The Covid-19 Thread: News, Preparation Tips, Etc
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- Start date
ThirdEyeBeauty
Well-Known Member
for all your contributions to this thread. You have kept me up to date and informed. And for those who are sick, have lost loved ones, or have sick family/friends may God comfort you in these difficult times.
dancinstallion
Well-Known Member
I saw a lot of YT not wearing masks and not social distancing yesterday in Manhattan. There were a LOT of people outside hanging out.
meka72
Well-Known Member
By Steve Thompson, Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis
May 17 at 4:19 PM ET
Four months into the U.S. coronavirus epidemic, tests for the virus finally are becoming widely available, a crucial step toward lifting stay-at-home orders and safely returning to normal life. But while many states no longer report crippling supply shortages, a new problem has emerged: too few people lining up to get tested.
A Washington Post survey of governors’ offices and state health departments found at least a dozen states where testing capacity outstrips the supply of patients. Many have scrambled to make testing more convenient, especially for vulnerable communities, by setting up pop-up sites and developing apps that help assess symptoms, find free test sites and deliver quick results.
But the numbers, while rising, are well short of capacity — and far short of targets set by independent experts. Utah, for example, is conducting about 3,500 tests a day, a little more than a third of its 9,000-test maximum capacity, and health officials have erected highway billboards begging drivers to “GET TESTED FOR COVID-19.”
Why aren’t more people showing up? “Well, that’s the million-dollar question,” said Utah Health Department spokesman Tom Hudachko. “It could be simply that people don’t want to be tested. It could be that people feel like they don’t need to be tested. It could be that people are so mildly symptomatic that they’re just not concerned that having a positive lab result would actually change their course in any meaningful way.”
Experts say several factors may be preventing more people from seeking tests, including a lingering sense of scarcity, a lack of access in rural and underserved communities, and skepticism about testing operations. “We know there’s a lack of trust in the African American community with the medical profession,” said Ala Stanford, a pediatric surgeon in Philadelphia who started a group to provide free testing in low-income and minority communities, which have been particularly hard hit by the virus. The effort, which offers testing in church parking lots, has serviced more than 3,000 people in recent weeks.
“You’ve got to meet people where they are,” Stanford said.
Another major hurdle: lingering confusion about who qualifies. In the earliest days of the outbreak, Americans were told that only the sickest and most vulnerable should get tested while others should stay home. Last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention relaxed its guidelines to offer tests to people without symptoms who are referred by local health departments or clinicians.
Some states have since relaxed their testing criteria dramatically. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) has encouraged “all Georgians, even if they are not experiencing symptoms, to schedule an appointment.” And Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) urged residents earlier this month to “call 2-1-1 and find a location close to you, even if you don’t have symptoms and you’re just curious.”
Elsewhere, officials scarred by shortages have been hesitant to follow suit.
“A lot of states put in very, very restrictive testing policies . . . because they didn’t have any tests. And they’ve either not relaxed those, or the word is not getting out,” said Ashish Jha, who directs the Harvard Global Health Institute. “We want to be at a point where everybody who has mild symptoms is tested. That is critical. That is still not happening in a lot of places.”
Last week, Jha and other Harvard researchers estimated that the United States should be testing at least 900,000 people a day, or about 8 percent of the population per month. At that rate, they say, local officials would get a clear sense of the spread of the virus, would be able to detect clusters of infection in the early stages and could move to isolate people who test positive or have been exposed, a process known as contact tracing.
A White House estimate, obtained by The Post, shows the nation has sufficient lab capacity to process at least 400,000 tests per day, and potentially many more. But in surveying the states, The Post found that few are testing at full capacity. In 20 states that provided detailed information, the number of tests performed was roughly 235,000 per day lower than their technical capacity, with the biggest gaps in California and New Jersey.
Lab capacity remains untapped for many reasons, including lingering supply shortages. While most states say they are now able to test people in hospitals, nursing homes, prisons and other front-line settings, many continue to be hampered by a lack of personal protective equipment (PPE), nasal swabs and reagents, the chemicals necessary to process tests.
California, for example, has sufficient lab capacity to conduct nearly 100,000 tests a day, but is averaging less than 40,000. At a news conference last week, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) cited continuing “supply-chain constraints.”
And in Chicago, a major chain of urgent-care clinics temporarily halted mobile testing last week when it ran out of test kits. “[W]e are currently unable to test for COVID-19 in Illinois,” said a message posted Sunday on the website of Physicians Immediate Care, adding that the chain hopes to resume testing Monday.
As states trying to encourage people to return to normal life ramp up testing, experts worry that widespread shortages could return.
“Right now, in some locations in this country, they don’t have adequate testing to test all symptomatic patients,” said Angela M. Caliendo, board member of the Infectious Diseases Society of America and a vice chair in the Department of Medicine at Alpert Medical School of Brown University. “So when you open up and you start testing people that are asymptomatic, you’re going to put a lot of pressure on the supply chain.”
The federal government is working to remedy the problem, including by investing $75.5 million through the Defense Production Act to increase swab production. The Food and Drug Administration has eased regulations to permit use of swabs made from polyester in addition to nylon and foam, and the Trump administration has pledged to supply 12.9 million swabs directly to states this month, a promise many governors are banking on.
Last week, President Trump announced that the federal government will distribute $11 billion to help states get additional supplies, part of a $25 billion testing budget approved by Congress.
“I said from the beginning that the federal government would back up the states and help them build their testing capability and capacities, and that’s exactly what’s happened,” he said.
But reagents remain a problem. In the District, health officials have access to a public health lab, a research lab and six hospital labs, which together have the capacity to process at least 3,700 tests per day, said LaQuandra Nesbitt, director of the D.C. Department of Health.
But reagents must match the labs’ testing machines; in recent weeks, the labs have managed to purchase only enough to conduct 1,500 tests per day.
Still, even that supply has outstripped demand, with only about 1,000 D.C. residents seeking tests each day. In late April, the city expanded its guidelines to permit grocery store clerks and other critical workers to get tested regardless of whether they have symptoms. Further changes prioritized people over 65 and with underlying health conditions. Meanwhile, former first lady Michelle Obama has urged people in robocalls to take advantage of the free service.
Testing has been similarly slow to ramp up in Virginia, where guidelines posted on the state’s website limited testing mostly to people with symptoms who were hospitalized, living in communal settings or working as health-care providers.
Hilary Adams, a 28-year-old Web coordinator for the American Society of Clinical Oncology, said her doctor refused to order a test in late April even though she had a sore throat and headache, suffers from asthma and lives with her father, who had tested positive. She was told to stay home and quarantine.
“Just living with that level of uncertainly and anxiety was really, really stressful,” Adams said.
After being criticized for low testing rates, Virginia officials posted relaxed guidelines on May 5. That day, Adams’s doctor finally ordered a test — which came back negative. Virginia has since reported an increase in testing from about 4,000 per day to nearly 7,000.
“We’ve said from the very beginning that we needed more PPE. We have that now. Then we said we needed more testing supplies. We have that now,” said former Virginia health commissioner Karen Remley, who co-directs a testing task force appointed by Gov. Ralph Northam (D). “Now we’re working on education and bringing people to the table.”
A national strategy could make that effort more effective, said Danielle Allen, director of Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, which last week published a $74 billion road map that calls for 24-hour contact tracing and isolation facilities for people who test positive. Although many states are building those services, the patchwork approach means scarce resources may not be efficiently deployed.
For example, inviting anyone to get tested, rather than focusing on hot spots or areas of high vulnerability, is “not going to be that valuable,” said Jan Malcolm, the health commissioner in Minnesota, where policymakers are building toward 20,000 tests per day and considering hiring more than 4,000 contact tracers.
Kentucky illustrates the transition many states are making. In the first few months of the pandemic, the state had major shortages of testing materials and had to send many samples out of state for processing. Then in March, Gov. Andy Beshear (D) tapped a pair of local lab companies to scale up operations.
Gravity Diagnostics, a 140-person firm in Covington, blew out a wall to expand its main lab and hired 15 more people. It has processed nearly 40 percent of all tests in the state, as well as tests conducted at Kroger mobile health clinics across the nation.
By last week, Beshear said Kentucky had secured all the components needed to further ramp up testing, including a significant supply of swabs from the federal government. With businesses starting to reopen, Beshear is urging everyone to get tested. The state recorded an average of 5,700 tests a day over the past week, a sharp uptick.
“We can provide all the capacity in the world,” Beshear said. “You’ve got to show up and take a test.”
The story is similar elsewhere. In Wisconsin, officials last week listed a daily capacity of 13,400 tests, spread across 52 labs. But daily reported tests have averaged only around 4,800. To bump up the numbers, Gov. Tony Evers (D) has ordered the National Guard to set up mobile testing sites and told doctors to test anyone with symptoms.
In Florida, tests are averaging about half the statewide capacity of 30,000 per day. Jared Moskowitz, director of Florida’s Division of Emergency Management, said the state has opened sites to improve access, including one in front of Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, where he spoke at a news conference this month. Still, Moskowitz acknowledged that “less and less people are coming to these sites, and we’ve seen that decline in the numbers.”
And in Arizona, only 5,400 people turned out for a Saturday “testing blitz” held May 2 in dozens of community locations for people with symptoms or who think they have had contact with the virus. Health officials had been hoping for 10,000, and have since extended the blitz to every Saturday in May.
Although Massachusetts has tested nearly 6 percent of its population — one of the highest rates in the nation — even Gov. Charlie Baker (R) has been frustrated by a lack of interest in testing. Earlier this month, Baker chastised Bay State residents for refusing tests even in highly vulnerable settings such as nursing homes.
“There’s some people who, for whatever reason, don’t want to be tested,” Baker told reporters. “And we’re just going to have to find a way to work through that.”
Jenna Portnoy and Chris Mooney contributed to this report. Steve Thompson writes about government and politics in Maryland, D.C. and Virginia. Before joining The Washington Post in 2018, he was an investigative reporter for the Dallas Morning News. He started his career as a police reporter at the St. Petersburg Times. Juliet Eilperin is The Washington Post's senior national affairs correspondent, covering the transformation of federal environmental policy. She's authored two books, "Demon Fish: Travels Through The Hidden World of Sharks" and "Fight Club Politics: How Partisanship is Poisoning the House of Representatives." She has worked for The Post since 1998. Brady Dennis is a national reporter for The Washington Post, focusing on the environment and public health issues. He previously spent years covering the nation’s economy. Dennis was a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for a series of explanatory stories about the global financial crisis. Democracy Dies in Darkness
A Washington Post survey of governors’ offices and state health departments found at least a dozen states where testing capacity outstrips the supply of patients. Many have scrambled to make testing more convenient, especially for vulnerable communities, by setting up pop-up sites and developing apps that help assess symptoms, find free test sites and deliver quick results.
But the numbers, while rising, are well short of capacity — and far short of targets set by independent experts. Utah, for example, is conducting about 3,500 tests a day, a little more than a third of its 9,000-test maximum capacity, and health officials have erected highway billboards begging drivers to “GET TESTED FOR COVID-19.”
Why aren’t more people showing up? “Well, that’s the million-dollar question,” said Utah Health Department spokesman Tom Hudachko. “It could be simply that people don’t want to be tested. It could be that people feel like they don’t need to be tested. It could be that people are so mildly symptomatic that they’re just not concerned that having a positive lab result would actually change their course in any meaningful way.”
Experts say several factors may be preventing more people from seeking tests, including a lingering sense of scarcity, a lack of access in rural and underserved communities, and skepticism about testing operations. “We know there’s a lack of trust in the African American community with the medical profession,” said Ala Stanford, a pediatric surgeon in Philadelphia who started a group to provide free testing in low-income and minority communities, which have been particularly hard hit by the virus. The effort, which offers testing in church parking lots, has serviced more than 3,000 people in recent weeks.
“You’ve got to meet people where they are,” Stanford said.
Another major hurdle: lingering confusion about who qualifies. In the earliest days of the outbreak, Americans were told that only the sickest and most vulnerable should get tested while others should stay home. Last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention relaxed its guidelines to offer tests to people without symptoms who are referred by local health departments or clinicians.
Some states have since relaxed their testing criteria dramatically. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) has encouraged “all Georgians, even if they are not experiencing symptoms, to schedule an appointment.” And Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) urged residents earlier this month to “call 2-1-1 and find a location close to you, even if you don’t have symptoms and you’re just curious.”
Elsewhere, officials scarred by shortages have been hesitant to follow suit.
“A lot of states put in very, very restrictive testing policies . . . because they didn’t have any tests. And they’ve either not relaxed those, or the word is not getting out,” said Ashish Jha, who directs the Harvard Global Health Institute. “We want to be at a point where everybody who has mild symptoms is tested. That is critical. That is still not happening in a lot of places.”
Last week, Jha and other Harvard researchers estimated that the United States should be testing at least 900,000 people a day, or about 8 percent of the population per month. At that rate, they say, local officials would get a clear sense of the spread of the virus, would be able to detect clusters of infection in the early stages and could move to isolate people who test positive or have been exposed, a process known as contact tracing.
A White House estimate, obtained by The Post, shows the nation has sufficient lab capacity to process at least 400,000 tests per day, and potentially many more. But in surveying the states, The Post found that few are testing at full capacity. In 20 states that provided detailed information, the number of tests performed was roughly 235,000 per day lower than their technical capacity, with the biggest gaps in California and New Jersey.
Lab capacity remains untapped for many reasons, including lingering supply shortages. While most states say they are now able to test people in hospitals, nursing homes, prisons and other front-line settings, many continue to be hampered by a lack of personal protective equipment (PPE), nasal swabs and reagents, the chemicals necessary to process tests.
California, for example, has sufficient lab capacity to conduct nearly 100,000 tests a day, but is averaging less than 40,000. At a news conference last week, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) cited continuing “supply-chain constraints.”
And in Chicago, a major chain of urgent-care clinics temporarily halted mobile testing last week when it ran out of test kits. “[W]e are currently unable to test for COVID-19 in Illinois,” said a message posted Sunday on the website of Physicians Immediate Care, adding that the chain hopes to resume testing Monday.
As states trying to encourage people to return to normal life ramp up testing, experts worry that widespread shortages could return.
“Right now, in some locations in this country, they don’t have adequate testing to test all symptomatic patients,” said Angela M. Caliendo, board member of the Infectious Diseases Society of America and a vice chair in the Department of Medicine at Alpert Medical School of Brown University. “So when you open up and you start testing people that are asymptomatic, you’re going to put a lot of pressure on the supply chain.”
The federal government is working to remedy the problem, including by investing $75.5 million through the Defense Production Act to increase swab production. The Food and Drug Administration has eased regulations to permit use of swabs made from polyester in addition to nylon and foam, and the Trump administration has pledged to supply 12.9 million swabs directly to states this month, a promise many governors are banking on.
Last week, President Trump announced that the federal government will distribute $11 billion to help states get additional supplies, part of a $25 billion testing budget approved by Congress.
“I said from the beginning that the federal government would back up the states and help them build their testing capability and capacities, and that’s exactly what’s happened,” he said.
But reagents remain a problem. In the District, health officials have access to a public health lab, a research lab and six hospital labs, which together have the capacity to process at least 3,700 tests per day, said LaQuandra Nesbitt, director of the D.C. Department of Health.
But reagents must match the labs’ testing machines; in recent weeks, the labs have managed to purchase only enough to conduct 1,500 tests per day.
Still, even that supply has outstripped demand, with only about 1,000 D.C. residents seeking tests each day. In late April, the city expanded its guidelines to permit grocery store clerks and other critical workers to get tested regardless of whether they have symptoms. Further changes prioritized people over 65 and with underlying health conditions. Meanwhile, former first lady Michelle Obama has urged people in robocalls to take advantage of the free service.
Testing has been similarly slow to ramp up in Virginia, where guidelines posted on the state’s website limited testing mostly to people with symptoms who were hospitalized, living in communal settings or working as health-care providers.
Hilary Adams, a 28-year-old Web coordinator for the American Society of Clinical Oncology, said her doctor refused to order a test in late April even though she had a sore throat and headache, suffers from asthma and lives with her father, who had tested positive. She was told to stay home and quarantine.
“Just living with that level of uncertainly and anxiety was really, really stressful,” Adams said.
After being criticized for low testing rates, Virginia officials posted relaxed guidelines on May 5. That day, Adams’s doctor finally ordered a test — which came back negative. Virginia has since reported an increase in testing from about 4,000 per day to nearly 7,000.
“We’ve said from the very beginning that we needed more PPE. We have that now. Then we said we needed more testing supplies. We have that now,” said former Virginia health commissioner Karen Remley, who co-directs a testing task force appointed by Gov. Ralph Northam (D). “Now we’re working on education and bringing people to the table.”
A national strategy could make that effort more effective, said Danielle Allen, director of Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, which last week published a $74 billion road map that calls for 24-hour contact tracing and isolation facilities for people who test positive. Although many states are building those services, the patchwork approach means scarce resources may not be efficiently deployed.
For example, inviting anyone to get tested, rather than focusing on hot spots or areas of high vulnerability, is “not going to be that valuable,” said Jan Malcolm, the health commissioner in Minnesota, where policymakers are building toward 20,000 tests per day and considering hiring more than 4,000 contact tracers.
Kentucky illustrates the transition many states are making. In the first few months of the pandemic, the state had major shortages of testing materials and had to send many samples out of state for processing. Then in March, Gov. Andy Beshear (D) tapped a pair of local lab companies to scale up operations.
Gravity Diagnostics, a 140-person firm in Covington, blew out a wall to expand its main lab and hired 15 more people. It has processed nearly 40 percent of all tests in the state, as well as tests conducted at Kroger mobile health clinics across the nation.
By last week, Beshear said Kentucky had secured all the components needed to further ramp up testing, including a significant supply of swabs from the federal government. With businesses starting to reopen, Beshear is urging everyone to get tested. The state recorded an average of 5,700 tests a day over the past week, a sharp uptick.
“We can provide all the capacity in the world,” Beshear said. “You’ve got to show up and take a test.”
The story is similar elsewhere. In Wisconsin, officials last week listed a daily capacity of 13,400 tests, spread across 52 labs. But daily reported tests have averaged only around 4,800. To bump up the numbers, Gov. Tony Evers (D) has ordered the National Guard to set up mobile testing sites and told doctors to test anyone with symptoms.
In Florida, tests are averaging about half the statewide capacity of 30,000 per day. Jared Moskowitz, director of Florida’s Division of Emergency Management, said the state has opened sites to improve access, including one in front of Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, where he spoke at a news conference this month. Still, Moskowitz acknowledged that “less and less people are coming to these sites, and we’ve seen that decline in the numbers.”
And in Arizona, only 5,400 people turned out for a Saturday “testing blitz” held May 2 in dozens of community locations for people with symptoms or who think they have had contact with the virus. Health officials had been hoping for 10,000, and have since extended the blitz to every Saturday in May.
Although Massachusetts has tested nearly 6 percent of its population — one of the highest rates in the nation — even Gov. Charlie Baker (R) has been frustrated by a lack of interest in testing. Earlier this month, Baker chastised Bay State residents for refusing tests even in highly vulnerable settings such as nursing homes.
“There’s some people who, for whatever reason, don’t want to be tested,” Baker told reporters. “And we’re just going to have to find a way to work through that.”
Jenna Portnoy and Chris Mooney contributed to this report. Steve Thompson writes about government and politics in Maryland, D.C. and Virginia. Before joining The Washington Post in 2018, he was an investigative reporter for the Dallas Morning News. He started his career as a police reporter at the St. Petersburg Times. Juliet Eilperin is The Washington Post's senior national affairs correspondent, covering the transformation of federal environmental policy. She's authored two books, "Demon Fish: Travels Through The Hidden World of Sharks" and "Fight Club Politics: How Partisanship is Poisoning the House of Representatives." She has worked for The Post since 1998. Brady Dennis is a national reporter for The Washington Post, focusing on the environment and public health issues. He previously spent years covering the nation’s economy. Dennis was a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for a series of explanatory stories about the global financial crisis. Democracy Dies in Darkness
meka72
Well-Known Member
By
Felicia Sonmez and
Darryl Fears
May 17, 2020 at 6:51 p.m. EDT
Tensions between the White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spilled out into public view on Sunday as a top adviser to President Trump criticized the public health agency’s response to the novel coronavirus pandemic.
The comments by White House trade adviser Peter Navarro are the latest signal of how the Trump administration has sought to sideline the CDC. The agency typically plays the lead role in public health crises, but in recent weeks it’s had its draft guidance for reopening held up by the White House, leaving states and localities to largely fend for themselves.
Speaking on NBC News’s “Meet the Press,” Navarro sharply criticized the CDC over its production of a flawed coronavirus test kit that contributed to a nationwide delay in testing.
“Early on in this crisis, the CDC — which really had the most trusted brand around the world in this space — really let the country down with the testing,” Navarro said. “Because not only did they keep the testing within the bureaucracy, they had a bad test. And that did set us back.”
Republicans defend Trump on Obamagate, inspector general firing
Lawmakers and political advisers reacted to President Trump's latest contentious actions on May 17. (Sarah Cahlan/The Washington Post)
The CDC did not respond to a request for comment. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, whose agency oversees the CDC, pushed back against Navarro’s criticism in an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
“I don’t believe the CDC let this country down,” Azar said when pressed repeatedly on Navarro’s comments. “I believe the CDC serves an important public health role. And what was always critical was to get the private sector to the table [on testing].”
Sign up for our Coronavirus Updates newsletter to track the outbreak. All stories linked in the newsletter are free to access.
Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, pictured Friday after President Trump participated in a vaccine development event in the Rose Garden at the White House. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
With the coronavirus pandemic in the United States now in its third month, some in the White House are increasingly taking aim at the CDC and the leadership of its director, Robert Redfield, as The Washington Post has previously reported.
Growing friction between White House, CDC hobbles pandemic response
In addition to the issue of testing, White House officials say they are also frustrated by what they consider the agency’s balky flow of data and information and the leak of an early version of its reopening recommendations, according to three administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal disagreements.
Appearing remotely at a Senate committee hearing on Tuesday, Redfield detailed the CDC’s efforts to combat the pandemic, including expert assistance to state health authorities, disease surveillance and testing and contact tracing strategy. But he also sounded an alarm that the nation’s public health resources have been insufficient to meet the challenge that covid-19 has posed.
“We need to rebuild our nation’s public health infrastructure: data and data analytics, public health laboratory resilience and our nation’s public health workforce,” he said.
Navarro on Sunday lashed out not only at the CDC, but also at China, escalating the Trump administration’s attacks on that country for its handling of the virus. In an interview on ABC News’s “This Week,” Navarro said he holds the country’s leaders responsible for the global outbreak.
“The virus was spawned in Wuhan province,” Navarro said. “Patient zero was in November. The Chinese, behind the shield of the World Health Organization, for two months hid the virus from the world, and then sent hundreds of thousands of Chinese on aircraft to Milan, New York and around the world to seed that. They could have kept it in Wuhan. Instead, it became a pandemic.”
Beijing has responded to such attacks by accusing the Trump administration of “shifting blame” in an effort to distract from its own failures amid the pandemic.
While they were at odds over the CDC, Navarro and Azar were in agreement Sunday as they defended the Trump administration’s push for states to reopen their economies.
Navarro argued that “some of the people in the medical community want to just run and hide until the virus is extinguished,” an approach that he argued, without evidence, would “kill many more people” than the coronavirus would.
He also said loosening restrictions on businesses is not a “question of lives vs. jobs.”
“What President Trump realized early on is that, if you lock people down, you may save lives directly from the China virus, but you indirectly are going to kill a lot more people” through suicide or substance abuse, Navarro said.
Azar declared that it’s safe to reopen the country because half of the counties reporting “haven’t had a single death,” and more than 60 percent of all covid-19 cases are in just 2 percent of the reporting counties.
“That’s why the local leaders need to lead this,” he said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
As coronavirus testing expands, a new problem arises: Not enough people to test
Azar also said he was not overly concerned by images of people congregating at bars and other places without staying six feet apart or wearing masks.
“I think in any individual instance you are going to see people doing things that are irresponsible,” he said, emphasizing, “we’ve got to get this economy open and our people out and about, working and going to school again.”
Trump made only brief remarks Sunday as he returned to the White House from Camp David. In an exchange with reporters, he maintained that “tremendous progress is being made on many fronts, including coming up with a cure for this horrible plague that has beset our country.”
But statistics from some states paint a less-than-rosy picture.
Texas reported its largest single-day jump in coronavirus cases Saturday, with 1,801 newly confirmed cases. According to the Texas Department of State Health Services, 734 of the new cases were reported in the Amarillo area, where there has been an outbreak tied to the region’s meatpacking facilities.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) has already allowed some businesses — including hair salons, restaurants and retail stores — to reopen at reduced capacity, and beginning on Monday, gyms, offices and nonessential manufacturing facilities will be allowed to do so as well, according to the Dallas Morning News.
New York, the state hardest hit by the pandemic, has seen a decline in new cases since April, but officials remain wary of a potential increase as parts of the state begin to reopen. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) on Sunday received a covid-19 swab test on live TV in an effort to convince residents to get tested if they are experiencing symptoms.
“It is so fast and so easy that even a governor can take this test,” Cuomo said shortly before a doctor swabbed his nose during his daily briefing in Albany.
After photos and videos emerged over the weekend of people in New York City crowding the sidewalks outside restaurants and bars, many carrying open containers and not wearing masks, Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) scolded those disregarding quarantine measures.
“We’re feeling the pull of the outdoors, we’re feeling the seasons changing, we all want to be out there,” de Blasio said, noting that the sunny weather has only exacerbated pent-up New Yorkers’ “quarantine fatigue” after two months in isolation. “But we all understand we’re in the middle of a pandemic, and we have to do things differently.”
In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom said he is moving forward based on the best guidance to control the spread of the virus: social distancing. He also said reopening schools will be predicated on data and science, not just observations on the ground.
“I think some schools will not be [open this fall] and many schools will be,” Newsom (D) told Jake Tapper on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Seventy-five percent of California’s economy is now open, including manufacturing, warehouses and restaurants, Newsom said. Business owners and individuals are encouraged to wear face coverings and maintain physical distance from others. Opening sports arenas, he said, is not an option at this time.
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) said that reopening his state’s economy was necessary but also noted that the state was still wrestling with the outbreak and the danger remains. “I’ve said to Ohioans that so much is in every individual’s control. I encourage people to wear masks when they go out in public,” he said on CNN.
DeWine said he was concerned when he saw images of a reopened Ohio bar crowded with people. But he added that the people running the bar got the situation under control.
“Ultimately, it’s going to come to Ohioans doing what Ohioans have done the last two months — keep their distance and wear masks,” he said.
DeWine said that 90 percent of the state’s economy is open but that he wasn’t sure about reopening schools. He said they were closed “not because you [are] specifically worried about the kids,” but to keep students from going home and infecting their parents.
“You have 30 kids go into a classroom, one kid is in there, and he’s got no symptoms, but he’s carrying it — now you got maybe 25 kids . . . going back to their families,” DeWine said. “And it just spreads and multiplies. So, that’s the concern.”
In an interview on CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) warned that “time is of the essence” for Congress and the White House to approve an additional round of coronavirus relief, including funds for additional testing and job protections.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has sought to expand liability protections for employers that reopen during the pandemic, but Pelosi on Sunday declined to say whether Democrats are open to such a move.
“Time is very important. We have lost time,” Pelosi said, adding: “People are hungry across America. Hunger doesn’t take a pause. People are jobless across America. That doesn’t take a pause.”
Meryl Kornfield, Joseph Marks, Steven Goff, Lenny Bernstein and Mike DeBonis contributed to this report.
Felicia Sonmez and
Darryl Fears
May 17, 2020 at 6:51 p.m. EDT
Tensions between the White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spilled out into public view on Sunday as a top adviser to President Trump criticized the public health agency’s response to the novel coronavirus pandemic.
The comments by White House trade adviser Peter Navarro are the latest signal of how the Trump administration has sought to sideline the CDC. The agency typically plays the lead role in public health crises, but in recent weeks it’s had its draft guidance for reopening held up by the White House, leaving states and localities to largely fend for themselves.
Speaking on NBC News’s “Meet the Press,” Navarro sharply criticized the CDC over its production of a flawed coronavirus test kit that contributed to a nationwide delay in testing.
“Early on in this crisis, the CDC — which really had the most trusted brand around the world in this space — really let the country down with the testing,” Navarro said. “Because not only did they keep the testing within the bureaucracy, they had a bad test. And that did set us back.”
Republicans defend Trump on Obamagate, inspector general firing
Lawmakers and political advisers reacted to President Trump's latest contentious actions on May 17. (Sarah Cahlan/The Washington Post)
The CDC did not respond to a request for comment. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, whose agency oversees the CDC, pushed back against Navarro’s criticism in an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
“I don’t believe the CDC let this country down,” Azar said when pressed repeatedly on Navarro’s comments. “I believe the CDC serves an important public health role. And what was always critical was to get the private sector to the table [on testing].”
Sign up for our Coronavirus Updates newsletter to track the outbreak. All stories linked in the newsletter are free to access.
Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, pictured Friday after President Trump participated in a vaccine development event in the Rose Garden at the White House. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
With the coronavirus pandemic in the United States now in its third month, some in the White House are increasingly taking aim at the CDC and the leadership of its director, Robert Redfield, as The Washington Post has previously reported.
Growing friction between White House, CDC hobbles pandemic response
In addition to the issue of testing, White House officials say they are also frustrated by what they consider the agency’s balky flow of data and information and the leak of an early version of its reopening recommendations, according to three administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal disagreements.
Appearing remotely at a Senate committee hearing on Tuesday, Redfield detailed the CDC’s efforts to combat the pandemic, including expert assistance to state health authorities, disease surveillance and testing and contact tracing strategy. But he also sounded an alarm that the nation’s public health resources have been insufficient to meet the challenge that covid-19 has posed.
“We need to rebuild our nation’s public health infrastructure: data and data analytics, public health laboratory resilience and our nation’s public health workforce,” he said.
Navarro on Sunday lashed out not only at the CDC, but also at China, escalating the Trump administration’s attacks on that country for its handling of the virus. In an interview on ABC News’s “This Week,” Navarro said he holds the country’s leaders responsible for the global outbreak.
“The virus was spawned in Wuhan province,” Navarro said. “Patient zero was in November. The Chinese, behind the shield of the World Health Organization, for two months hid the virus from the world, and then sent hundreds of thousands of Chinese on aircraft to Milan, New York and around the world to seed that. They could have kept it in Wuhan. Instead, it became a pandemic.”
Beijing has responded to such attacks by accusing the Trump administration of “shifting blame” in an effort to distract from its own failures amid the pandemic.
While they were at odds over the CDC, Navarro and Azar were in agreement Sunday as they defended the Trump administration’s push for states to reopen their economies.
Navarro argued that “some of the people in the medical community want to just run and hide until the virus is extinguished,” an approach that he argued, without evidence, would “kill many more people” than the coronavirus would.
He also said loosening restrictions on businesses is not a “question of lives vs. jobs.”
“What President Trump realized early on is that, if you lock people down, you may save lives directly from the China virus, but you indirectly are going to kill a lot more people” through suicide or substance abuse, Navarro said.
Azar declared that it’s safe to reopen the country because half of the counties reporting “haven’t had a single death,” and more than 60 percent of all covid-19 cases are in just 2 percent of the reporting counties.
“That’s why the local leaders need to lead this,” he said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
As coronavirus testing expands, a new problem arises: Not enough people to test
Azar also said he was not overly concerned by images of people congregating at bars and other places without staying six feet apart or wearing masks.
“I think in any individual instance you are going to see people doing things that are irresponsible,” he said, emphasizing, “we’ve got to get this economy open and our people out and about, working and going to school again.”
Trump made only brief remarks Sunday as he returned to the White House from Camp David. In an exchange with reporters, he maintained that “tremendous progress is being made on many fronts, including coming up with a cure for this horrible plague that has beset our country.”
But statistics from some states paint a less-than-rosy picture.
Texas reported its largest single-day jump in coronavirus cases Saturday, with 1,801 newly confirmed cases. According to the Texas Department of State Health Services, 734 of the new cases were reported in the Amarillo area, where there has been an outbreak tied to the region’s meatpacking facilities.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) has already allowed some businesses — including hair salons, restaurants and retail stores — to reopen at reduced capacity, and beginning on Monday, gyms, offices and nonessential manufacturing facilities will be allowed to do so as well, according to the Dallas Morning News.
New York, the state hardest hit by the pandemic, has seen a decline in new cases since April, but officials remain wary of a potential increase as parts of the state begin to reopen. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) on Sunday received a covid-19 swab test on live TV in an effort to convince residents to get tested if they are experiencing symptoms.
“It is so fast and so easy that even a governor can take this test,” Cuomo said shortly before a doctor swabbed his nose during his daily briefing in Albany.
After photos and videos emerged over the weekend of people in New York City crowding the sidewalks outside restaurants and bars, many carrying open containers and not wearing masks, Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) scolded those disregarding quarantine measures.
“We’re feeling the pull of the outdoors, we’re feeling the seasons changing, we all want to be out there,” de Blasio said, noting that the sunny weather has only exacerbated pent-up New Yorkers’ “quarantine fatigue” after two months in isolation. “But we all understand we’re in the middle of a pandemic, and we have to do things differently.”
In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom said he is moving forward based on the best guidance to control the spread of the virus: social distancing. He also said reopening schools will be predicated on data and science, not just observations on the ground.
“I think some schools will not be [open this fall] and many schools will be,” Newsom (D) told Jake Tapper on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Seventy-five percent of California’s economy is now open, including manufacturing, warehouses and restaurants, Newsom said. Business owners and individuals are encouraged to wear face coverings and maintain physical distance from others. Opening sports arenas, he said, is not an option at this time.
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) said that reopening his state’s economy was necessary but also noted that the state was still wrestling with the outbreak and the danger remains. “I’ve said to Ohioans that so much is in every individual’s control. I encourage people to wear masks when they go out in public,” he said on CNN.
DeWine said he was concerned when he saw images of a reopened Ohio bar crowded with people. But he added that the people running the bar got the situation under control.
“Ultimately, it’s going to come to Ohioans doing what Ohioans have done the last two months — keep their distance and wear masks,” he said.
DeWine said that 90 percent of the state’s economy is open but that he wasn’t sure about reopening schools. He said they were closed “not because you [are] specifically worried about the kids,” but to keep students from going home and infecting their parents.
“You have 30 kids go into a classroom, one kid is in there, and he’s got no symptoms, but he’s carrying it — now you got maybe 25 kids . . . going back to their families,” DeWine said. “And it just spreads and multiplies. So, that’s the concern.”
In an interview on CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) warned that “time is of the essence” for Congress and the White House to approve an additional round of coronavirus relief, including funds for additional testing and job protections.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has sought to expand liability protections for employers that reopen during the pandemic, but Pelosi on Sunday declined to say whether Democrats are open to such a move.
“Time is very important. We have lost time,” Pelosi said, adding: “People are hungry across America. Hunger doesn’t take a pause. People are jobless across America. That doesn’t take a pause.”
Meryl Kornfield, Joseph Marks, Steven Goff, Lenny Bernstein and Mike DeBonis contributed to this report.
dancinstallion
Well-Known Member
Warning:
There is a lot of incompetence and neglect going on in a few of the Brooklyn hospitals that is leading to a lot of deaths. Some of the Covid cases are picking up and they are opening new covid units in those hospitals while our hospital is discharging patients and closing down units.
Thursday a patient has a severely critical lab result. Nurse talks to Attending Doc and gets order for xyz. Nurse does xyz and it doesn't work.
Nurse: We need to do STAT dialysis.
Doc: We don't do dialysis for that.
Nurse:
what do you mean? This patient needs it. So what do you do for this?
Doc: We do xyz.
Nurse: xyz didn't work.
Doc: do it again.
Nurse passes report on to night shift.
Friday the nurse comes back and nothing else has been done for the patient. XYZ has not been working for the patient no matter how many times it is done. Now the patient is getting worse and is having heart arrhythmias. The patient Codes. The nurse says the docs didn't know how to do Advance Cardiac Life Support and was reading out of a book while the code was going on and asking what to do next. The nurse said the code took two hours and the patient died. The patient was black.
and of course the death will be listed as Covid death instead of what it really is.
Like @BillsBackerz67 told me, now is not the time to be learning critical care, how to run CRRT machines, and how to do ACLS while a code is in progress.
She was right!
There is a lot of incompetence and neglect going on in a few of the Brooklyn hospitals that is leading to a lot of deaths. Some of the Covid cases are picking up and they are opening new covid units in those hospitals while our hospital is discharging patients and closing down units.
Thursday a patient has a severely critical lab result. Nurse talks to Attending Doc and gets order for xyz. Nurse does xyz and it doesn't work.
Nurse: We need to do STAT dialysis.
Doc: We don't do dialysis for that.
Nurse:
what do you mean? This patient needs it. So what do you do for this?Doc: We do xyz.
Nurse: xyz didn't work.
Doc: do it again.
Nurse passes report on to night shift.
Friday the nurse comes back and nothing else has been done for the patient. XYZ has not been working for the patient no matter how many times it is done. Now the patient is getting worse and is having heart arrhythmias. The patient Codes. The nurse says the docs didn't know how to do Advance Cardiac Life Support and was reading out of a book while the code was going on and asking what to do next. The nurse said the code took two hours and the patient died. The patient was black.
and of course the death will be listed as Covid death instead of what it really is.Like @BillsBackerz67 told me, now is not the time to be learning critical care, how to run CRRT machines, and how to do ACLS while a code is in progress.
She was right!
Last edited:
nyeredzi
Well-Known Member
This is what's happening in my state, Maryland. I'm in the county with the highest number of cases, but the next county over, of about the same size, has more deaths. But honestly most of the counties that have any real population are still under county lockdown orders until the end of the month, not just our county. It's the less populated counties that are somewhat reopening, which seems reasonable to me.
nyeredzi
Well-Known Member
This is very interesting. I find everything about this situation confusing. It is confused. If we really have the capacity to test more, that message is totally failing to reach people. There are different messages for every state, for every county even. It's why no one knows what to do. Can you even get a test without a doctor's order anymore? Not last I heard, and the doctors are still setting the bar of admission. Which for the general population is still to be showing certain symptoms. Right? Maybe the number of people showing symptoms is not high enough for that level of testing.
OhTall1
Well-Known Member
I agree. In my part of VA, people were being told that you needed a doctor's note, and even with a note you basically needed to be on death's door to get tested. It seems like we're at a point where people aren't being told that anyone can get tested, or people who were sick have recovered and just don't feel the need to confirm what they already suspect. Meanwhile, I've done everything possible to stay at home and wear a mask if I have to leave, so I'm really not interested in learning if I'm asymptomatic since I'm already doing everything they'd tell me to do if I tested positive. I feel like I'd be putting myself at risk by going to a testing center with a bunch of sick people.
vevster
Well-Known Member
My cousin lives in The Netherlands, so I plan on teasing him on this.....
Dutch health officials release new COVID-19 sex guidelines
The Dutch government has released new guidelines on sex during COVID-19, suggesting "sex with yourself or with others at a distance" among other recommendations published on its health ministry's website amid the relaxation of some lockdown rules.
The new guidance, which was issued on by the Dutch National Institute for Health and Environment on May 16, acknowledges that it is "logical" for single people to seek physical contact, but advises minimizing risks by picking just one partner and discussing "how best to do this together.” Couples are reminded to avoid sex with partners who have been self-isolating because of coronavirus symptoms, with officials going as far to suggest safer at-distance alternatives.
Lockdown rules in the Netherlands are being relaxed countrywide as part of a four-phase plan announced by Prime Minister Mark Rutte at the end of April. COVID-19 has caused 5,680 deaths in the country so far, with 43,995 cases reported, according to John Hopkins University.
Dutch health officials release new COVID-19 sex guidelines
The Dutch government has released new guidelines on sex during COVID-19, suggesting "sex with yourself or with others at a distance" among other recommendations published on its health ministry's website amid the relaxation of some lockdown rules.
The new guidance, which was issued on by the Dutch National Institute for Health and Environment on May 16, acknowledges that it is "logical" for single people to seek physical contact, but advises minimizing risks by picking just one partner and discussing "how best to do this together.” Couples are reminded to avoid sex with partners who have been self-isolating because of coronavirus symptoms, with officials going as far to suggest safer at-distance alternatives.
Lockdown rules in the Netherlands are being relaxed countrywide as part of a four-phase plan announced by Prime Minister Mark Rutte at the end of April. COVID-19 has caused 5,680 deaths in the country so far, with 43,995 cases reported, according to John Hopkins University.
vevster
Well-Known Member
If you are asymptomatic, don't engage the healthcare system. If it ain't broke.....
Plus these tests are sketchy with false positives and false negatives. Please.
OhTall1
Well-Known Member
There are so many people in my other online forums who want to get tested because they're just curious. Meanwhile I'm like
NYC had released its own rather explicit guidelines when lockdown started in March, ... I wonder if there will be an updated version here too when (if?) this ends,
.
Stormy
Well-Known Member
Well, on Mother's Day weekend, that Saturday I went to the mall masked up, saw others masked up too in the parking lot so I was feeling safe. Figured I run to this vegan restaurant on the end of the food court because I was craving my favorite chicken skewers. I get there, workers are masked and there's a couple walking away. Here, everything is made to order, so people usually sit at one of the food court tables or go somewhere while waiting. This is what I did. So far so good. I decide I want fries to go with those delicious chicken skewers. Well, American Deli's taste better so I waltz over there and what do I see? A whole different world. Crowds of people. Lines at every restaurant on this side of the food court. Not one young person had on a mask. Most of the few older people did. I saw a very pregnant woman and her husband without one on.
As I was leaving I did see two teens wearing one. They were with their parents. One teen brother with his friend. He was wearing one, but the friend wasn't. I just couldn't believe how people were so nonchalant in such a crowded place. I mean it was almost elbow to elbow. I haven't been back since.
As I was leaving I did see two teens wearing one. They were with their parents. One teen brother with his friend. He was wearing one, but the friend wasn't. I just couldn't believe how people were so nonchalant in such a crowded place. I mean it was almost elbow to elbow. I haven't been back since.
vevster
Well-Known Member
Gross!!!!NYC had released its own rather explicit guidelines when lockdown started in March, ... I wonder if there will be an updated version here too when (if?) this ends,
vevster
Well-Known Member
There are so many people in my other online forums who want to get tested because they're just curious. Meanwhile I'm like
I don't want to know ENOUGH to deal with the nonsense.
Everything Zen
Well-Known Member
By
Felicia Sonmez and
Darryl Fears
May 17, 2020 at 6:51 p.m. EDT
Tensions between the White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spilled out into public view on Sunday as a top adviser to President Trump criticized the public health agency’s response to the novel coronavirus pandemic.
The comments by White House trade adviser Peter Navarro are the latest signal of how the Trump administration has sought to sideline the CDC. The agency typically plays the lead role in public health crises, but in recent weeks it’s had its draft guidance for reopening held up by the White House, leaving states and localities to largely fend for themselves.
Speaking on NBC News’s “Meet the Press,” Navarro sharply criticized the CDC over its production of a flawed coronavirus test kit that contributed to a nationwide delay in testing.
“Early on in this crisis, the CDC — which really had the most trusted brand around the world in this space — really let the country down with the testing,” Navarro said. “Because not only did they keep the testing within the bureaucracy, they had a bad test. And that did set us back.”
Republicans defend Trump on Obamagate, inspector general firing
Lawmakers and political advisers reacted to President Trump's latest contentious actions on May 17. (Sarah Cahlan/The Washington Post)
The CDC did not respond to a request for comment. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, whose agency oversees the CDC, pushed back against Navarro’s criticism in an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
“I don’t believe the CDC let this country down,” Azar said when pressed repeatedly on Navarro’s comments. “I believe the CDC serves an important public health role. And what was always critical was to get the private sector to the table [on testing].”
Sign up for our Coronavirus Updates newsletter to track the outbreak. All stories linked in the newsletter are free to access.
Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, pictured Friday after President Trump participated in a vaccine development event in the Rose Garden at the White House. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
With the coronavirus pandemic in the United States now in its third month, some in the White House are increasingly taking aim at the CDC and the leadership of its director, Robert Redfield, as The Washington Post has previously reported.
Growing friction between White House, CDC hobbles pandemic response
In addition to the issue of testing, White House officials say they are also frustrated by what they consider the agency’s balky flow of data and information and the leak of an early version of its reopening recommendations, according to three administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal disagreements.
Appearing remotely at a Senate committee hearing on Tuesday, Redfield detailed the CDC’s efforts to combat the pandemic, including expert assistance to state health authorities, disease surveillance and testing and contact tracing strategy. But he also sounded an alarm that the nation’s public health resources have been insufficient to meet the challenge that covid-19 has posed.
“We need to rebuild our nation’s public health infrastructure: data and data analytics, public health laboratory resilience and our nation’s public health workforce,” he said.
Navarro on Sunday lashed out not only at the CDC, but also at China, escalating the Trump administration’s attacks on that country for its handling of the virus. In an interview on ABC News’s “This Week,” Navarro said he holds the country’s leaders responsible for the global outbreak.
“The virus was spawned in Wuhan province,” Navarro said. “Patient zero was in November. The Chinese, behind the shield of the World Health Organization, for two months hid the virus from the world, and then sent hundreds of thousands of Chinese on aircraft to Milan, New York and around the world to seed that. They could have kept it in Wuhan. Instead, it became a pandemic.”
Beijing has responded to such attacks by accusing the Trump administration of “shifting blame” in an effort to distract from its own failures amid the pandemic.
While they were at odds over the CDC, Navarro and Azar were in agreement Sunday as they defended the Trump administration’s push for states to reopen their economies.
Navarro argued that “some of the people in the medical community want to just run and hide until the virus is extinguished,” an approach that he argued, without evidence, would “kill many more people” than the coronavirus would.
He also said loosening restrictions on businesses is not a “question of lives vs. jobs.”
“What President Trump realized early on is that, if you lock people down, you may save lives directly from the China virus, but you indirectly are going to kill a lot more people” through suicide or substance abuse, Navarro said.
Azar declared that it’s safe to reopen the country because half of the counties reporting “haven’t had a single death,” and more than 60 percent of all covid-19 cases are in just 2 percent of the reporting counties.
“That’s why the local leaders need to lead this,” he said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
As coronavirus testing expands, a new problem arises: Not enough people to test
Azar also said he was not overly concerned by images of people congregating at bars and other places without staying six feet apart or wearing masks.
“I think in any individual instance you are going to see people doing things that are irresponsible,” he said, emphasizing, “we’ve got to get this economy open and our people out and about, working and going to school again.”
Trump made only brief remarks Sunday as he returned to the White House from Camp David. In an exchange with reporters, he maintained that “tremendous progress is being made on many fronts, including coming up with a cure for this horrible plague that has beset our country.”
But statistics from some states paint a less-than-rosy picture.
Texas reported its largest single-day jump in coronavirus cases Saturday, with 1,801 newly confirmed cases. According to the Texas Department of State Health Services, 734 of the new cases were reported in the Amarillo area, where there has been an outbreak tied to the region’s meatpacking facilities.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) has already allowed some businesses — including hair salons, restaurants and retail stores — to reopen at reduced capacity, and beginning on Monday, gyms, offices and nonessential manufacturing facilities will be allowed to do so as well, according to the Dallas Morning News.
New York, the state hardest hit by the pandemic, has seen a decline in new cases since April, but officials remain wary of a potential increase as parts of the state begin to reopen. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) on Sunday received a covid-19 swab test on live TV in an effort to convince residents to get tested if they are experiencing symptoms.
“It is so fast and so easy that even a governor can take this test,” Cuomo said shortly before a doctor swabbed his nose during his daily briefing in Albany.
After photos and videos emerged over the weekend of people in New York City crowding the sidewalks outside restaurants and bars, many carrying open containers and not wearing masks, Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) scolded those disregarding quarantine measures.
“We’re feeling the pull of the outdoors, we’re feeling the seasons changing, we all want to be out there,” de Blasio said, noting that the sunny weather has only exacerbated pent-up New Yorkers’ “quarantine fatigue” after two months in isolation. “But we all understand we’re in the middle of a pandemic, and we have to do things differently.”
In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom said he is moving forward based on the best guidance to control the spread of the virus: social distancing. He also said reopening schools will be predicated on data and science, not just observations on the ground.
“I think some schools will not be [open this fall] and many schools will be,” Newsom (D) told Jake Tapper on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Seventy-five percent of California’s economy is now open, including manufacturing, warehouses and restaurants, Newsom said. Business owners and individuals are encouraged to wear face coverings and maintain physical distance from others. Opening sports arenas, he said, is not an option at this time.
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) said that reopening his state’s economy was necessary but also noted that the state was still wrestling with the outbreak and the danger remains. “I’ve said to Ohioans that so much is in every individual’s control. I encourage people to wear masks when they go out in public,” he said on CNN.
DeWine said he was concerned when he saw images of a reopened Ohio bar crowded with people. But he added that the people running the bar got the situation under control.
“Ultimately, it’s going to come to Ohioans doing what Ohioans have done the last two months — keep their distance and wear masks,” he said.
DeWine said that 90 percent of the state’s economy is open but that he wasn’t sure about reopening schools. He said they were closed “not because you [are] specifically worried about the kids,” but to keep students from going home and infecting their parents.
“You have 30 kids go into a classroom, one kid is in there, and he’s got no symptoms, but he’s carrying it — now you got maybe 25 kids . . . going back to their families,” DeWine said. “And it just spreads and multiplies. So, that’s the concern.”
In an interview on CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) warned that “time is of the essence” for Congress and the White House to approve an additional round of coronavirus relief, including funds for additional testing and job protections.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has sought to expand liability protections for employers that reopen during the pandemic, but Pelosi on Sunday declined to say whether Democrats are open to such a move.
“Time is very important. We have lost time,” Pelosi said, adding: “People are hungry across America. Hunger doesn’t take a pause. People are jobless across America. That doesn’t take a pause.”
Meryl Kornfield, Joseph Marks, Steven Goff, Lenny Bernstein and Mike DeBonis contributed to this report.
Lawd just wake me when this nightmare is over.
Again WHY didn’t we just use the WHO tests?
Make it make sense!!!
Last edited:
meka72
Well-Known Member
These anti-Acton people suck.
Ohio’s Amy Acton inspires admiration, and a backlash, with tough coronavirus response
Supporters of Ohio Health Director Amy Acton on Acton's front lawn after a few dozen protesters of the stay-at-home orders once again showed up outside her home in Bexley, Ohio, on May 4. (Barbara J. Perenic/AP)
By
Griff Witte
May 18, 2020 at 7:43 a.m. EDT
It was a sunny spring day in the Ohio suburb of Bexley. Along streets lined with old-growth sycamores and maples, residents were out cutting the grass. Children were playing in the front lawns. Then the men with the guns showed up.
“We don’t see people in our neighborhood wearing full military outfits, armed with handguns,” said Tim Madison, a lawyer and former city council member. “It was shocking, to say the least.”
But Madison knew why they were there: for his next-door neighbor, Amy Acton.
An obscure state official only months ago, Acton — who was homeless as a child in hardscrabble Youngstown — has become a white-coated emblem of her state’s forceful coronavirus response. To her legions of fans, she’s a hero whose aggressive action as Ohio health director has saved lives, and whose calm, clear and compassionate style is a national model for how leaders should be communicating amid an unparalleled public health crisis.
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Yet Acton has also become a target, and not only for the protesters — some armed, most not — who have descended on her home.
One Republican state representative denounced the 54-year-old doctor as a “medical dictator.” And the GOP-dominated Ohio House recently voted to strip much of her power, with members agitating against the widespread closures that have brought the state crushing economic pain.
Sign up for our Coronavirus Updates newsletter to track the outbreak. All stories linked in the newsletter are free to access.
The backlash against Acton reflects a broader rebuke of the medical advisers who are counseling caution as the nation enters its third month since coronavirus shutdowns kicked off. Although polls show that most Americans remain willing to accept the trade-offs that experts say are necessary to curb the virus’s spread, demonstrators, lawmakers and top officials — not least the president — have been far less patient.
A protester holds up a sign outside of the Ohio statehouse in Columbus. (Megan Jelinger/AFP/Getty Images)
A woman holds up a sign against Acton outside of the Ohio statehouse in Columbus. (Megan Jelinger/AFP/Getty Images)
Legislators in Pennsylvania recently led a capitol-steps protest demanding the resignation of the state health secretary. In Wisconsin, the GOP-dominated legislature filed suit against the governor’s health advisers, prompting the state supreme court to strike down stay-at-home orders — and thirsty patrons to throng suddenly reopened bars.
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At the national level, senators have undercut infectious disease point man Anthony S. Fauci — as has the president he serves — after Fauci admonished against a “cavalier” attitude toward reopening the economy.
“I’m a scientist, a physician and a public health official. I give advice, according to the best scientific evidence,” Fauci replied last week after Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) told him he was not the “end all.”
Trump was displeased. “He wants to play all sides of the equation,” the president complained when asked about Fauci’s warnings. The president said Fauci’s reservations about reopening schools were, in particular, “not an acceptable answer.”
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By contrast, Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, has stood by his top medical adviser. Acton, DeWine has said in response to attacks from members of his own party, is “a good, compassionate and honorable person” who has “worked nonstop to save lives and protect her fellow citizens.”
‘The buck stops with me’: DeWine calls out anti-lockdown protests
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) defended members of the media and his staff from protesters during a press briefing on May 4. (The Ohio Channel)
He has also insisted that protesters and other critics target him, not her. “The buck stops with me,” DeWine said this month as demonstrators were unsettling Acton’s Bexley neighbors. “These decisions are my decisions.”
Acton’s influence, however, has been undeniable.
With Acton at his side, DeWine led the nation in shutting down sources of covid-19 spread, including large gatherings, schools and restaurants. His handling of the crisis has been hailed as a model by public health experts, and it has won approval from an astonishing 86 percent of Ohioans. The state has over 27,000 coronavirus cases, around half the total of its smaller neighbor, Michigan.
Acton talks with reporters at the Ohio statehouse after a news conference in April. (Doral Chenoweth/AP)
At their regular news conferences, the governor has often yielded the floor to Acton and allowed her to explain the finer points of medical knowledge about the coronavirus . She has also taken on much of the emotional hand-holding.
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“I don’t want you to be afraid. I am not afraid. I am determined,” she said on the March day that she issued the state’s stay-at-home order. “I want you to think about the fact that this is our one shot in this country. All of us are going to have to sacrifice.”
Her quotes have been emblazoned on T-shirts and coffee mugs, and a Facebook fan club has more than 130,000 members. A popular Internet meme in Ohio includes a photo of Acton in her signature outfit, along with the caption: “Not all heroes where capes. Mine wears a white coat.”
Those who have known Acton for decades say they are not surprised. She grew up poor in blue-collar Youngstown, living one winter out of a tent and surviving abuse. The chance to attend Northeast Ohio Medical University was her ticket out of that life and on to a 30-plus-year career in medical practice and policy, culminating in DeWine’s selection of her for the medical director job last year. But she retained her ability to empathize.
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“She was always able to connect with people, and we see that now especially,” said Rochelle Rosian, a classmate who is now a Cleveland Clinic doctor. “She’s educating Ohioans, knowing that knowledge is power.”
Not everyone, of course, has appreciated her advice. The protesters at her home in Bexley, a suburb of Columbus, have numbered in the dozens out of a state of nearly 12 million. But they have attracted widespread attention with their aggressive tactics, breaking the calm of a peaceful neighborhood with bullhorn-amplified invective.
Some slogans have been tame: “Dr. Amy Over-Re-Acton” and “Hairstylists are Essential.” But much of the rhetoric has been anti-Semitic and sexist, said Madison, the next-door neighbor. (Acton is Jewish.)
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Neighbors have responded by planting “Dr. Amy Acton Fan Club” yard signs and by sitting in Acton’s lawn in a show of solidarity whenever the protesters come around. The two sides have repeatedly squared off — one socially distanced and wearing masks, the other massed together and not.
“It’s really bizarre,” Madison said. “We just sit there silently. They’re screaming and yelling. It’s terrible.”
Dozens including Alycia Rodgers, right, don masks as the Physicians Action Network holds a public rally in support of Acton. (Barbara J. Perenic/AP)
New signs appeared along Pleasant Ridge, specifically outside Acton's home in Bexley. (Barbara J. Perenic/AP)
Madison said he believes the protesters first demonstrate at the nearby capitol building before shifting to Acton’s house.
But the health director’s critics are well represented within the statehouse, as well as outside. State Rep. Nino Vitale (R) has frequently derided Acton as a “dictator” as well as “an unelected, globalist health director.”
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The Republican majority in the House passed legislation this month — with no Democratic support — that would dramatically curtail Acton’s authority, effectively nullifying her orders if they are not endorsed by a legislative panel.
The legislation is considered unlikely to pass in the Ohio Senate, and DeWine has said he would veto it even if it does. But Republican legislators said they would continue to press to limit Acton’s reach.
“Unbridled power with no oversight or accountability is a recipe for economic calamity and a loss of freedom,” said Rep. Derek Merrin (R), who voted for the measure and supports allowing all Ohio businesses to immediately reopen. “That’s what we have in Ohio.”
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Merrin described Acton — a registered Democrat who campaigned for Barack Obama — as a negative influence on the state’s GOP governor. She has flip-flopped on questions such as whether to recommend that Ohioans wear masks, he said, and has promoted models that exaggerate the virus’s toll.
Allies of Acton, who declined an interview request for this story, say the only reason those dire forecasts have not come true is that the state acted preemptively to head off the worst of the virus’s effects.
“She’s done phenomenally well,” said Rep. Emilia Sykes, who leads Democrats in the Ohio House.
Acton enters the daily coronavirus news conference. (Doral Chenoweth/AP)
Sykes has a degree in public health but said the legislature should have no business telling a medical expert how to do her job in the midst of a crisis. “It is a grossly negligent act to think that 10 legislators are better situated to decide,” she said.
Sykes said she believes much of the criticism of Acton stems from sexism: The men who dominate in Ohio politics, she said, are uncomfortable with a woman wielding so much power. “If you worked with the people I work with, you would understand exactly what I mean,” she said. “It’s very clear that female leadership is not as respected.”
Merrin described that idea as “ridiculous.”
DeWine announced Thursday that much of Ohio’s economy will reopen by the end of the month, including pools, day-care centers, gyms and sports leagues. That’s despite the fact that cases in Ohio have plateaued, not dropped as DeWine had said he wanted before a wide-scale reopening.
Sykes said she worries that DeWine let the political pressure get to him and relaxed restrictions before it was time. “There are a lot of people rooting for the governor,” she said. “But we’re very concerned about what happens next.”
Acton is apparently one of them. While she stood by DeWine for Thursday’s announcement, and endorsed it, she was careful to note that the success or failure of the state’s reopening will depend largely on how people respond. She encouraged Ohio citizens to continue to respect social distancing and to proceed “carefully,” recognizing that the threat remains.
“Each and every one of us should be judicious,” she said. “We have choices to make.”
Demonstrators with signs are reflected in a puddle in Columbus. (Matthew Hatcher/Bloomberg News)
Supporters of Ohio Health Director Amy Acton on Acton's front lawn after a few dozen protesters of the stay-at-home orders once again showed up outside her home in Bexley, Ohio, on May 4. (Barbara J. Perenic/AP)
By
Griff Witte
May 18, 2020 at 7:43 a.m. EDT
It was a sunny spring day in the Ohio suburb of Bexley. Along streets lined with old-growth sycamores and maples, residents were out cutting the grass. Children were playing in the front lawns. Then the men with the guns showed up.
“We don’t see people in our neighborhood wearing full military outfits, armed with handguns,” said Tim Madison, a lawyer and former city council member. “It was shocking, to say the least.”
But Madison knew why they were there: for his next-door neighbor, Amy Acton.
An obscure state official only months ago, Acton — who was homeless as a child in hardscrabble Youngstown — has become a white-coated emblem of her state’s forceful coronavirus response. To her legions of fans, she’s a hero whose aggressive action as Ohio health director has saved lives, and whose calm, clear and compassionate style is a national model for how leaders should be communicating amid an unparalleled public health crisis.
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Yet Acton has also become a target, and not only for the protesters — some armed, most not — who have descended on her home.
One Republican state representative denounced the 54-year-old doctor as a “medical dictator.” And the GOP-dominated Ohio House recently voted to strip much of her power, with members agitating against the widespread closures that have brought the state crushing economic pain.
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The backlash against Acton reflects a broader rebuke of the medical advisers who are counseling caution as the nation enters its third month since coronavirus shutdowns kicked off. Although polls show that most Americans remain willing to accept the trade-offs that experts say are necessary to curb the virus’s spread, demonstrators, lawmakers and top officials — not least the president — have been far less patient.
A protester holds up a sign outside of the Ohio statehouse in Columbus. (Megan Jelinger/AFP/Getty Images)
A woman holds up a sign against Acton outside of the Ohio statehouse in Columbus. (Megan Jelinger/AFP/Getty Images)
Legislators in Pennsylvania recently led a capitol-steps protest demanding the resignation of the state health secretary. In Wisconsin, the GOP-dominated legislature filed suit against the governor’s health advisers, prompting the state supreme court to strike down stay-at-home orders — and thirsty patrons to throng suddenly reopened bars.
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At the national level, senators have undercut infectious disease point man Anthony S. Fauci — as has the president he serves — after Fauci admonished against a “cavalier” attitude toward reopening the economy.
“I’m a scientist, a physician and a public health official. I give advice, according to the best scientific evidence,” Fauci replied last week after Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) told him he was not the “end all.”
Trump was displeased. “He wants to play all sides of the equation,” the president complained when asked about Fauci’s warnings. The president said Fauci’s reservations about reopening schools were, in particular, “not an acceptable answer.”
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By contrast, Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, has stood by his top medical adviser. Acton, DeWine has said in response to attacks from members of his own party, is “a good, compassionate and honorable person” who has “worked nonstop to save lives and protect her fellow citizens.”
‘The buck stops with me’: DeWine calls out anti-lockdown protests
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) defended members of the media and his staff from protesters during a press briefing on May 4. (The Ohio Channel)
He has also insisted that protesters and other critics target him, not her. “The buck stops with me,” DeWine said this month as demonstrators were unsettling Acton’s Bexley neighbors. “These decisions are my decisions.”
Acton’s influence, however, has been undeniable.
With Acton at his side, DeWine led the nation in shutting down sources of covid-19 spread, including large gatherings, schools and restaurants. His handling of the crisis has been hailed as a model by public health experts, and it has won approval from an astonishing 86 percent of Ohioans. The state has over 27,000 coronavirus cases, around half the total of its smaller neighbor, Michigan.
Acton talks with reporters at the Ohio statehouse after a news conference in April. (Doral Chenoweth/AP)
At their regular news conferences, the governor has often yielded the floor to Acton and allowed her to explain the finer points of medical knowledge about the coronavirus . She has also taken on much of the emotional hand-holding.
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“I don’t want you to be afraid. I am not afraid. I am determined,” she said on the March day that she issued the state’s stay-at-home order. “I want you to think about the fact that this is our one shot in this country. All of us are going to have to sacrifice.”
Her quotes have been emblazoned on T-shirts and coffee mugs, and a Facebook fan club has more than 130,000 members. A popular Internet meme in Ohio includes a photo of Acton in her signature outfit, along with the caption: “Not all heroes where capes. Mine wears a white coat.”
Those who have known Acton for decades say they are not surprised. She grew up poor in blue-collar Youngstown, living one winter out of a tent and surviving abuse. The chance to attend Northeast Ohio Medical University was her ticket out of that life and on to a 30-plus-year career in medical practice and policy, culminating in DeWine’s selection of her for the medical director job last year. But she retained her ability to empathize.
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“She was always able to connect with people, and we see that now especially,” said Rochelle Rosian, a classmate who is now a Cleveland Clinic doctor. “She’s educating Ohioans, knowing that knowledge is power.”
Not everyone, of course, has appreciated her advice. The protesters at her home in Bexley, a suburb of Columbus, have numbered in the dozens out of a state of nearly 12 million. But they have attracted widespread attention with their aggressive tactics, breaking the calm of a peaceful neighborhood with bullhorn-amplified invective.
Some slogans have been tame: “Dr. Amy Over-Re-Acton” and “Hairstylists are Essential.” But much of the rhetoric has been anti-Semitic and sexist, said Madison, the next-door neighbor. (Acton is Jewish.)
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Neighbors have responded by planting “Dr. Amy Acton Fan Club” yard signs and by sitting in Acton’s lawn in a show of solidarity whenever the protesters come around. The two sides have repeatedly squared off — one socially distanced and wearing masks, the other massed together and not.
“It’s really bizarre,” Madison said. “We just sit there silently. They’re screaming and yelling. It’s terrible.”
Dozens including Alycia Rodgers, right, don masks as the Physicians Action Network holds a public rally in support of Acton. (Barbara J. Perenic/AP)
New signs appeared along Pleasant Ridge, specifically outside Acton's home in Bexley. (Barbara J. Perenic/AP)
Madison said he believes the protesters first demonstrate at the nearby capitol building before shifting to Acton’s house.
But the health director’s critics are well represented within the statehouse, as well as outside. State Rep. Nino Vitale (R) has frequently derided Acton as a “dictator” as well as “an unelected, globalist health director.”
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The Republican majority in the House passed legislation this month — with no Democratic support — that would dramatically curtail Acton’s authority, effectively nullifying her orders if they are not endorsed by a legislative panel.
The legislation is considered unlikely to pass in the Ohio Senate, and DeWine has said he would veto it even if it does. But Republican legislators said they would continue to press to limit Acton’s reach.
“Unbridled power with no oversight or accountability is a recipe for economic calamity and a loss of freedom,” said Rep. Derek Merrin (R), who voted for the measure and supports allowing all Ohio businesses to immediately reopen. “That’s what we have in Ohio.”
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Merrin described Acton — a registered Democrat who campaigned for Barack Obama — as a negative influence on the state’s GOP governor. She has flip-flopped on questions such as whether to recommend that Ohioans wear masks, he said, and has promoted models that exaggerate the virus’s toll.
Allies of Acton, who declined an interview request for this story, say the only reason those dire forecasts have not come true is that the state acted preemptively to head off the worst of the virus’s effects.
“She’s done phenomenally well,” said Rep. Emilia Sykes, who leads Democrats in the Ohio House.
Acton enters the daily coronavirus news conference. (Doral Chenoweth/AP)
Sykes has a degree in public health but said the legislature should have no business telling a medical expert how to do her job in the midst of a crisis. “It is a grossly negligent act to think that 10 legislators are better situated to decide,” she said.
Sykes said she believes much of the criticism of Acton stems from sexism: The men who dominate in Ohio politics, she said, are uncomfortable with a woman wielding so much power. “If you worked with the people I work with, you would understand exactly what I mean,” she said. “It’s very clear that female leadership is not as respected.”
Merrin described that idea as “ridiculous.”
DeWine announced Thursday that much of Ohio’s economy will reopen by the end of the month, including pools, day-care centers, gyms and sports leagues. That’s despite the fact that cases in Ohio have plateaued, not dropped as DeWine had said he wanted before a wide-scale reopening.
Sykes said she worries that DeWine let the political pressure get to him and relaxed restrictions before it was time. “There are a lot of people rooting for the governor,” she said. “But we’re very concerned about what happens next.”
Acton is apparently one of them. While she stood by DeWine for Thursday’s announcement, and endorsed it, she was careful to note that the success or failure of the state’s reopening will depend largely on how people respond. She encouraged Ohio citizens to continue to respect social distancing and to proceed “carefully,” recognizing that the threat remains.
“Each and every one of us should be judicious,” she said. “We have choices to make.”
Demonstrators with signs are reflected in a puddle in Columbus. (Matthew Hatcher/Bloomberg News)
meka72
Well-Known Member
A view of Moderna headquarters in Cambridge, Mass. (Maddie Meyer/Getty Images)
By
Carolyn Y. Johnson
May 18, 2020 at 8:54 a.m. EDT
PLEASE NOTE
The Washington Post is providing this important information about the coronavirus for free. For more free coverage of the coronavirus pandemic, sign up for our daily Coronavirus Updates newsletter where all stories are free to read.
Moderna, the Massachusetts biotechnology company behind a leading effort to create a coronavirus vaccine, announced promising early results from its first human safety tests Monday. The company plans to launch a large clinical trial in July aimed at showing whether the vaccine works.
The company reported that in eight patients who had been followed for a month and a half, the vaccine at low and medium doses triggered blood levels of virus-fighting antibodies that were similar or greater than those found in patients who recovered. That would suggest, but doesn’t prove, that it triggers some level of immunity. The antibody-rich blood plasma donated by patients who have recovered is separately being tested to determine whether it is an effective therapy or preventive measure for covid-19.
What antibody tests can teach us about potential coronavirus immunity
Antibody testing has garnered the attention of many researchers and government officials in the fight against the coronavirus outbreak. (John Farrell, Jonathan Baran/The Washington Post)
Moderna’s announcement comes days after one of its directors, Moncef Slaoui, stepped down from the board to become chief scientist for Operation Warp Speed, a White House initiative to speed up vaccine development. Watchdogs called out Slaoui’s apparent conflict of interest. Filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission show Slaoui’s stock options in Moderna are worth more than $10 million with the company’s share price at $66.69. In pre-market trading Monday, Moderna’s stock soared as high as 30 percent to nearly $87.
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Moderna also received $483 million from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, a federal agency.
“Slaoui’s blatant financial conflicts of interest disqualify him for the role of vaccine czar, unless he commits immediately to global vaccine access conditions over the obvious profit interests of the corporations he serves,” said Peter Maybarduk, director of the Access to Medicines Program at Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) called for Slaoui to divest his stock options, tweeting it is “a huge conflict of interest for the White House’s new vaccine czar to own $10 million of stock in a company receiving government funding to develop a covid-19 vaccine.”
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The data released Monday by Moderna is encouraging, but represents only a first step in a long process to bring a vaccine to market. It comes from an interim report on dozens of patients followed over weeks, whereas vaccine studies require broad testing in thousands of patients followed over many months or years.
Paul Offit, a vaccine expert at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said the data looked promising and it made sense to proceed to a large trial this summer.
“The fact that the vaccine elicited neutralizing antibody amounts comparable or higher to those found in convalescent sera [plasma] is very encouraging,” said Arturo Casadevall, chair of molecular microbiology and immunology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who is spearheading the initiative to test plasma as a treatment.
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Peter Jay Hotez, who is working on developing a coronavirus vaccine at the Baylor College of Medicine, said it would be important to understand the level of antibodies detected in the patients beyond the information provided in a company news release. He pointed to emerging evidence that many recovered patients do not muster high levels after they recover — and that high levels of antibodies are needed to neutralize the virus.
The vaccine showed no worrisome safety signals, aside from redness at the injection site for one patient and some transient “systemic” symptoms in three patients given the highest dose, the company said.
The interim data comes from a clinical trial aimed at showing the safety of its experimental vaccine and helping the company select the correct dose. The company has not yet picked the final dose, or announced the size or length of the large trial that it will start in July, which will be the key one that regulators consider to decide whether the vaccine is safe and effective.
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“We are very, very happy because first the vaccine was generally safe,” Stephane Bancel, chief executive of Moderna said in an interview. “The piece that was really exciting and was the big question, of course, was can you find antibodies in people in enough quantities” to prevent disease.
Moderna also reported that the vaccine protected mice who were vaccinated and then exposed to the virus, preventing it from multiplying in their lungs. The animal and human data being released by the company have not yet been published.
Moderna’s vaccine uses a genetic material called messenger RNA that codes for the distinctive spike protein that studs the outside of the novel coronavirus. The vaccine delivers the messenger RNA to cells, which then follows the genetic instructions to create the virus protein — allowing the body to learn to recognize and neutralize the pathogen.
Alta Angel
Well-Known Member
My husband is on the board of our HOA, and he said that the legal counsel recommended NOT opening the pool this summer due to liability concerns. At a minimum he suggested that the board reviews the current insurance coverage and potentially add more. My husband said they were having fits and saying that they were opening the pool no matter what. The board members were already annoyed because my husband used FaceTime to attend the meeting!
meka72
Well-Known Member
Devices associated with protesters travelled up to hundreds of miles after rallies where few precautions were taken

Cellphone location data suggests that demonstrators at anti-lockdown protests – some of which have been connected with Covid-19 cases – are often traveling hundreds of miles to events, returning to all parts of their states, and even crossing into neighboring ones.
The data, provided to the Guardian by the progressive campaign group the Committee to Protect Medicare, raises the prospect that the protests will play a role in spreading the coronavirus epidemic to areas which have, so far, experienced relatively few infections.
The anonymized location data was captured from opt-in cellphone apps, and data scientists at the firm VoteMap used it to determine the movements of devices present at protests in late April and early May in five states: Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Colorado and Florida.
They then created visualizations that tracked the movements of those devices up to 48 hours after the conclusion of protests. The visualizations only show movements within states, due to the queries analysts made in creating them. But the data scientist Jeremy Fair, executive-vice president of VoteMap, says that many of the devices that are seen to reach state borders are seen to continue across them in the underlying raw data.
One visualization shows that in Lansing, Michigan, after a 30 April protest in which armed protesters stormed the capitol building and state police were forced to physically block access to Governor Gretchen Whitmer, devices which had been present at the protest site can be seen returning to all parts of the state, from Detroit to remote towns in the state’s north.
One device visible in the data traveled to and from Afton, which is over 180 miles from the capital. Others reached, and some crossed, the Indiana border.
In the 48 hours following a 19 April “Operation Gridlock” protest in Denver, devices reached the borders of neighboring states including Wyoming, Nebraska, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Utah.
In Florida on 18 April, devices returned to all parts of the peninsula and up to the Georgia border. In Wisconsin on 24 April, devices returned to smaller towns like Green Bay and Wausau, and the borders of Minnesota and Illinois.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/18/lockdown-protests-spread-coronavirus-cellphone-data

Cellphone location data suggests that demonstrators at anti-lockdown protests – some of which have been connected with Covid-19 cases – are often traveling hundreds of miles to events, returning to all parts of their states, and even crossing into neighboring ones.
The data, provided to the Guardian by the progressive campaign group the Committee to Protect Medicare, raises the prospect that the protests will play a role in spreading the coronavirus epidemic to areas which have, so far, experienced relatively few infections.
The anonymized location data was captured from opt-in cellphone apps, and data scientists at the firm VoteMap used it to determine the movements of devices present at protests in late April and early May in five states: Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Colorado and Florida.
They then created visualizations that tracked the movements of those devices up to 48 hours after the conclusion of protests. The visualizations only show movements within states, due to the queries analysts made in creating them. But the data scientist Jeremy Fair, executive-vice president of VoteMap, says that many of the devices that are seen to reach state borders are seen to continue across them in the underlying raw data.
One visualization shows that in Lansing, Michigan, after a 30 April protest in which armed protesters stormed the capitol building and state police were forced to physically block access to Governor Gretchen Whitmer, devices which had been present at the protest site can be seen returning to all parts of the state, from Detroit to remote towns in the state’s north.
One device visible in the data traveled to and from Afton, which is over 180 miles from the capital. Others reached, and some crossed, the Indiana border.
In the 48 hours following a 19 April “Operation Gridlock” protest in Denver, devices reached the borders of neighboring states including Wyoming, Nebraska, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Utah.
In Florida on 18 April, devices returned to all parts of the peninsula and up to the Georgia border. In Wisconsin on 24 April, devices returned to smaller towns like Green Bay and Wausau, and the borders of Minnesota and Illinois.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/18/lockdown-protests-spread-coronavirus-cellphone-data
I think you are soo sweet and considerate to start using spoilers for your posts. 
I hate NYPD wth a passion! Passion! I once got threatened to be tased and put on a psych hold because I calmly questioned their actions. That video triggered me. Gosh I hate them. Was that a white mother?
Last edited:
Everything Zen
Well-Known Member
So we should have taken the WHO tests or at least paid the German manufacturer rather than just refused them outright prior to making our own so we weren't out here caught with our pants down. Lord have mercy!!! Who does that?!!
https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/biden-trump-wrong-about-who-coronavirus-tests/
https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/biden-trump-wrong-about-who-coronavirus-tests/
Crackers Phinn
Either A Blessing Or A Lesson.
Are there any other business owners fighting with your insurance company over your Business Interruption policy?
sunshinebeautiful
Well-Known Member
I'm in higher ed. There is a faction of parents who are determined to have their kids back on campus, living in dorms, etc., and others who are wary. Questions keep coming up about wanting an announcement of what's happening in the Fall... although, truthfully, nobody knows what's next. I've been seeing more discussions about allowing kids to come back to campus, but only if they're willing to sign liability waivers. The colleges are fearful of being sued if kids get sick.
Miss_Luna
Well-Known Member
With the way kids are responding to this, a rare disorder similar to Kawasaki's disease, I'm surprised most parents would advocate to open the pool. The insurance would need to go up, which would most likely make the HOA fees go up.
People are crazy; these are the same people that are going to complain about long waiting times in the hospital once they show up with the entire family sick.
UmSumayyah
Well-Known Member
I'm surprised that the school could be liable.
You can't prove that a kid got Covid on campus and not at the local coffee shop or Walmart, can you?
How is a school with basic cleanliness going to be sued over a virus?
If no one gets sued because someone contracted meningitis or the flu, what would the precedent be for suing over Covid contraction, even if it could be proven that they got it from a door handle in the dining hall?
oneastrocurlie
Well-Known Member
These anti-Acton people suck.
Ohio’s Amy Acton inspires admiration, and a backlash, with tough coronavirus response
Supporters of Ohio Health Director Amy Acton on Acton's front lawn after a few dozen protesters of the stay-at-home orders once again showed up outside her home in Bexley, Ohio, on May 4. (Barbara J. Perenic/AP)
By
Griff Witte
May 18, 2020 at 7:43 a.m. EDT
It was a sunny spring day in the Ohio suburb of Bexley. Along streets lined with old-growth sycamores and maples, residents were out cutting the grass. Children were playing in the front lawns. Then the men with the guns showed up.
“We don’t see people in our neighborhood wearing full military outfits, armed with handguns,” said Tim Madison, a lawyer and former city council member. “It was shocking, to say the least.”
But Madison knew why they were there: for his next-door neighbor, Amy Acton.
An obscure state official only months ago, Acton — who was homeless as a child in hardscrabble Youngstown — has become a white-coated emblem of her state’s forceful coronavirus response. To her legions of fans, she’s a hero whose aggressive action as Ohio health director has saved lives, and whose calm, clear and compassionate style is a national model for how leaders should be communicating amid an unparalleled public health crisis.
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Yet Acton has also become a target, and not only for the protesters — some armed, most not — who have descended on her home.
One Republican state representative denounced the 54-year-old doctor as a “medical dictator.” And the GOP-dominated Ohio House recently voted to strip much of her power, with members agitating against the widespread closures that have brought the state crushing economic pain.
Sign up for our Coronavirus Updates newsletter to track the outbreak. All stories linked in the newsletter are free to access.
The backlash against Acton reflects a broader rebuke of the medical advisers who are counseling caution as the nation enters its third month since coronavirus shutdowns kicked off. Although polls show that most Americans remain willing to accept the trade-offs that experts say are necessary to curb the virus’s spread, demonstrators, lawmakers and top officials — not least the president — have been far less patient.
A protester holds up a sign outside of the Ohio statehouse in Columbus. (Megan Jelinger/AFP/Getty Images)
A woman holds up a sign against Acton outside of the Ohio statehouse in Columbus. (Megan Jelinger/AFP/Getty Images)
Legislators in Pennsylvania recently led a capitol-steps protest demanding the resignation of the state health secretary. In Wisconsin, the GOP-dominated legislature filed suit against the governor’s health advisers, prompting the state supreme court to strike down stay-at-home orders — and thirsty patrons to throng suddenly reopened bars.
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At the national level, senators have undercut infectious disease point man Anthony S. Fauci — as has the president he serves — after Fauci admonished against a “cavalier” attitude toward reopening the economy.
“I’m a scientist, a physician and a public health official. I give advice, according to the best scientific evidence,” Fauci replied last week after Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) told him he was not the “end all.”
Trump was displeased. “He wants to play all sides of the equation,” the president complained when asked about Fauci’s warnings. The president said Fauci’s reservations about reopening schools were, in particular, “not an acceptable answer.”
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By contrast, Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, has stood by his top medical adviser. Acton, DeWine has said in response to attacks from members of his own party, is “a good, compassionate and honorable person” who has “worked nonstop to save lives and protect her fellow citizens.”
‘The buck stops with me’: DeWine calls out anti-lockdown protests
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) defended members of the media and his staff from protesters during a press briefing on May 4. (The Ohio Channel)
He has also insisted that protesters and other critics target him, not her. “The buck stops with me,” DeWine said this month as demonstrators were unsettling Acton’s Bexley neighbors. “These decisions are my decisions.”
Acton’s influence, however, has been undeniable.
With Acton at his side, DeWine led the nation in shutting down sources of covid-19 spread, including large gatherings, schools and restaurants. His handling of the crisis has been hailed as a model by public health experts, and it has won approval from an astonishing 86 percent of Ohioans. The state has over 27,000 coronavirus cases, around half the total of its smaller neighbor, Michigan.
Acton talks with reporters at the Ohio statehouse after a news conference in April. (Doral Chenoweth/AP)
At their regular news conferences, the governor has often yielded the floor to Acton and allowed her to explain the finer points of medical knowledge about the coronavirus . She has also taken on much of the emotional hand-holding.
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“I don’t want you to be afraid. I am not afraid. I am determined,” she said on the March day that she issued the state’s stay-at-home order. “I want you to think about the fact that this is our one shot in this country. All of us are going to have to sacrifice.”
Her quotes have been emblazoned on T-shirts and coffee mugs, and a Facebook fan club has more than 130,000 members. A popular Internet meme in Ohio includes a photo of Acton in her signature outfit, along with the caption: “Not all heroes where capes. Mine wears a white coat.”
Those who have known Acton for decades say they are not surprised. She grew up poor in blue-collar Youngstown, living one winter out of a tent and surviving abuse. The chance to attend Northeast Ohio Medical University was her ticket out of that life and on to a 30-plus-year career in medical practice and policy, culminating in DeWine’s selection of her for the medical director job last year. But she retained her ability to empathize.
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“She was always able to connect with people, and we see that now especially,” said Rochelle Rosian, a classmate who is now a Cleveland Clinic doctor. “She’s educating Ohioans, knowing that knowledge is power.”
Not everyone, of course, has appreciated her advice. The protesters at her home in Bexley, a suburb of Columbus, have numbered in the dozens out of a state of nearly 12 million. But they have attracted widespread attention with their aggressive tactics, breaking the calm of a peaceful neighborhood with bullhorn-amplified invective.
Some slogans have been tame: “Dr. Amy Over-Re-Acton” and “Hairstylists are Essential.” But much of the rhetoric has been anti-Semitic and sexist, said Madison, the next-door neighbor. (Acton is Jewish.)
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Neighbors have responded by planting “Dr. Amy Acton Fan Club” yard signs and by sitting in Acton’s lawn in a show of solidarity whenever the protesters come around. The two sides have repeatedly squared off — one socially distanced and wearing masks, the other massed together and not.
“It’s really bizarre,” Madison said. “We just sit there silently. They’re screaming and yelling. It’s terrible.”
Dozens including Alycia Rodgers, right, don masks as the Physicians Action Network holds a public rally in support of Acton. (Barbara J. Perenic/AP)
New signs appeared along Pleasant Ridge, specifically outside Acton's home in Bexley. (Barbara J. Perenic/AP)
Madison said he believes the protesters first demonstrate at the nearby capitol building before shifting to Acton’s house.
But the health director’s critics are well represented within the statehouse, as well as outside. State Rep. Nino Vitale (R) has frequently derided Acton as a “dictator” as well as “an unelected, globalist health director.”
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The Republican majority in the House passed legislation this month — with no Democratic support — that would dramatically curtail Acton’s authority, effectively nullifying her orders if they are not endorsed by a legislative panel.
The legislation is considered unlikely to pass in the Ohio Senate, and DeWine has said he would veto it even if it does. But Republican legislators said they would continue to press to limit Acton’s reach.
“Unbridled power with no oversight or accountability is a recipe for economic calamity and a loss of freedom,” said Rep. Derek Merrin (R), who voted for the measure and supports allowing all Ohio businesses to immediately reopen. “That’s what we have in Ohio.”
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Merrin described Acton — a registered Democrat who campaigned for Barack Obama — as a negative influence on the state’s GOP governor. She has flip-flopped on questions such as whether to recommend that Ohioans wear masks, he said, and has promoted models that exaggerate the virus’s toll.
Allies of Acton, who declined an interview request for this story, say the only reason those dire forecasts have not come true is that the state acted preemptively to head off the worst of the virus’s effects.
“She’s done phenomenally well,” said Rep. Emilia Sykes, who leads Democrats in the Ohio House.
Acton enters the daily coronavirus news conference. (Doral Chenoweth/AP)
Sykes has a degree in public health but said the legislature should have no business telling a medical expert how to do her job in the midst of a crisis. “It is a grossly negligent act to think that 10 legislators are better situated to decide,” she said.
Sykes said she believes much of the criticism of Acton stems from sexism: The men who dominate in Ohio politics, she said, are uncomfortable with a woman wielding so much power. “If you worked with the people I work with, you would understand exactly what I mean,” she said. “It’s very clear that female leadership is not as respected.”
Merrin described that idea as “ridiculous.”
DeWine announced Thursday that much of Ohio’s economy will reopen by the end of the month, including pools, day-care centers, gyms and sports leagues. That’s despite the fact that cases in Ohio have plateaued, not dropped as DeWine had said he wanted before a wide-scale reopening.
Sykes said she worries that DeWine let the political pressure get to him and relaxed restrictions before it was time. “There are a lot of people rooting for the governor,” she said. “But we’re very concerned about what happens next.”
Acton is apparently one of them. While she stood by DeWine for Thursday’s announcement, and endorsed it, she was careful to note that the success or failure of the state’s reopening will depend largely on how people respond. She encouraged Ohio citizens to continue to respect social distancing and to proceed “carefully,” recognizing that the threat remains.
“Each and every one of us should be judicious,” she said. “We have choices to make.”
Demonstrators with signs are reflected in a puddle in Columbus. (Matthew Hatcher/Bloomberg News)
Giirllll I'm so over them. I think the fact that she's a Democrat is making them even more crazy.
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