just like the old days in CA when some had strong opinions about no shoes, no shirt, no service

"RapperViper" here has, er, real strong opinions against the vaccine as the possible mark of the beast, never heard of him but see he has 90K+ followers; his opinion seems informed by some kind of supreme being, not sure who and I don't know what race but he certainly doesn't look like a white supremacist:

What is the hand signal in the photo?

Florida doctors are exhausted and angry as the state's COVID-19 surge unleashes pandemonium inside hospitals

Florida has entered the worst phase of the coronavirus outbreak in the state. Insider interviewed doctors, hospital leaders, and local government officials, to explain the chaos it's created. “You just emotionally break,” said Ed Jimenez, CEO of the University of Florida Health Shands Hospital.

Military gonna do it FINALLY:

It was absurd it took so long. They signed away their rights to their body when they signed on the dotted line. It's not like they could refuse vaccination for exotic diseases when deployed sheesh...

Children's hospitals are swamped with Covid patients — and it may only get worse

Nearly 1,600 kids with Covid-19 were hospitalized last week, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — a new seven-day record and a 27 percent increase from the week before.

current headline story BY DAN GOLDBERG AND ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN @ Politico.com, 8/11/2021 03:00 PM EDT

[....] Tennessee’s health commissioner expects the state’s children’s hospitals to be full by the week’s end. Louisiana reached that point more than a week ago. And Arkansas’ only children’s hospital has just two ICU beds remaining.

As dire as the situation is now, hospital leaders and public health officials predict it will get even worse in the coming weeks. They are already contending with unseasonably high levels of RSV, a respiratory virus that can be dangerous for young children and infants. Flu season is on the horizon. And schools across the country are welcoming children back, creating opportunities for Covid-19 and other viruses to spread even faster.

Yet the escalating crisis has had little political impact thus far, even in the southeastern states where Delta is hitting hardest. Most GOP governors and state officials who have banned vaccine mandates, mask requirements and other public health tools to fight Covid-19 are sticking with those policies. Nor has the unprecedented wave of infections in children meaningfully moved parents of school-age children; nearly 60 percent said they opposed mandating shots for kids attending school in person, according to a new survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation. And almost 70 percent of Republican parents told pollsters they continue to oppose school mask mandates.

In the face of this inaction, doctors and health officials are struggling to deal with the growing number of sick children.

“We’ve got problems pretty uniformly everywhere,” said Mark Wietecha, CEO of the Children’s Hospital Association. “Most of our children's hospital intensive care units, if they're not near capacity, they're at capacity. We have kids in the emergency department on gurneys.”

When Covid infections surged in adults last year, hospitals delayed elective procedures, commandeered beds normally used for other patients and brought in temporary staff from other states. Many facilities are returning to those tactics with cases in adults once again rising. But most of those strategies are difficult or impossible to apply to treating children, Wietecha said. Pediatric patients require specialized staff and equipment — and for them, virtually no procedure is elective. [....]

I follow this guy who often offers up some "black" humor--small "b", no pun intended--here's a new one from him sorely needed right now 

this will be costing all of us big bucks, the insurers who agree to cover it will get their money back one way or another:

‘This is real’: Fear and hope in an Arkansas pediatric ICU

As the delta variant surges, some experts worry we may be entering the most dangerous moment in the pandemic for children

By  Ariana Eunjung Cha @ WashingtonPost.com,Today at 3:32 p.m. EDT

LITTLE ROCK — It had started on July 1 when she could no longer smell her uncle’s cologne.

Caia Alexx Morris, 13, had been sitting on the couch texting friends, and as other family members joked about the overpowering scent, it hit her that she had no idea what they were talking about. She had no other symptoms at the time. But two days later, she was diagnosed with covid-19 and on a ventilator, and has been in intensive care ever since.

“Thirty-four days,” her mother Angela Morris reflected last week while at Caia’s bedside at Arkansas Children’s Hospital. 816 hours. 48,960 minutes. And counting. “This is a nightmare.”

Outside Room No. 5 on the third floor, where Caia lay with a stuffed frog in one hand and a stuffed seal in the other, a crowd of doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists and other specialists buzzed around her and other sick children. The hospital had started the day with 23 covid patients, 10 in intensive care. Five of those were on ventilators and three were on heart-and-lung bypass machines of last resort. It wouldn’t be long before more sick kids were on the way

You always have times when you cry,” Shonda Grappe, a pediatric intensive care nurse, said a few hours into her shift. “Everyone is feeling this.”

The hyper-contagious delta variant has changed much of what we thought we knew about the coronavirus and children — that kids might get infected, but they were extremely unlikely to become seriously ill. Today, as delta infections mount, some front line doctors suggest children are being hospitalized at higher rates and with more serious illnesses because of the new variant — a still-unproven hypothesis. What is indisputable is that in a swath of low-vaccination states stretching from Florida, South Carolina and Texas, up to Indiana and Missouri, the first large wave of pediatric cases is hitting hard — overwhelming hospitals, dominating political debates over mask and vaccine mandates and throwing school reopening plans into disarray.

Linda Young, a respiratory therapist at the hospital for nearly 37 years, said these latest children with covid appear to be progressing to respiratory distress much faster and in less predictable patterns: “I have never seen anything like this.” Even healthy children are being hospitalized, she said, something she had not seen in previous waves.

[graph]

Amid the delta-fueled coronavirus surge, the American Academy of Pediatrics reported a nearly sevenfold increase in new child covid infections in one month: In the first week of July, there were 12,000 cases nationwide. By the first week of August, the number had grown to 96,000 — representing about 15 percent of all new infections.

As of Thursday, 1,785 children with suspected or confirmed covid-19 cases were hospitalized across the country, according to a Washington Post analysis. Florida leads the country in child hospitalizations — with 247 children with covid-19 admitted last week, a rate of 35 new admissions a day.

Doctors at major children’s hospitals say nearly all of their patients are unvaccinated. They are either under age 12 and not yet eligible for the coronavirus shots, or teens who put off the vaccine.

While those numbers are still a fraction of adult hospitalizations — and children’s deaths remain rare — they represent the highest rate of new pediatric admissions of any point in the pandemic. And there is growing evidence that even mild or asymptomatic infections in children could lead to long-haul illness, just as in adults.

In a letter this week to acting Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Janet Woodcock, the pediatricians’ group urged federal authorities to approve the shots for younger kids as soon as possible: “In our view, the rise of the delta variant changes the risk-benefit analysis.”

Combined with a highly unusual spike in the number of children admitted with respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), a flu-like illness that usually strikes in the winter, and parainfluenza viruses — and in some cases, co-infections with covid-19 — many children’s hospitals are overwhelmed.

“After many months of zero or few pediatric covid cases, we are seeing infants, children, and teens with covid pouring back into the hospital, more and more each day … I worry that we will run out of beds and staff,” Heather Haq, a pediatrician for Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, tweeted recently.

Michael Smit, a pediatric infectious-disease expert at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, said he fears things may get even worse over the next few months with vaccines for 5- to 11-year-olds delayed until later in the year.

“We have months more to go,” he warned. “We’re in a real danger period between now and then.”

‘Different’

Most respiratory viruses like the flu hit the very old and the very young with equal vengeance. SARS-CoV-2 has always been different. There have been about 400 children in the United States who have died from the virus, compared with more than 600,000 adults — and we still haven’t figured out exactly why.

The delta variant, which now represents about 97 percent of U.S. cases, seems almost like another virus than the one that spread from central China last year. Studies suggest it has a shorter incubation period — three to four days, instead of five to six — and that it may result in higher viral loads, which may explain its super transmissibility.

Whether it leads to more severe disease is a matter of intense debate. Doctors and nurses on the front lines report that infected children appear to be sicker than earlier in the pandemic. And several studies, including a report based on data from Scotland, suggested the variant doubles the risk of hospitalization regardless of a patient’s age. But the evidence is still mostly anecdotal and some contend co-infections with other viruses, and the larger number of stricken kids may account for what doctors are seeing.

Mark Williams, dean of the College of Public Health at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, said that even the first signs of illness look distinct — “more like a typical cold or pneumonia,” than they did a year ago. These include a sore throat, for example

Unvaccinated America, In 5 Charts: current headline story at FiveThirtyEight.com​