dagblog - Comments for "Vice President Harris Tests Positive for Coronavirus"

Just announced by @StateDept

artappraiser — Thu, 05 May 2022 13:53:39 +0000

In reply to Vice President Harris Tests Positive for Coronavirus

Just announced by @StateDept that @SecBlinken has tested positive for #COVID19. pic.twitter.com/6VVvO4r2Vi
— Steve Herman (@W7VOA) May 4, 2022

Bill Gates on Covid: ‘I don’t

artappraiser — Wed, 04 May 2022 06:29:28 +0000

In reply to Vice President Harris Tests Positive for Coronavirus

Bill Gates on Covid: ‘I don’t want to be a voice of doom and gloom,’ but ‘the worst’ could still be ahead

@CNBC.COM, Published Mon, May 2 20222:41 PM EDT

In the days since WHCD

artappraiser — Wed, 04 May 2022 04:40:29 +0000

In reply to Vice President Harris Tests Positive for Coronavirus

In the days since WHCD weekend, reporters and staffers from CNN, ABC News, NBC News, CBS News, Politico, and other participating news orgs have tested positive for Covid. More in the @ReliableSources newsletter. https://t.co/Fg9FPbasc0
— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) May 4, 2022

Prevalence of Long Covid is

artappraiser — Tue, 03 May 2022 04:15:36 +0000

In reply to 9/ Friends, over 100 MILLION

Prevalence of Long Covid is now estimated to be
51-80%
across all infections including asymptomatic, mild and severe.

We keep finding more of it. https://t.co/B6oVGb46lN
— Yaneer Bar-Yam (@yaneerbaryam) May 2, 2022

9/ Friends, over 100 MILLION

artappraiser — Mon, 02 May 2022 23:02:36 +0000

In reply to Vice President Harris Tests Positive for Coronavirus

9/ Friends, over 100 MILLION people have #LongCOVID

We must ALL be aware of this burgeoning public health disaster.

Even after mild COVID, people are suffering or have suffered long-term symptoms.

It’s very unpredictable.https://t.co/xGcc2zb3aP
— WesElyMD (@WesElyMD) May 2, 2022

Them viruses, they are after

artappraiser — Fri, 29 Apr 2022 02:02:48 +0000

In reply to Vice President Harris Tests Positive for Coronavirus

Them viruses, they are after us, yes they are, not giving up:

BREAKING: Human case of H5N1 bird flu reported in Colorado
— The Spectator Index (@spectatorindex) April 29, 2022

Today, after consultation

artappraiser — Thu, 28 Apr 2022 16:28:54 +0000

In reply to Vice President Harris Tests Positive for Coronavirus

Today, after consultation with her physicians, the Vice President was prescribed and has taken Paxlovid.
— Kirsten Allen (@KirstenAllen46) April 26, 2022

Coronavirus has infected

artappraiser — Wed, 27 Apr 2022 06:38:25 +0000

In reply to Vice President Harris Tests Positive for Coronavirus

Coronavirus has infected majority of Americans, blood tests indicate (nearly 60%!)

But officials caution that people should not presume they have protection against the virus going forward

By Lena H. Sun, Dan Keating and Joel Achenbach @ WashingtonPost.com, Updated yesterday at 6:16 p.m. EDT

Before omicron, one-third of Americans had been infected with the coronavirus, but by the end of February, that rate had climbed to nearly 60 percent, including 3 out of 4 children, according to federal health data released Tuesday.

The data from blood tests offers the first evidence that over half the U.S. population, roughly 190 million people, has been infected at least once since the pandemic began. That is more than double the official case count. Many of those infections are likely to have been asymptomatic or with few symptoms. The virus has killed nearly 1 million Americans and caused disruptions that have driven up death rates from other causes, including cancer and heart disease.

Officials cautioned, however, that the data, drawn from tens of thousands of blood samples from across the country, does not indicate people have protection against the virus going forward, especially against increasingly transmissible variants that may be able to evade antibodies. Previous infections are believed to offer some protection against severe disease for most people, especially when combined with vaccinations. But the natural waning of antibodies and an ever-evolving virus create opportunities for reinfection.

“We continue to recommend that everyone be up to date on their vaccinations, get your primary series and booster, when eligible,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said during a media briefing.

“We don’t know how long [ago] that infection was,” she said of antibodies from past infections. “We don’t know whether that protection has waned. We don’t know as much about that level of protection than we do about the protection we get from both vaccines and boosters.”

The CDC report offers confirmation of what experts suspected: Most people in the country have had at least one coronavirus infection. Close to half of those got that infection in recent months when the omicron variant swept the nation. That variant, first identified in southern Africa, had so many mutations it could easily infect people who had antibodies from previous bouts of the virus or whose antibodies were generated by a vaccine [....]

Medicine: sucky as usual - a real crap shoot.

Deborah Birx’s Excruciating

artappraiser — Wed, 27 Apr 2022 06:22:48 +0000

In reply to Vice President Harris Tests Positive for Coronavirus

Deborah Birx’s Excruciating Story of Donald Trump’s Covid Response

“Silent Invasion,” an insider’s look at the Trump administration’s pandemic policies, is earnest and exhaustive, our reviewer says.

By David Quammen @ NYTimes.com, April 21, 2022

On March 2, 2020, Dr. Deborah Birx took up her new position as coronavirus response coordinator within the White House Coronavirus Task Force. She was fresh off a plane from South Africa, where she had been busy in her sixth year as the global AIDS coordinator for the United States, overseeing the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a well-regarded and efficacious initiative begun by George W. Bush. The word “coordinator” is an equivocal title under the best of bureaucratic circumstances, let alone in the Trump White House, and amid the urgency of this new pandemic, arising to occlude the older one (AIDS), Birx had no time or opportunity to define the title before assuming it. She had said yes to “a job I didn’t seek but felt compelled to accept,” she recounts in “Silent Invasion.” She wasn’t the chair of this White House task force; Alex Azar, the secretary of Health and Human Services, held that position until he was replaced after one month by Vice President Pence. Birx had an office in the West Wing but almost no staff, and her only leverage was persuasion. Her account of how that played out — it’s no spoiler to say, how poorly that played out — is earnest, exhaustive and excruciating.

A representative point of inflection occurred within her first week. She sat in a meeting, prepared to hear Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, present detailed data showing where the virus was in America at that point — data that, she assumed, would be specific to counties, municipalities and ZIP codes, and would include positive test rates and hospitalization rates, so that efforts could be focused against localized outbreaks and projections could be made as to where the disease might explode next. What she and her colleagues got was a one-page C.D.C. handout, lacking any granular detail. “I pressed the flats of my hands into my eyes and shook my head,” she tells us. “I had expected something very different.” Advanced data-reporting structures and procedures, such as she and her PEPFAR team had helped African nations develop over years, did not exist in the United States, though they would be badly needed within the coming days. It wasn’t the last time Birx would deliver a face-palm reaction, literally or figuratively, to her new colleagues and bosses.

She did that to Trump himself, somewhat more discreetly, on April 23, 2020, as she sat against a side wall in the White House briefing room while he extolled, before assembled reporters, the idea of using disinfectant chemicals taken internally as a possible treatment against the virus. Did he propose that Americans drink bleach? It wasn’t clear that he didn’t. If such disinfectants could kill SARS-CoV-2 on a tabletop, as Trump had been told, why not? “Knocks it out in a minute,” he said. “One minute.” So perhaps the doctors should try injection. “It would be interesting to check that,” the president opined, with no sign of joking (as he claimed later). Birx froze, hands clenched on her lap. You can see her there even now, in video preserved on YouTube. “I looked down at my feet and wished for two things: something to kick,” she writes, “and for the floor to open up and swallow me whole.”

By that date, she and her more reliable colleagues on the task force, the physicians Redfield and Anthony Fauci, had achieved something useful: persuading the president to countenance a 15-day partial shutdown recommendation, then a 30-day extension, under the slogan “Stop the Spread”; the government seemed to be taking the viral threat seriously. “The president’s disinfectant remark could unravel all that,” Birx recalls thinking, “and at the worst possible time.” When Trump turned to her for comment on the potential benefits of disinfectant, and also of some form of sterilizing light — sunlight or beams of pure UV radiation or who knows — she answered, “Not as a treatment.” Birx didn’t, as she had hoped, vanish through the floor, but she did vanish from the flow chart of White House influence around that time. The daily news conferences ended, and she found herself marginalized throughout the rest of her tenure as task force coordinator — right up until Jan. 19, 2021. Why did she remain in the job? Because Trump and his political advisers didn’t want to fire her, [....]

More friends of mine have

artappraiser — Wed, 27 Apr 2022 04:58:37 +0000

In reply to Vice President Harris Tests Positive for Coronavirus

More friends of mine have tested positive for #COVID19 in the past week than at any point in the pandemic. By far, even. The "It's over" business is a total fiction. https://t.co/Y8SMT84Z8M
— Steve Silberman (@stevesilberman) April 26, 2022