The Covid-19 Thread: News, Preparation Tips, Etc

intellectualuva

Well-Known Member
Information on the government's strategic national stockpile that sends medical equipment during times of crises

Health
Inside the secret U.S. stockpile meant to save us all in a bioterror attack



(Monica Akhtar)
By Lena H. Sun
April 24, 2018 at 6:00 AM EDT
A SECRET LOCATION OUTSIDE WASHINGTON, D.C. — From the outside, it looks like an ordinary commercial warehouse, only much bigger, about the size of two super Walmarts. Inside it’s dark except when motion sensors are triggered. When the lights come on, hundreds of thousands of shrink-wrapped boxes of medicines emerge from the gloom, stacked on shelves nearly five stories high.

This is quite a different kind of warehouse. It and several others across the country are part of the $7 billion Strategic National Stockpile, a government repository of drugs and supplies ready for deployment in a bioterrorism or nuclear attack, or against an infectious disease outbreak — of either a known pathogen or some unknown threat with pandemic potential, which global health officials dub “Disease X” — or other major public health emergency. There are antibiotics, including the powerful medication Ciprofloxacin, vaccines for smallpox and anthrax and antivirals for a deadly influenza pandemic.

The need for biodefense has become more clear in the wake of outbreaks of Ebola in West Africa, Zika in the Americas, devastating wildfires and hurricanes, and the poisonings of the North Korean leader's half brother in Malaysia and former Russian spies in England with nerve and radiological agents. Last year, the federal government added three new chemicals to its list of high-priority threats, including chlorine and blister agents, such as mustard gas, that have been used in deadly chemical weapons attacks in Syria. On Monday, officials announced plans to add more anthrax antitoxin.


For nearly two decades, the repository has been almost exclusively managed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That will change under a Trump administration plan to shift oversight of the $575 million program to a different part of the Department of Health and Human Services. Doing so, proponents say, will keep the program intact but streamline decision-making and create “efficiencies.”

But some public health officials and members of Congress in both parties worry the move will disrupt a complex process that relies on long-standing relationships between the federal program and the state and local agencies responsible for distributing the medicine. During a congressional hearing last week, lawmakers expressed concern that a change could risk the government’s ability to deliver lifesaving medical supplies to what public health officials call “the last mile” — to people in need during a disaster.

“You have spent years planning and exercising and training because you need to know what to do if 100,000 doses of Cipro showed up in your state,” said Ali Khan, who used to oversee the program and now is dean at the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s College of Public Health. “How would you get it out? Who would dispense it? These parts are as critical as maintaining the medicines in pristine condition.”


He and other public health experts also question whether the administration’s plan will politicize decision-making about products bought for the stockpile. The office of the assistant secretary for preparedness and response (ASPR) oversees the process by which the government awards contracts to private biotechnology companies that develop and manufacture medicines such as anthrax vaccine. The CDC then is responsible for buying and replenishing the materials. Eligible medicines are tested by the Food and Drug Administration to check if, and for how long, the expiration date can be extended.

Come October, however, the ASPR will be in charge of choosing the products and then purchasing them for the stockpile. Proponents say the shift makes sense operationally to place key decisions about the repository under one office.

“I think this is a very good move,” said Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University. “It will help coordinate and organize the delivery of vital medical responses.”


But critics say it will allow biotech companies to lobby for more of their specialized, and often more expensive, drugs to be included because the federal government is often the only purchaser. Just because the government can buy these products, they say, doesn’t mean it should do so given the parallel need for medications, like antibiotics, that have much broader use.

And it’s not clear, they caution, whether the new structure will make Americans safer.

The stockpile should contain “the stuff we need for the disasters we know we’re going to have — like gloves, syringes, Cipro, penicillin, antibiotics, and influenza vaccines — versus the newest, sexiest version of the anthrax vaccine,” said Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, who was Maryland’s health secretary during the 2001 terrorist and anthrax attacks.

Officials won't say how many stockpile warehouses exist. But there are at least six, according to a 2016 independent report. All the locations are secret, including this one in an industrial complex off a busy highway. A reporter allowed to tour the facility had to agree not to disclose the location. No camera, video equipment or cellphone is permitted inside.

Inside one of the warehouses of the Strategic National Stockpile are containers of medical supplies ready for shipment in the event of a large-scale public health incident. These supplies can be sent out within 12 hours of a federal decision to deploy. (CDC)
In the early hours of a crisis, the warehouse can send an affected city or region a “12-hour push package,” a pre-configured cache of 130 containers of antibiotics, syringes and oxygen tubing, enough to fill the belly of a widebody plane. “About 50 tons of materiel,” said Shirley Mabry, the stockpile’s chief logistics officer.


In the section of the warehouse where biologic drugs such as botulism antitoxins are stored at minus-4 degrees Fahrenheit, workers wear full-body insulated suits. Because of the intense cold they are limited to 20 minutes inside the two enormous freezers, just enough time to drive a forklift in and retrieve a pallet of medicine. An intensely loud vibrating sound makes conversation impossible.

Nationwide, the repository contains enough medical countermeasures to add up to more than 133,995 pallets. Laid flat, they’d cover more than 31 football fields — or 41 acres of land. They contain enough vaccine to protect every person in America from smallpox.

The stockpile program was created in 1999 under President Bill Clinton to respond to terrorist events, including the first World Trade Center bombing, the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway and the Oklahoma City bombing. The original goal was to be ready for chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear threats. The repository includes nearly 2,000 caches of nerve agent antidotes, known as Chempacks, that are stored and maintained separately from the warehouses at more than 1,300 locations around the country where they can be accessed quickly.


Over time, the stockpile’s mission has expanded to include natural disasters and emerging infectious disease threats. The stockpile deployed antiviral medicine during the 2009-2010 swine flu pandemic, and vaccines, portable cots and other supplies during the hurricanes that devastated Houston and Puerto Rico last year. As the only source of botulism antitoxin in the United States, it also sends medicine for about 100 cases a year of severe food poisoning.

The inventory exceeds 1,000 categories of drugs and other items, but CDC’s budget hasn’t always been able to keep up with the program’s ever-growing list of needs.

Houston’s George R. Brown Convention Center became a shelter for those displaced by Hurricane Harvey. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
“It’s a mission among many pressing missions among the CDC,” said Tara O’Toole, who was undersecretary for science and technology under President Barack Obama and chaired a National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine committee in 2016 that reviewed the challenges facing the program. “Bottom line, it's a good idea to lay the responsibility of the cost of maintaining it on the same people who decide what to put in the stockpile.”


The group of federal agencies making decisions about what goes in the repository is led by the ASPR office, which is headed by former Air Force physician Robert Kadlec. He is a former special assistant to President George W. Bush on biodefense and former deputy staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Kadlec stresses that the impending change has nothing to do with CDC’s performance. “The question here is whether we can get better efficiencies,” he said in an interview. At the same time, he said he will be able to advocate most effectively for the program to give it greater visibility, which could lead to more funding.

“Quite frankly, by the back of the envelope, they need more money,” he said.

When the stockpile was established, CDC was the only major public health agency in the federal government. The ASPR office, created in 2006 in the wake of Hurricane Katrina to manage emergency responses across the government, was historically focused on natural disasters and threats from dirty bombs or crude biological or chemical weapons, he said. But since then, the world has changed, with many more unpredictable threats. The ASPR office needs to change to meet these threats. “The decision to move the stockpile, I think, was just a natural one,” Kadlec said.


Yet Congress has some bipartisan concerns about the stockpile’s future. Republican and Democratic appropriators, who just gave the program budget a slight boost for this year, signaled their unease as part of the recently passed spending bill. They specifically highlighted CDC’s “unique expertise in public health preparedness and response, science-based policy and decision-making, public health communication, and coordination with state and local groups.” Lawmakers also “strongly urged” HHS Secretary Alex Azar to “maintain a strong and central role for CDC” in the program.

Kadlec testified April 18 at a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing on next year's HHS biodefense budget. Rep. Tom Cole, (R-Okla.), who chairs the health subcommittee, told Kadlec his main concern is “that we make this organizational change in a way that makes [the stockpile] stronger, not one that's duplicative, let alone something that might disrupt the relationships we have.”

Sen. Patty Murray (Wash.), ranking Democrat on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, faults the administration for failing to get “any input from Congress” despite the fact that lawmakers are in the process of reauthorizing the law that includes the Strategic National Stockpile.


“We have yet to see proof this large-scale public health program with complex state, local and federal partnerships would be better served at ASPR than at CDC,” Murray wrote in a letter in February to Mick Mulvaney, President Trump’s budget director. At the CDC, she said, the program “may be better protected from politicization and therefore better able to be scientifically driven.”

Mulvaney defended the plan in his response, saying it will “streamline operational decisions during responses to public health and other emergencies and improve responsiveness.” It is unlikely Congress could derail the move, but appropriators have to fund it and still can provide direction and oversight.

At CDC, the program’s current director is hoping its planned move this fall will provide new ways to improve the stockpile’s capability. Regardless of where it is located within HHS, Greg Burel said, in an emergency “we will not change the way we respond.”

Read more:

CDC seeks new labs for bioterror pathogens to replace aging facility

In emotional speech, CDC's new director vows to uphold science

This woman is first human infected with rare eye worm


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Lena Sun
Lena H. Sun is a national reporter for The Washington Post covering health with a special focus on public health and infectious disease. A longtime reporter at The Post, she has covered the Metro transit system, immigration, education and was a Beijing



Ive been curious about this since I saw Contagion. I would love to get an understanding of the distribution plans and some of the other logistics involved.
 

ScorpioBeauty09

Well-Known Member
I will not be surprised if much of the world recovers and life gets back to normal, while we're still dealing with this. :nono: 85% of new infections are in US and Europe. India is on lockdown, going door to door with testing, and African countries cut travel when they had the chance, not to mention already have public health structures in place because of Ebola.

 

Layluh

Well-Known Member
Ive been curious about this since I saw Contagion. I would love to get an understanding of the distribution plans and some of the other logistics involved.

Yeah i saw national stockpile on the boxes and i thought it was a charity or donation center or something. Decided to google it and saw it was an actual thing.
 

qchelle

Well-Known Member
36-year-old New York City principal dies of coronavirus complications
BY CHRISTOPHER BRITO

UPDATED ON: MARCH 24, 2020 / 12:22 PM / CBS NEWS


A New York City principal has died because of complications of the coronavirus, officials said. Dezann Romain, 36, is the first known public school staff member to die of the virus.

Romain worked at Brooklyn Democracy Academy, a transfer high school for overage or under-credited students. A union representing New York City's school supervisors and administrators announced her death.

"It is with profound sadness and overwhelming grief that we announce the passing of our sister, CSA member Dezann Romain, Principal of Brooklyn Democracy Academy, due to complications from Coronavirus," the Council of Schools Supervisors and Administrators said in a statement obtained by Chalkbeat, a nonprofit news website that covers education.

New York City school chancellor Richard Carranza called her death "painful for all of us" and extended his condolences to the Brooklyn Democracy Academy and Romain's family.

Trending News ›
"We'll be there for the students and staff through whatever means necessary during this impossibly difficult time," he said in a statement to CBS New York.

Councilman Mark Treyger, who is the chair of the city's education committee, mourned the loss of Romain and called out city agencies for their response to the coronavirus pandemic.

"This needs to serve as a wake-up call for DOHMH, DOE, and City Hall around their collective response to COVID-19 cases in school buildings, even as students are learning from home," Treyger tweeted.

It is unclear if Romain had any underlying health conditions. She is one of 125 New York City residents to die of COVID-19.

Her impact as an educator is still felt today. Keticia Alvarez, who had Romain as an art teacher at Frederick Douglas High School in Far Rockaway almost 10 years ago, said she always "pushed us to think outside the box and color inside the lines."

"Her presence and attitude in class made her class like an escape for many," Alvarez told CBS News. "From the struggles of every day high school life, her class was so relaxing and judgment free."

Three people have died under the age of 44, according to the city's latest statistics. The number of positive cases in the city was at 13,119 as of 6 p.m. Monday, CBS New York reported. De Blasio said New York City needs more help from the federal government.

"We are the epicenter of this crisis," de Blasio said. "No one wants that distinction, not a single one of us, but it is true that we are the epicenter of this crisis, and that's why we so desperately need help, particularly from our federal government to get through it."

First published on March 24, 2020 / 11:22 AM

© 2020 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
 

Jmartjrmd

Well-Known Member

News Rankings

Los Angeles County Reports Virus Death of Person Under 18
Associated Press • March 24, 2020, at 7:57 p.m.


By ROBERT JABLON, Associated Press

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Los Angeles County on Tuesday reported what may be the first U.S. death of a person under 18 from coronavirus.

Health officials said the youth lived in the Mojave Desert city of Lancaster north of Los Angeles but didn't provide other details.

“This is a devastating reminder that COVID-19 affects people of all ages,”county Public Health Department Director Barbara Ferrer said.

A report last week by the Centers for Disease Control found no coronavirus deaths in the U.S. among people 19 and under. That age group accounted for less than 3% of all hospitalizations.

Ferrer also reported two additional deaths of people between 50 and 70 and said that over the last 48 hours there had been 256 new cases in Los Angeles County

A tally by Johns Hopkins University on Tuesday found California cases have topped 2,500, with at least 50 deaths.

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday said California is preparing for a 90-day surge and will need an additional 50,000 hospital beds to handle it. The state also is scrambling to acquire about 1 billion sets of gloves and hundreds of millions of gowns, surgical masks and face shields for healthcare workers and first responders.

Among other things, he said the state would charter flights from China with gear and had heard from companies wanting to use 3-D printers to make surgical masks.

Last week, the governor announced a stay-at-home order covering 40 million Californians and closing all nonessential retail businesses. Lawmakers have issued urgent pleas for people to only leave their homes to buy food, get medication or perform essential services.

The governor on Monday closed parking lots at dozens of beaches and state parks to prevent the spread of coronavirus after large groups flocked to the coast and mountains to get outdoors on the first weekend under the state's stay-at-home order.


Newsom reaffirmed he wants to continue using social pressure, not police enforcement, to get people to maintain safe spacing.

In Santa Cruz, where most people are complying with shelter in place rules, some nonessential businesses remained open and some residents were still congregating in groups.

Law enforcement officials warned they will begin enforcing rules that residents shelter in place.

“While we don’t want to resort to citations or arrests, if we don’t see people take this seriously, we’ll have to," said Sheriff Jim Hart, whose office is receiving dozens of calls daily from people reporting that some residents are gathering in groups and some nonessential businesses are still operating as usual.

In Los Angeles County, where a stay-at-home order was issued last week, Sheriff Alex Villanueva said gun shops are not essential businesses and ordered them to stop selling to the public, a move that enraged Second Amendment advocates who said they planned to challenge it in court.

The stay-at-home order is not a license “for everyone to be panic gun-buying or rushing to stores, which is now what we're seeing," Villanueva said.

He said said gun shops have complied and deputies have not had to issue any citations.

___

Associated Press writers Adam Beam and Don Thompson in Sacramento, Kathleen Ronayne, Janie Har and Juliet Williams in San Francisco, Christopher Weber, Stefanie Dazio, Brian Melley and Michael R. Blood in Los Angeles and Julie Watson and Elliot Spagat in San Diego contributed to this report.

___


Follow AP coverage of the virus outbreak at https://apnews.com/VirusOutbreak and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak.

Copyright 2020 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Bette Davis Eyes

The "OG" Product Junkie
Do you have Wegmans near you? My mom was able to get toilet paper a couple of days ago via delivery...they are limiting it to 1 pack per family.
No. That’s a little south jersey.

The babysitter went to Walmart tonight and there was toilet paper and a lady in the aisle took it all. Walmart doesn’t limit it. They told her they restock every six hours when she complained. She was so mad. I’m at work during the day and she’s with the LO and I haven’t taken him in public in two weeks.
 

Chromia

Well-Known Member
No. That’s a little south jersey.

The babysitter went to Walmart tonight and there was toilet paper and a lady in the aisle took it all. Walmart doesn’t limit it. They told her they restock every six hours when she complained. She was so mad. I’m at work during the day and she’s with the LO and I haven’t taken him in public in two weeks.
I went to Aldi 4 or 5 days ago and they had 4-roll, 12-roll, and 30-roll packs of toilet paper. They had a lot on the shelves and they were bringing more out from the stockroom.

Maybe if you check the NextDoor site you'll be able to find out where the best place is near you to get toilet paper.
 

snoop

Well-Known Member
Source: https://deadline.com/2020/03/chinese-city-wuhan-epicenter-covid19-end-quarantine-1202890828/

Chinese City Wuhan, Original Epicenter Of COVID-19, To End Quarantine

March 24, 2020 3:01am


Coronavirus causes Apple to fall short of sales targets. WALLACE WOON/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
Wuhan, the Chinese city where the coronavirus first emerged back in December, will have its quarantine lifted within two weeks.

The city has been in lockdown for months, but transportation will now resume on April 8 and people will be allowed to leave the province. A statement was posted on the Hubei local government’s website on Tuesday (March 24) confirming the news.

Hubei reported zero new infections on March 19, a significant reduction since the height of the epidemic, according to Bloomberg. Globally, there has been more than 380,000 confirmed cases worldwide and more than 16,000 deaths. In China, there have been more than 80,000 cases and more than 3,000 deaths.

As we reported yesterday, more than 500 cinemas in China reopened over the weekend, though to date that does not appear to include any of the country’s major exhibition chains.

The news of the containment will be welcomed by people around the world who are experiencing earlier stages of lockdowns. Italy, which has been particularly badly hit by the virus, remains in total lockdown, though the increase in confirmed cases has been receding for two days now. There are also reports that the cases in Germany are flattening. Last night, UK PM Boris Johnson placed the country in lockdown mode.
 

qchelle

Well-Known Member
[34 year old] NYC paramedic hospitalized with coronavirus sedated, breathing with ventilator as condition worsens, family says
By NOAH GOLDBERG
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
MAR 24, 2020 | 6:21 PM




Christell Cadet, an FDNY paramedic with coronavirus.(Courtesy of Sherry Singleton)
FDNY EMS paramedic Christell Cadet ― who shared her coronavirus struggle with the world last week from her hospital bed ― is now unable to breathe comfortably on her own and has been hooked up to a ventilator, her distraught family told the Daily News Tuesday.

Cadet, 34, is sedated and has a breathing tube down her throat, but hasn’t given up the fight, her family and friends said.

“She has definitely gotten worse,” said friend and fellow FDNY EMS paramedic Sherry Singleton, who last spoke with Cadet via text on Saturday. Cadet’s condition then showed signs of small signs of deterioration, Singleton said. Her friend was short of breath and getting oxygen round the clock.

By Monday, Cadet was unreachable by either phone or text — and her concerned family soon learned why.

Cadet was transferred to the ICU and sedated, her mother, Jessy Cadet, 61, told The News. The family learned the news early Tuesday.

“Since this morning it’s really, really difficult for me. I can’t think or focus. I try to remind myself I have to remain strong even though she can’t hear me right now,” the anxious mother said.


Cadet was hospitalized a week ago after she collapsed outside her Queens home upon returning from an EMS tour. Her family found her on her hands and knees and struggling to breathe. She later tested positive for coronavirus.

On Friday, speaking to CNN from her hospital bed, Cadet said she’d been working light duty — meaning not doing ambulance tours — with EMS for the past several weeks. She was not handling patients directly and only interacting with other FDNY staff.

“It’s terrifying and we’re just hoping she makes it through to the other side,” her friend Singleton said.


Her family is trying to understand why an otherwise healthy 34-year-old woman has been hit so hard by the respiratory virus, which is considered most dangerous for the elderly.

“It’s a big question mark for me ... 34 years old, for that virus to get on her so aggressively, it’s heartbreaking. I don’t even know how to express that or describe it,” said Jessy Cadet.

FDNY spokesman Jim Long said the department hopes “for a quick return to health for all FDNY members affected by COVID-19.”

As of Monday, 45 FDNY members, including firefighters, EMS and civilians, had tested positive for coronavirus.
 

starfish

Well-Known Member
I think I need to go on a news embargo, it’s all causing me too much anxiety. What I really want to know is who in my community is infected, and that’s not happening due to the lack of tests. I’m in California and I wish we could all shelter in place for at minimum 8 weeks. My doctor told me to pretend everyone has it and keep my distance, practice good hand and house hygiene and don’t touch my face. That’s all I can do.
 

aribell

formerly nicola.kirwan
Yup, the explosion in cases in NY and to a lesser degree in NJ, is largely in the ultra-orthodox communities. There are other cases of course, but the concentration of new cases are in their communities. That is probably why NY has changed the testing policy as well - in Crown Heights for example, just about everyone has been exposed, so it makes more sense to operate under the assumption that everyone has it. And the crazy part is that it took a conference call involving the White House Wednesday night, March 18th to get the rabbis and other community leaders to finally agree to completely close all the synagogues, yeshivahs and stop the public gatherings! That was only 3 days ago... way too late to stop, let alone slow, the spread.

It makes so much sense now why the mayor was hesitant to close the schools. He couldn’t say anything specifically about which communities were being affected; he has no influence in those communities, and he couldn’t do much to enforce the safety recommendations there. Even now, local mainstream media is keeping all of this very quiet, presumably not to inflame tensions. You have to really dig around to find the information, but it is all over media sources within those communities. It’s actually incredibly frustrating because not being forthcoming has made the situation much worse for everyone.

Well, there was just the measles outbreak in Rockland last year, and when they wanted to ban anyone unvaccinated from going out in public, people said it was anti-semitic and directed towards those communities.

This is everywhere though, so they really can't be blamed, and I really expected it to spread in NYC sooner than it did. Oddly enough, the last weekend in January I took a weekend trip with a friend, whose husband is Italian and works for an Italian bank in NYC. She said he wasn't feeling well and was insisting that he had the coronavirus. It hadn't spread a lot globally by that point and I was just like, "How would he have acquired that?" Well anyway, later that week this weird sore throat and dry cough hit me out of nowhere. No other symptoms but a very persistent, severe cough that was still there after a couple of weeks, at which point I went to urgent care. They confirmed it wasn't pneumonia, but I was starting to get worried. I've never had a cough like that before.

Anyway, it did eventually go away, but I do wonder if I actually did have it, and my friend's husband had reason to think he had been exposed (maybe from colleagues who had traveled to China or his own travels).

In any event, as soon as my job converted us to remote work we left the city--and I felt that it looked like a bit of an overreaction at that point. Been back in the midwest for a little over a week and it's insane how the numbers in NYC have exploded in this short amount of time. Gov. Cuomo seems to be doing a good job though.
 
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brg240

Well-Known Member
Thought this was interesting


Taiwan says WHO ignored its coronavirus questions at start of outbreak
.

19 hours ago

(Reuters) - Taiwan accused the World Heath Organization of ignoring its questions at the start of the coronavirus outbreak, part of what it has long described as a pattern that puts it at risk because of Chinese pressure to exclude it from international bodies.

Taiwan is barred from membership in the WHO under pressure from China, which views it as a province rather than a state. It responded early to the coronavirus outbreak in China, and has had notable success in limiting contagion so far, with just two deaths and 215 cases.

Taiwan's government has said that keeping it out of the WHO during the outbreak amounts to playing politics with Taiwanese lives, and it has been denied access to first-hand information. Both the WHO and China say Taiwan has been provided with the help it needs.
 

Chicoro

5 Year Shea Anniversary: Started Dec 16th, 2016!
Follow-up on post #1737 of this thread.

Omari Hardway speaks on Facebook. I think he did this Facebook video before the confrontation of the meeting became public and viral.


Omari states his city has not declared a state of emergency, when this video was made, because the City Manager, Michael Bornstein said they would have to pay the Union workers an Escalated rate and the City Manager didn't want to do that. Money was the focus.


 
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nyeredzi

Well-Known Member
I just found out that 3 of the 4 nurses who work under me can't see patients anymore and 2 of them have to do mandatory testing now as they are symptomatic and considered high risk. FML right now and thanks for hearing my vent.
Where are you located?
 

Jmartjrmd

Well-Known Member
The Prince of Wales has tested positive for coronavirus, Clarence House has confirmed.

Prince Charles, 71, is displaying mild symptoms "but otherwise remains in good health", a spokesman said.

The Duchess of Cornwall, 72, has also been tested but does not have the virus.

Clarence House said Charles and Camilla were now self-isolating at Balmoral, adding the prince has been working throughout home over the last few days.

An official statement read: "It is not possible to ascertain from whom the prince caught the virus owing to the high number of engagements he carried out in his public role during recent weeks."
 

UmSumayyah

Well-Known Member
Saw this on news. People need to be careful and use some sense when it comes to things like this. Especially not taking advice from Trump. When he talked about this Dr. Fauci (spelling?) was quick to say it needed more studies.

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Show caption
Coronavirus outbreak
Arizona man dies after taking coronavirus ‘cure’ Trump touted with false claims
Wife survives after couple in their 60s ingested chloroquine phosphate, which Trump falsely claimed was approved to treat coronavirus


Associated Press in Phoenix, Arizona
Tue 24 Mar 2020 08.28 EDT

A Phoenix-area man has died and his wife was in critical condition after the couple took chloroquine phosphate, an additive used to clean fish tanks that is also found in an anti-malaria medication touted by Donald Trump as a treatment for Covid-19.

Older people would rather die than let Covid-19 harm US economy – Texas official
Banner Health said on Monday the couple in their 60s got sick within half an hour of ingesting the additive. The man could not be resuscitated at hospital but the woman was able to throw up much of the chemical.

“Trump kept saying it was basically pretty much a cure,” the woman told NBC.

She said her advice would be: “Don’t take anything. Don’t believe anything. Don’t believe anything that the president says and his people … call your doctor.”

It’s unclear if the couple took chloroquine phosphate specifically because of Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

“Given the uncertainty around Covid-19, we understand that people are trying to find new ways to prevent or treat this virus, but self-medicating is not the way to do so,” said Dr Daniel Brooks, Banner Poison and Drug Information Center medical director.

“The last thing that we want right now is to inundate our emergency departments with patients who believe they found a vague and risky solution that could potentially jeopardize their health.”

At a news conference last week, Trump falsely stated that the Food and Drug Administration had just approved the use of an anti-malaria medication called chloroquine to treat patients infected with coronavirus.

Even after the FDA chief clarified that the drug still needs to be tested for that use, Trump overstated the drug’s potential upside in containing the virus.

Chloroquine is obtained by prescription, and Banner Health is urging medical providers against prescribing it to people who are not hospitalised.

The difference between the fish tank cleaning additive the couple took and the drug used to treat malaria is the way they are formulated.

The man’s death came as the number of Covid-19 cases in Arizona spiked more than 50% in one day, from 152 on Sunday to 235 on Monday, according to the state health department.

Pima county reported its first coronavirus death: a woman in her 50s with an underlying health condition. It was the third Covid-19 death in Arizona. Two men, one in his 70s and one in his 50s, both had underlying conditions.

People have tested positive in 11 of Arizona’s 15 counties, including 139 cases in Maricopa county, the state’s most populous.

For most people, the virus causes only mild or moderate symptoms such as fever and cough. For some, older adults and people with health problems, it can cause more severe illness including pneumonia. The vast majority recover.


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Those people ingested fish tank cleaner.

If someone says h20 is great for you, and you down a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, you qualify for the Darwin awards.
 

Jmartjrmd

Well-Known Member
Those people ingested fish tank cleaner.

If someone says h20 is great for you, and you down a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, you qualify for the Darwin awards.
Right that's why I said they need to use some sense.
In my heart failure group dozens of people stopped taking their ACE inhibitors because someone posted an article saying they will make them more susceptible to the virus or worse if they get it. These people need this medication and should be consulting instead with their physician.
They will find any article, post it, and people follow it regardless of the source.
Like that thread we had a bit ago with the little boy that died from flu. Kid was having seizures and his mom still taking facebook advice.
 

Chicoro

5 Year Shea Anniversary: Started Dec 16th, 2016!
Right that's why I said they need to use some sense.
In my heart failure group dozens of people stopped taking their ACE inhibitors because someone posted an article saying they will make them more susceptible to the virus or worse if they get it. These people need this medication and should be consulting instead with their physician.
They will find any article, post it, and people follow it regardless of the source.
Like that thread we had a bit ago with the little boy that died from flu. Kid was having seizures and his mom still taking facebook advice.

This why it is good to have your voice and others on this thread to question, clarify, correct and substantiate information. Fear can really hurt us.
 
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