirus, experts say….
Post 32. June 16, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Could the Trump administration be pursuing herd immunity by “inaction”? “ If Fauci didn’t exist, we’d have to invent him.”
POST 34. June 26, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. CDC Director Redfield… “the number of coronavirus infections…could be 10 times higher than the confirmed case count — a total of more than 20 million.” As Florida, Texas and Arizona become eipicenters!
POST 35. June 29, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Pence: “We slowed the spread. We flattened the curve. We saved lives..” While Dr. Fauci “warned that outbreaks in the South and West could engulf the country…”
POST 36. July 2, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “There’s just a handful of interventions proven to curb the spread of the coronavirus. One of them is contact tracing, and “it’s not going well,” (Dr. Anthony Fauci)..
POST 37. June 8, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. When “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.”
POST 38. July 15, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Some Lessons Learned, or not. AdventHealth CEO Terry Shaw: I wouldn’t hesitate to go to Disney as a healthcare CEO — based on the fact that they’re working extremely hard to keep people safe,” (M)
POST 39. July, 23,2020. CORONAVIRUS. A Tale of Two Cities. Seattle becomes New York (rolls back reopening) while New York becomes Seattle (moves to partial phase 4 reopening)
POST 40. July 27, 2020. CORONAVIRUS.” One canon of medical practice is that you order a test only if you can act on the result. And with a turnaround time of a week or two, you cannot. What we have now is often not testing — it’s testing theater.”
POST 41. August 2, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Whenever a vaccine for the coronavirus becomes available, one thing is virtually certain: There won’t be enough to go around. That means there will be rationing.”
POST 44. September 1, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The CDC…modified its coronavirus testing guidelines…to exclude people who do not have symptoms of Covid-19.” (While Dr. Fauci was undergoing surgery.) A White House official said: “Everybody is going to catch this thing eventually..”
POST 45. September 9, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Trump on Fauci. ‘You inherit a lot of people, and you have some you love, some you don’t. I like him. I don’t agree with him that often but I like him.’
POST 46. September 17, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Bill Gates used to think of the US Food and Drug Administration as the world’s premier public-health authority. Not anymore. And he doesn’t trust the Centers for Disease Control and Protection either….”
POST 47. September 24, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Perry N. Halkitis, dean of the School of Public Health at Rutgers University…called New York City’s 35 percent rate for eliciting contacts “very bad.” “For each person, you should be in touch with 75 percent of their contacts within a day,” he said”
POST 48. October 1, 2020. “…you can actually control the outbreak if you do the nonpharmaceutical interventions (social distancing and masks). In the United States we haven’t done them. We haven’t adhered to them; we’ve played with them.” (A)
POST 49. October 4, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. RAPID RESPONSE. “The possibility that the president and his White House entourage were traveling superspreaders is a nightmare scenario for officials in Minnesota, Ohio, New Jersey and Pennsylvania…”
POST 50. October 6, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Monday October 5th will go down as one of the most fraught chapters in the history of American public Health (and national security).
POST 51. October 12, 2020. Rather than a hodge-podge of Emergency Use Authorizations, off-label “experimentation”, right-to-try arguments, and “politicized” compassionate use approvals maybe we need to designate REGIONAL EMERGING VIRUSES REFERRAL CENTERS (REVRCs).
POST 52. October 18, 2020. ZIKA/ EBOLA/ CANDIDA AURIS/ SEVERE FLU/ Tracking. “… if there was a severe flu pandemic, more than 33 million people could be killed across the world in 250 days… Boy, do we not have our act together.” —”- Bill Gates. July 1, 2018
POST 54. October 22, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. POST 54A. New Jersey’s Coronavirus response, led by Governor Murphy and Commissioner of Health Persichilli started with accelerated A+ traditional, evidence-based Public Health practices, developed over years of experience with seasonal flu, swine flu, Zika, and Ebola.
POST 55. October 26, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. The Testing Conundrum: “ It’s thus very possible to be antigen negative but P.C.R. positive, while still harboring the virus in the body..”
POST 57. November 3, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Dr. Deborah Birx: the US is entering its “most deadly phase” yet, one that requires “much more aggressive action,”
POST 58. November 4, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…the president has largely shuttered the White House Coronavirus Task Force and doubled down on anti-science language…”
POST 59. November 5, 2020. Coronavirus. “The United States on Wednesday recorded over 100,000 new coronavirus cases in a single day for the first time since the pandemic began..
POST 61. November 7, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Joe Biden’s top priority entering the White House is fighting both the immediate coronavirus crisis and its complex long-term aftermath…” “Here are the key ways he plans to get US coronavirus cases under control.”
POST 62. November 8, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The United States reported its 10 millionth coronavirus case on Sunday, with the latest million added in just 10 days,…”
POST 63. November 9, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “New York City-based Mount Sinai Health System has opened a center to help patients recovering from COVID-19 and to study the long-term impact of the disease….”
POST 64. November 10, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “It works! Scientists have greeted with cautious optimism a press release declaring positive interim results from a coronavirus vaccine phase III trial — the first to report on the final round of human testing.”
POST 65. November 11, 2020. CORONAVIRUS, “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention took a stronger stance in favor of masks on Tuesday, emphasizing that they protect the people wearing them, rather than just those around them…
POST 66. November.12, 2020. CORONAVIRUS.”… as the country enters what may be the most intense stage of the pandemic yet, the Trump administration remains largely disengaged.”… “President-elect Biden has formed a special transition team dedicated to coordinating the coronavirus response across the government…”
POST 67. November 13, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “When all other options are exhausted, the CDC website says, workers who are suspected or confirmed to have COVID-19 (and “who are well enough to work”) can care for patients who are not severely immunocompromised — first for those who are also confirmed to have COVID-19, then those with suspected cases.”
POST 68. November 14, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. The CDC “now is hewing more closely to scientific evidence, often contradicting the positions of the Trump administration.”..” “A passenger aboard the first cruise ship to set sail in the Caribbean since the start of the pandemic has tested positive for coronavirus..”
POST 69. November 15, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Colorado Gov. Jared Polis will issue a new executive order outlining steps hospitals will need to take to ready themselves for a surge in COVID-19 hospitalizations and directing the hospitals to finalize plans for converting beds into ICU beds, adding staffing and scaling back on or eliminating elective procedures….
POST 70. November 16, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “White House coronavirus task force member Dr. Atlas criticized Michigan’s new Covid-19 restrictions..urging people to “rise up” against the new public health measures.
POST 71. November 17, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. ”Hospitals overrun as U.S. reports 1 million new coronavirus cases in a week.” “But in Florida, where the number of coronavirus infections remains the third-highest in the nation, bars and schools remain open and restaurants continue to operate at full capacity.”
POST 72. November 18, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The Health and Human Services Department will not work with President-elect Joe Biden’s (PANDEMIC) team until the General Services Administration makes a determination that he won the election,….”
POST 73. November 19, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…officials at the CDC…urged Americans to avoid travel for Thanksgiving and to celebrate only with members of their immediate households…” When will I trust a vaccine? to the last question I always answer: When I see Tony Fauci take one….”
POST 74. November 20, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Pfizer…submitted to the FDA for emergency use authorization for their coronavirus vaccine candidate. —FDA issued an EUA for the drug baricitinib, in combination with remdesivir, as WHO says remdesivir doesn’t do much of anything.
POST 75. November 21, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “The president and CEO of one of the nation’s largest non-profit health systems says he won’t be wearing a mask at work because he’s recovered from COVID-19, and doing so would only be a “symbolic gesture” because he considers himself immune from the virus….
POST 76. November 23, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” Ventilators..”just keep people alive while the people caring for them can figure out what’s wrong and fix the problem. And at the moment, we just don’t have enough of those people.”
POST 77. November 26, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Pope Francis: “When I got really sick at the age of 21, I had my first experience of limit, of pain and loneliness.”.. “….Aug. 13, 1957. I got taken to a hospital…”….” I remember especially two nurses from this time.”…” They fought for me to the end, until my eventual recovery.”
POST 78. November 27, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Kelby Krabbenhoft is no longer president and CEO of Sioux Falls, S.D.-based Sanford Health.” “…for not wearing a face covering… “ because “He considered himself immune from the virus.”
POST 79. November 28, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Mayo Clinic. “”Our surge plan expands into the garage…”..””Not where I’d want to put my grandfather or my grandmother,” … though it “may have to happen.”
POST 81. December 1, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Dr. Atlas, … who espoused controversial theories and rankled government scientists while advising President Trump on the coronavirus pandemic, resigned…”
POST 82. December 3, 2020. CORONAVIRIUS. The NBA jumped to the front of the line for Coronavirus testing….while front line nurses often are still waiting. Who will similarly “hijack” the vaccine?
POST 83. December 4, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “California Gov. Gavin Newsom says he will impose a new, regional stay-at-home order for areas where capacity at intensive care units falls below 15%.”… East Tennessee –“This is the first time the health care capability benchmark has been in the red..”
POST 84. December 6, 2020. CPRONAVIRUS. “ More than 100,000 Americans are in the hospital with COVID-19…” “We’re seeing C.D.C. …awaken from (its) politics-induced coma…”…Dr. Fauci “to be a chief medical adviser in Biden’s incoming administration..”.. “Trump administration leaves states to grapple with how to distribute scarce vaccines..”
POST 85. December 7, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…Florida, Gov. DeSantis’ administration engaged in a pattern of spin and concealment that misled the public on the gravest health threat the state has ever faced..”.. “NY Gov. Cuomo said…the state will implement a barrage of new emergency actions..”… Rhode Island and Massachusetts open field hospitals… “Biden Names Health Team to Fight Pandemic”
POST 86. December 9, 2020. If this analysis seems a bit incomprehensible it is because “free Coronavirus test” is often an oxymoron! with charges ranging from as little as $23 to as much as $2,315… Laws (like for free Coronavirus tests) are Like Sausages. Better Not to See Them Being Made. (Please allow about 20 seconds for the text to download. Thanx!)
POST 87. December 10, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…Rudolph W. Giuliani, the latest member of President Trump’s inner circle to contract Covid-19, has acknowledged that he received at least two of the same drugs the president received. He even conceded that his “celebrity” status had given him access to care that others did not have.”
POST 88. December 11, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “As COVID-19 cases surge, the federal government is releasing data about hospital capacity at facilities around the country….”The new data paints the picture of how a specific hospital is experiencing the pandemic,”…
PART 89. December 12, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. THE VACCINE!!! “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” Winston Churchill
POST 90. December 14, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “…the first doses of a Covid-19 vaccine have been given to the American public..”…” Each person who receives a vaccine needs two doses, and it’s up to states to allocate their share of vaccines.”
POST 91. December 15, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “UPMC will first give (vaccination) priority to those in critical jobs. That includes a range of people working in critical units, from workers cleaning the emergency room and registering patients to doctors and nurses.. “Finally, if needed, UPMC will use a lottery to select who will be scheduled first.”
POST 92. December 17, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “..each state — and each hospital system — has come up with its own (vaccination) plan and priorities. The result has been a sometimes confusing constellation of rules and groupings that has left health care workers wondering where they stand.” (Trump appointee July 4th email “…we need to establish herd, and it only comes about allowing the non-high risk groups expose themselves to the virus. PERIOD,”)
POST 93. December 19, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. On NPR Congresswoman Shalala (D-Florida) said she wouldn’t jump the vaccination line in Miami; then added she would get vaccinated in Washington this week. This, even though Congress has failed to pass “essential” Coronavirus legislation. So who are our “essential” workers?
POST 94. December 21, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “A doctor at an L.A. County public hospital said the number of COVID-19 patients is “increasing exponentially, without an end in sight.”.. “I haven’t done ICU medicine since I was a resident — you don’t want me adjusting your ventilator,” he said. “That’s the challenge, actually — it isn’t so much space, it’s staff…”
POST 96. December 26, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “Achieving herd immunity against the coronavirus could require as much as 90 percent of the population to be vaccinated, Anthony Fauci…”…”..he hesitated to state a number as high as 90% weeks ago because many Americans still seemed skeptical about vaccine….”
POST 97. December 27, 2020. “A new variant of the coronavirus that has been spreading through the UK and other countries has not yet been detected in the United States..”.. . But if new-wave medicines like antivirals and antibody therapy contributed to the development of viral variants, it will be “a reminder for all the medical community that we need to use these treatment options carefully.”
POST 99. December 29, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “ICUs are being overwhelmed across many parts of California. Statewide aggregate ICU availability has been at 0% since Christmas Eve…. a surge on top of a surge on top of a surge.”… “hospitals are getting close to the point where they would begin putting COVID-positive patients under the care of COVID-positive staff who are asymptomatic.”
POST 100. December 29, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. Front line hospital workers – in the ER, ICUs, EMS, acute medical care, behavioral health – are amongst the most courageous, heroic and dedicated colleagues you will ever meet.
POST 101. December 30, 2020.CORONAVIRUS. Is there a point where the increasing Coronavirus trajectory so far exceeds the slow growth of the vaccination rate that reaching herd immunity through vaccinations becomes less likely?
POST 102. January 2, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. “We’ve taken the people with the least amount of resources and capacity and asked them to do the hardest part of the vaccination — which is actually getting the vaccines administered into people’s arms,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health. “Ultimately, the buck seems to stop with no one,”…
POST 103. January 4, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. Dr. Fauci said “that the United States would not follow Britain’s lead in front-loading first vaccine injections, potentially delaying the administration of second doses…Dr. Moore – ”British officials “seem to have abandoned science completely now and are just trying to guess their way out of a mess.”
POST 104. January 6, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Paramedics in Southern California are being told to conserve oxygen and not to bring patients to the hospital who have little chance of survival…”
POST 105. January 8, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. POST 105. January 8, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Facing a shortage of vaccinators, the Association of Immunization Managers… recommends relaxing regulation or adjusting licensing requirements. At least two states, Massachusetts and New York, have changed their laws in recent weeks to expand those who are eligible to give shots.”
POST 106. January 9, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. The riots at the Capitol could have been a superspreader event. “From what I saw… you had a large congregation of individuals who were in close contact for an extended period of time and almost universally unmasked…. many coming and going on buses as well, also unmasked, and hanging out in hotel lobbies.”
POST 107. January 8, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Our job is to make sure the vaccine isn’t politicized the way masks were politicized,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said after getting her vaccine. South Carolina Rep.-elect Nancy Mace, a Republican, wrote that “Congress shouldn’t be putting themselves first in line for the COVID-19 vaccination when the average American can’t get it.”
POST 108. January 9, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. (vaccination)”Line-cutters will be named and shamed. It’s inevitable, as will be the congressional hearings and front-page investigative stories ferreting out who saved their own skin at the expense of others.”
POST 109.January 9, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “President-elect Joe Biden will aim to release nearly every available dose of the coronavirus vaccine when he takes office, a break with the Trump administration’s strategy of holding back half of US vaccine production to ensure second doses are available.
POST 110. January 13, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. ““The (federal) government is changing the way it allocates Covid vaccine doses, now basing it on how quickly states can administer shots and the size of their elderly population.”… “New York State sent a letter to hospitals saying if they don’t use their vaccine allocations by the end of this week, they won’t receive any further allocations.”
POST 111. January 14, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Visitors from Toronto to New York to Buenos Aires have long flocked to Florida for sun, surf and shopping. Now they are coming for the Covid-19 vaccine….
POST 112. January 14, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. CHINA – “Eleven million people are under lockdown in Hebei province after a new cluster of coronavirus infections.
PART 113. January 17, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. The Next President Actually Has a Covid Plan… New York City and other places in the state expect to exhaust their supply of doses as early as next week… Charles Barkley said during the “NBA on TNT” broadcast that pro athletes should get the first round of the vaccine…..
POST 114. January 18, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “When government programs that have been unattended, underfunded and bogged down by red tape suddenly have to meet a huge demand in a crisis, they can’t cope and people suffer….”
POST 115. January 21, 2020. CORONAVIRUS. A year ago today an unnumbered POST was headlined “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday confirmed the first U.S. case of a deadly new coronavirus that has killed six people in China.” The CORONAVIRUS CONTENT TRACKING PROJECT started with HISTORIOGRAPHY and over time moved to LESSONS LEARNED, RAPID RESPONSE, and THE VACCINATION PROGRAM. Now 115 POSTS later – the BIDEN CORONAVIRUS PLAN.
POST 116. January 22, 2021. President Biden – “We’re entering what may be the toughest and deadliest period of the virus. We must set aside politics and finally face this pandemic as one nation.”
POST 117. January 23, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. 1.Dr. Fauci:“The idea that you can get up here….”and.. let the science speak”… “It is somewhat of a liberating feeling.” 2.updated CDC guidance:”.. providers could give the second dose up to six weeks after the first dose..” 3.Dr. Fauci: people would be “taking a chance” if they follow the CDC’s updated guidance.
POST 118. January 24, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Unfortunately, we’ve let this virus spread extensively and are launching the vaccination campaign at the height of the threat,” Dr. Meyers said. “The more the virus spreads before the vaccine reaches people, the fewer deaths we can prevent with the vaccine.”
POST 119. January 27, 2010. CORONAVIRUS. Amazon is offering its help to President Joe Biden with the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines. Washington’s governor, Jay Inslee, included the help of companies like Starbucks, Costco and Microsoft in a plan to vaccinate 45,000 residents a day.
POST 120. January 28, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The fact that four vaccines backed by the federal government seem to be less effective against the (South African) B.1.351 variant has unsettled federal officials and vaccine experts alike. Facing this uncertainty, many researchers said it was imperative to get as many people vaccinated as possible — quickly. Lowering the rate of infection could thwart the contagious variants while they are still rare, and prevent other viruses from gaining new mutations that could cause more trouble.”
POST 121. January 30, 2021. CORONVIRUS. Will our communities become stratified by which vaccine is distributed? 95%ters v. 72%ters? Will the easier distribution of the J&J vaccine drive its inequitable distribution to” hard-hit, marginalized, and medically underserved communities.” (thanx! to XJ/LA)
POST 123. February 4, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Nursing homes across the country are facing the same struggle, as workers have been more reluctant than residents to be vaccinated…
POST 124. February 5, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. Dr. Osterholm ” …it may be time to..go with a ‘first-dose only’ approach, so more people over the age of 65 can have at least some protection right away. He said that would require delaying second doses until this summer.” Dr.Fauci “warned against this practice, and cautioned people about “the danger” that could come with focusing only on the first dose.”
POST 125. June 9, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “States are rolling back Covid-19 restrictions as new cases trend down from record highs across the country. But experts warn it might be too much too soon as variants pose an increased risk and the pandemic… is far from over.”
POST 126. February 11, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “There will be more coronavirus outbreaks in the future. Bats and other mammals are rife with strains and species of this abundant family of viruses. Some of these pathogens will inevitably spill over the species barrier and cause new pandemics. It’s only a matter of time.” (A)
POST 127. February 12, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “… Trump only agreed to be hospitalized when aides told him that he could walk to Marine One or he could wait until his case progressed and he would be carried out.”
POST 128. February 14, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new research on Wednesday that found wearing a cloth mask over a surgical mask offers more protection against the coronavirus, as does tying knots on the ear loops of surgical masks…
POST 129. February 15, 2021, CORONAVIRUS. “ “The CDC released its much-anticipated, updated guidance to help school leaders decide how to safely bring students back into classrooms, or keep them there.”…” For politicians, parents and school leaders looking for a clear green light to reopen schools, this is not it.”
POST 130. February 16, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “A second person who had contracted the Ebola virus died this week in the Democratic Republic of Congo, marking another outbreak just three months after the nation outlasted the virus’s second-worst outbreak in history…”
POST 131. February 17, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “It really is right now – a race between how quickly new variants, particularly the U.K. variant, can spread in the United States and how quickly we can get people vaccinated”
POST 132. February 20, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “In Texas, where over 2.5 million people are still without power, the state health department said this week’s vaccine shipments wouldn’t arrive until Wednesday at the earliest.”
POST 133. February 23, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Going off your meds is a surefire way to aggravate your doctor. What if a whole country did it?” The United Kingdom has veered into uncharted territory by changing tack and introducing a revised COVID-19 vaccination protocol, one that involves distributing the second dose at 12 weeks, rather than the prescribed 21 days.”
POST 134. February 24, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. The first tranche of the J&J (single dose) vaccine must go to K-12 teachers, so schools can open safely in the first 100 days of the Biden Administration. The federal government…”can set up its own vaccination centers in regions with eligible populations it’s trying to target.” We owe our front-line teachers nothing less!
POST 135. February 27, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “As Chief Executive Officers of New York’s major health care systems, we would like to provide facts to clear up confusion in the public and the media regarding decisions to discharge patients to nursing homes during New York’s spring coronavirus surge.”
POST 136. March 2, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. ““The governors of Texas and Mississippi both announced on Tuesday they would be lifting their states’ mask mandates and rolling back many of their Covid-19 health mandates..”…while “The US could experience a “fourth surge” of coronavirus before the majority of the country is vaccinated.”
POST 137. March 4, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The clamor for hard-to-get Covid-19 vaccines has created armies of anxious Americans who have resorted to hunting for leftovers on the fringes of the country’s patchwork vaccination system. They haunt pharmacies at the end of the day in search of an extra, expiring dose. They drive from clinic to clinic hoping that someone was a no-show to their appointment. They cold-call pharmacies like eager telemarketers: Any extras today? Maybe tomorrow? Some pharmacists have even given them a nickname: vaccine lurkers.” (H)
POST 138. March 6, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “New cases are decreasing in the third wave because we are past the holidays, not because of vaccinations. It is a common misconception that the decrease we are seeing in new cases, hospitalizations, and deaths in the U.S. is due to vaccinations. The two aren’t related; at least yet.”
POST 139. March 8, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. CDC Issues First Set of Guidelines on How Fully Vaccinated People Can Visit Safely with Others…” In practice, that means fully vaccinated grandparents may visit unvaccinated healthy adult children and healthy grandchildren of the same household without masks or physical distancing.” (C)
POST 140. March 9, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “In West Virginia, they are bracing for the second wave….. Not coronavirus but opioid overdoses, with one scourge driving a resurgence of the other.
POST 141. March 11, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. Today is the first anniversary of the WHO declaration that the novel coronavirus was a Public Health Emergency of International Concern… “To truly prepare itself against the next pandemic, the U.S. has to reimagine what preparedness looks like.”
POST 142. March 15, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Candida auris is a superbug, a pathogen that can evade drugs made to kill it—and early signs suggest the COVID-19 pandemic may be propelling infections of the highly dangerous yeast. That’s because C. auris is particularly prominent in hospital settings, which have been flooded with people this year due to the coronavirus.”
POST 143. March 17, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The Trump administration sought to suppress Covid-19 testing in the United States last year by softening guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on who needed to be tested, a House panel said Monday.”
POST 144. March 20, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. ““The vaccine hesitancy we are seeing isn’t just about Covid vaccines,”… “It is a general reflection of Americans’ lack of trust in science, the pharmaceutical industry, and large health care institutions. We need a full court press on science and vaccine education right now to prevent more aggressive Covid-19 variants from developing and taking hold.”
POST 145. March 25, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “Efforts to disseminate Covid-19 vaccines as widely as possible are hitting an unexpected obstacle: health-care workers who decline the shots.
POST 146. March 30, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. Dr. Osterholm told Becker’s: “This is the perfect storm,”…”Here is Europe locking down and having problems containing B.1.1.7, even with vaccinations and previous infection histories. Here we are opening up as wide as we can. We are literally just walking into the mouth of the virus saying, ‘Don’t worry.'” (M)
POST 147. April 5, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The pandemic helped cement the shift to “a philosophy of really focusing on the role of the physician in reasoning through ambiguous and unknown problems as the focus of education, rather than teaching students that the role of physician was to memorize a body of knowledge that was already in existence and good enough for what usually happens.”
POST 148. April 7, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. While the Biden administration accelerates vaccinations to ward off numerous variants and as more young people are being hospitalized, states, even with increasing case rates are on paths to fully reopen. Politics v. public health!
POST 149. April 10, 2021. CORONAVIRIUS. “From Michigan to Massachusetts, COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations are on the rise again. Deaths will soon follow. “ ”.. the Biden administration is facing renewed calls to delay second vaccine doses and blanket more of the U.S. population with an initial shot.”
POST 150. April 10, 2021. CORONAVIRUS. “The use of so-called COVID-19 “vaccine passports” is quickly becoming a divisive issue across the US – with several states, including New York, embracing the idea, while others have already moved to ban them.”
