#is it a mega-spreader event at this point?

[bomberqueen17]

traveling

(don’t reblog, I am not prepared for this to go way out of context on other people’s dashboards)

I know, I know, but I’m traveling for Thanksgiving.

I’m going to the farm where my isolation pod is, where I’ve been working all summer on the line at my sister’s poultry slaughterhouse. We’ve got one last big job-- everyone’s turkeys. Two processing dates for two batches-- we’re processing for another producer, as is traditional, and if he’s got 40-pounders like last year we’re gonna beat him up.

Yeah, I don’t live locally, yeah I’ve been working at my actual-income job for the last three weeks since we processed the final batch of chickens for the year, because yeah, I need actual money to survive. Yeah, that means I’m traveling from a hotspot (7% testing positive in Erie Co. as of yesterday) to... well, another hotspot, Rensselaer Co is up over 3% as of yesterday as well. (I got the NY Covid app on my phone and monitor it obsessively.)

(I’ve been strictly quarantining for weeks for this, only going, well, to work, in a retail store*, because I have to, because the unemployment ran out, because there’s still work that’s gotta be done, because my employer’s not getting rent relief or any kind of stimulus check, because there’s no money unless you’re already rich. I haven’t been into a restaurant since March. I haven’t been outside my house without a mask on in a couple of weeks now. So, how good a “quarantine” is that? You fucking tell me.)

(*I work in the office in the back. Yeah, I don’t talk to customers. Does that make me at lower risk? It’s all the same building, it’s all the same ventilation system, it’s mostly the same room. IDK; I leave my mask on. Does it help? I don’t actually know.)

I’m on an Amtrak train because I’m tired, because my car is not in great shape at the moment, because I’m going to get a ride back with someone afterward. (Yeah! More traveling. We’re reprehensible.) And this car is crammed (to strict guidelines, a maximum density-- they mark the trains sold out at 50% capacity) with college kids who are going home, because it’s terrifying out in the world and they want to see their mothers. And maybe that’s going to kill some of their mothers. And maybe some of their mothers are going to kill them.

The thing about all of this, as I look around at all the people traveling for Thanksgiving, and read all the Spicy Hot Takes on the Internet about how people traveling for Thanksgiving are the downfall of society, is that neither of those two parties are wrong. I am both of those. I think traveling is a terrible idea. And here I am, on a fucking train, watching the sun rise over corn stubble somewhere just outside of Batavia.

Because the thing is, this kind of shit is why humans organize themselves into governments. This is what a government is supposed to be for. A government is supposed to manage a fucking health crisis epidemic. It cannot come down to a college kid standing up to their family and opting to spend Thanksgiving alone (and possibly dying alone in their dorm room because their suitemates didn’t dare defy their parents and went home and brought the virus back). It cannot come down to a frightened parent telling their child to stay away. Humans are humans and we need human things, including and especially other humans. It’s got to be someone’s job to look at the big picture and allocate resources and implement policies to do what is necessary. And not half-assed impossible-to-enforce policies like “don’t have more than ten people in your house, privately”, which, if you’ve ever had an overbearing mother-in-law, you try telling her you’re not coming over and see what happens when she won’t buy Christmas presents for your kids in retaliation, you try dealing with your husband’s feelings about it, you try standing all alone against that like, fucking, Cuchulainn but with a frying pan and crying kids, like, fuck.

No-- policies like “we’re paying every restaurant’s employees to stay home and we’re giving paid sick leave to every wage earner whose job has been deemed essential”, kind of shit. Rent relief. Promises of re-hiring bonuses. Shit like that. None of this verbal-shaming-only bullshit that only makes people mad and doesn’t actually fucking stop any of the problem behavior.

I promise you, if there was money in it, the anti-mask rabble rousers would have a whole lot less traction.

It cannot be my individual effort. It can’t.

(I’m wearing an N95 I found in my basement with a three-layer fabric mask over the top and I’m fucking miserable and my face hurts and I have four and a half more hours of this to go. Oh my god does my face hurt. Shit these things suck.)

But I have to do this; it’s essential agricultural work. People have to fucking eat.

(Yeah, I’m going to wind up violating the law by eating Thanksgiving dinner with more than ten people, because that’s how big the farm isolation pod is; my immediate family was six, and now there are husbands and kids, and if we’re all here to process turkeys we’re going to fucking eat dinner together afterward, we’ve all been quarantining for it. Are we supposed to spend the day working together, eat lunch in shifts, and then eat dinner in shifts???)

Worst of all, the half-assed finger-wagging broke-ass attempts at stopping this are mostly being made by Democrats. Thousands of small business owners being ruined by this are going to blame Andy Cuomo (who is indisputably a piece of shit anyway so they’re not wrong in spirit, even if they are in specifics), and are going to vote straight-ticket Republican the rest of their lives over this. Across the country, lame-duck Republicans are going to trash the place on their way out, and the Democrats who come into office and try to fix it but don’t have any money to spend are going to be blamed for it, and in years to come, everyone will blame the Democrats for this. Just watch! Fuck your facts, fuck your feelings. Shrug. (I mean, to be fair, the Ds probably could get money, but they also only believe in giving money to rich people, which seems to be why our government thinks it exists. So they’re gonna bail out fucking Amazon or something and people will starve and they’ll wag their fingers at the progressives who voted for them to stop the bleeding and say we’re asking for too much. They very much will deserve it, in the end, and then Rs who never gave a shit in the first place will sweep gleefully back into power and strip the carcasses for scrap metal and sell it. I mean, I’ve seen this before, I’m old now.)

I’m tired. Please don’t reblog this, I’m not ready for people to read the first sentence and flame me over it for months. (Nobody ever reads the whole thing before they send anon hate.)

[aalt-ctrl-del]

I can’t even with this family

So background. This family is anti-vaxx evangelicals, I believe the husband is a pastor to a meg-church or something. The ones that do mega-covid spread events. My mom hate watches them, which is why I know about them.

Anyway. Whole family has covid. She talks so nonchalant about working close and being with people who tested positive, and her kids came back from a summer camp early because of a covid outbreak. But you can hear it in her voice how hard it is for her to breathe. And this woman is pregnant, so her immune system is not at top performance because there’s a baby in the equation. And lots of babies too, she has lil kids and teens.

But holy shit. What does this family do? They pack kids in the RV and go cross country.

This. This is the reason why the pandemic is so out of control. And this isn’t covid-original - which they seemed to skirt through because their doctors prescribed them Vitamin D - but delta is much more virulent, much more prolific in production. And no one is vaxxed, and they don’t believe in masks.

And right now her husband might be in relapse, he’s having a hard time with it because he is dark skinned. Her kids are doing all right. But she clearly is having some hypoxia distress, and though it looks like her immune system is rallying against the virus - getting out doors is very healthy mind you, staying away form other covid spreaders is also a good thing too.

They are traveling cross country to Colorado from... I forget where. I didn’t watch the whole video because ew. But a week ago she was full blown covid, depending on when the vlog was published. Auto-immune distress, very apparent.

And the whole comment section is a shit show as well. People recounting how they lost a loved one to covid, or how they suffered debilitating affects due to covid infection - people who suffered covid-original, but have been long-haulers and have not been able to recover.

Then, there are sane people explaining how selfish and ill responsible this family is. Traveling, interacting with people. And this woman was a registered nurse. But she’s an anti-vaxx nurse raising a brood of children, traveling. When they should be treating this like a severe trauma and resting. There’s no way to determine if they’ve produced antibodies, though their immune system might fight the infection - unless specialized cells form to combat the covid cells, they won’t actually recover and will continue to progenerate and spread the infection.

I really can’t get over how bad her breathing is. This is very dangerous. And if you watch these people, not that their bad parents or anything mind you, but grasp that they are putting their plague on other unwilling participants - people of high risk, people who will have to go into healthcare and deal with those workers due to severe covid crash. This is why we’re struggling with the pandemic. This is why children will contract this disease and suffer ARD.

At this point, I can’t determine if they produced the antibodies for rallying against covid. If not, they might become long-haulers. It’s still too soon to say. I think so far they’ve been ill a month. But people like this tire me the fuck out.

[multipleservicelisting]

Private Schools Cashed in on P.P.P. Funding

This is the Coronavirus Schools Briefing, a guide to the seismic changes in U.S. education that are taking place during the pandemic. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.

Private schools and P.P.P.

This spring, when the federal government disbursed billions of dollars in emergency pandemic funding, the traditional K-12 public schools in Los Angeles got an average of about $716,000.

Meanwhile, Sierra Canyon School, a private school in the San Fernando Valley where LeBron James’s son is a basketball standout, got $3.14 million — part of a forgivable pandemic loan to its foundation from the federal Paycheck Protection Program.

New York’s public schools averaged $386,000 in federal aid. But Poly Prep Country Day School, a private school in Brooklyn with more than $114 million in the bank, got a $5.83 million P.P.P. loan. Public schools in Washington, D.C., averaged $189,000 in federal funding. But a P.P.P. loan for $5.22 million went to the Sidwell Friends School, the Washington alma mater of Sasha and Malia Obama.

This week, as the federal government releases a second round of P.P.P. loans, watchdog groups are following the money. From its start, the $659 billion program, intended to help struggling mom-and-pop businesses and nonprofits cover their payrolls with loans backed by the Small Business Administration, has been troubled by complaints that the rich and connected had crowded out intended recipients.

A database of recipients — released in full by the Treasury Department in December after The Times and other large news organization filed a federal lawsuit — has buttressed those concerns.

In education, the disparities were particularly striking. Public schools are not eligible for P.P.P. loans because they have a separate pot of aid under the federal CARES Act. But private and charter schools could apply for the loans. Many did, sometimes to their embarrassment when the applications became public.

The Latin School of Chicago, which disclosed a $58.5 million endowment in a recent tax filing, applied for a loan and then returned the money after a story by the school’s student newspaper, The Forum. So did the elite Brentwood School, in L.A., after The Los Angeles Times noted that its students include two of Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s children.

Still, many elite private schools kept the money they had applied for, citing economic uncertainty and rules that constrained their ability to tap their endowments to cover their payrolls. After an initial round of P.P.P. funding was quickly exhausted, the Small Business Administration issued revised guidelines for the program that make clear that employers with other financing options shouldn’t apply. Rules have since been tightened even further.

But Accountable.US — a nonpartisan watchdog organization that gathered the aforementioned statistics on L.A., New York and Washington schools — says it still needs to address loopholes that hide equity issues, make the program vulnerable to potential fraudsters and continue to let the well-connected cash in loans. And minority-focused lenders are raising similar concerns. This fight is far from over.

No campus spread in Singapore

After outbreaks last fall, the city-state of Singapore has averaged less than one locally transmitted case each day. Since the pandemic began, our colleague Sui-Lee Wee reports, its three major universities have reported zero cases of community transmission.

From our perch here in the United States, that almost sounds like a fantasy. But the three factors that contribute to its success — technology, restrictions and compliance — may be a useful reference point for educators and officials across the world.

Foregrounding technology

The National University of Singapore has invested in extensive testing resources and sifts through sewage in dormitories for traces of the coronavirus. That’s in step with many American campuses.

But the university is also using technology to enforce social distancing measures, specifically by clearing out crowds in high-traffic areas. The university president regularly scans an online dashboard to see how crowded the cafeterias are. If the real-time map shows that a dining area is too packed, he has administrators send out an advisory to avoid it and use other options.

Tough penalties

Singapore’s government has taken an aggressive pandemic response: It punishes those who have violated restrictions, in some cases by deporting foreign nationals and revoking work passes.

In universities, severe on-campus restrictions have led to the evictions of some students from dormitories for hosting visitors. More than 800 students signed a petition last October to lift the restrictions.

“The consequences are severe, so people are scared,” said Fok Theng Fong, a 24-year-old law student.

A different student culture

Most students in Singapore do not live on campus. And Singapore does not have fraternities and sororities.

Olyvia Lim, a senior at the Nanyang Technological University, said reports about American college students partying amid a pandemic baffled her friends.

“We all said, ‘Why would they risk themselves to do such a thing?’” Lim said. “It’s a bit hard to believe because we are of similar ages, but I think it’s culture. They are all about freedom, but when the government here says, ‘Wear a mask,’ we all do.”

Around the country

College update

After the University of Alabama won the college football championship Monday night, thousands partied in the streets to celebrate, in a potential super-spreader event.

Appalachian State University and the University of North Carolina-Charlotte joined a growing list of schools delaying the start of in-person learning. And a community college in California, Chaffey College, canceled in-person classes for the spring term.

Many colleges in Rhode Island plan to open soon, despite rising cases.

Art amid chaos: Three students at Dartmouth College shared their artistic creations with Emma Ginsberg, a reporter for the student paper. Jazz, baking and acting still thrive.

A good read: Our colleague Billy Witz took a hard look at the often absurd inequalities of college sports. “It is difficult to untangle the hypocrisy from the heartwarming in the mega-business of college sports, where the coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated the inherent conflicts wrought by a financial model that reaps billions on the backs of unpaid players.”

K-12 update

About 250 public schools in New York City are offering full-time, five-days-a-week instruction to all of their students, according to Mayor Bill de Blasio.

After delays, Utah started vaccinating teachers on Tuesday.

Arkansas will expand its vaccine distribution to teachers and workers in child care and higher education.

Boston plans to bring more public school students back for in-person learning starting in February. Last week, Gov. Charlie Baker unveiled plans to begin pool testing for students and staff across Massachusetts.

An opinion from Chicago: Stacy Moore, the executive director of Educators for Excellence-Chicago, did not mince words. “If the leaders of our school district and teachers’ union continue on this path, no one wins,” wrote Moore, a former teacher. “It is time for both sides to act like adults and come to the table to compromise.”

A worthy watch: A public school educator in Baltimore posted a powerful video with testimonials from students. “It’s so hard to stay engaged with your computer,” one student said. “It’s like a curse.” Alec MacGillis, a reporter at ProPublica, wrote on Twitter that it was “the first collection of first-hand student testimonials that I’ve seen from anywhere in the country.”

Tip: Covid tests for kids

Our colleague Christina Caron wrote a handy explainer for everything you need to know about Covid tests for kids. She spoke with five doctors and two of the largest urgent care providers in the United States to parse questions: Are there less invasive tests? If so, where? Are they accurate? And how should parents prepare a squeamish young child for the swab?

There’s a ton of information in the piece. But in general, to calm nerves, Christina recommends going to a pediatrician. “Doctors and nurses who test children regularly will most likely know what to do if your child is nervous or scared,” she wrote.

Sign up here to get the briefing by email.

from Multiple Service Listing https://ift.tt/2XDB8lX

[nebris]

The world is putting America in quarantine

The United States is in the midst of a full-blown second wave of coronavirus. According to Worldometers, Tuesday had 36,015 new cases — the highest number since May 1, and the third-highest ever. Arizona, Florida, South Carolina, California, and Texas are headed for a dire emergency fast. So far deaths have thankfully not returned to their previous highs, probably in part because the new surge appears to be hitting younger patients. But deaths are also a lagging indicator, and they are highly likely to start increasing soon.

Europe, where most countries have largely contained the virus (after initial screw-ups), is looking at America with slackjawed horror. The European Union is likely to close its borders to American travelers when it restores some international travel on July 1. Canada will most likely keep its U.S. border mostly closed when the current agreement expires on July 21.

Around the world, it is beginning to sink in how profoundly rotten the United States is. Unless America manages to turn things around, it will slide from the center of the international order to a peripheral, mistrusted basketcase, and it will deserve it.

It is plainly obvious why the U.S. is experiencing a second wave. The point of coronavirus lockdowns, as I and dozens of others explained months ago, was to buy time for the government to set up more fine-grained containment protocols that could contain the virus more effectively. With transmission reduced to a manageable rate and a test-trace-isolate system in place, countries can return to something like normal life, and an increasing number are doing so. It's a tricky business and renewed lockdowns may be necessary, as fresh outbreaks in China and elsewhere have shown, but it can be done.

But the Trump administration did not even try this on a national level, or do anything of significance. Indeed, American politics is so broken that we couldn't even manage the simplest common-sense containment strategy of mandating universal mask-wearing in any indoor space. American public health experts spent weeks on a bizarre and scientifically illiterate crusade against masks — a study years ago found that even cheap homemade masks significantly reduce droplet-based infection — but even after plenty of new evidence has come in, Trump and most Republicans keep insisting a mask is a matter of personal choice. Instead masks got sucked into the conservative grievance industrial complex, becoming another postmodern cultural signifier for right-wingers trying to own the libs.

Trump simply cannot grasp what the pandemic is, because in his mind nobody save himself is a real person. Appearances are all that matter — he is plainly most upset about the Bad Numbers of infections and deaths, and continues to suggest in public that the U.S. should be testing less so he looks less bad. He promises there will be no more lockdowns even as cases spike, and recently held a huge indoor rally in Tulsa — perhaps the worst possible thing he could do, especially because his followers mostly refused to wear the free provided masks. Despite being poorly attended, that rally still could easily turn out to be a mega-spreader event.

It is no doubt extremely alarming for people around the world coming to really grasp the fact that the world's most powerful country is being run by an incompetent buffoon who could not be trusted with a lemonade stand yet still commands the lockstep loyalty of one of two major political parties. "I can't imagine what it must be like having to go to work knowing it's unsafe," Siouxsie Wiles, a New Zealand disease scientist, told The Washington Post. "There are just going to be more and more people infected, and more and more deaths. It's heartbreaking." Indeed, American political reporters have struggled to grasp the reality of Trump as well, though the ongoing catastrophe seems to have finally beaten it into their heads.

But Trump is not the only problem with the United States. New York had the worst outbreak in the country (so far) because Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio dawdled and procrastinated in its early stages. In this they exemplified perhaps the signature characteristic of American politicians: blame avoidance. When faced with a problem, most top politicians in both parties think first about how they can shift blame to others or appear the victim of circumstance. Halting the epidemic in its early stages would have required a lot of aggressive action before the need for it was clear — in a word, leadership. Politicians would have had to exercise power in a way that upset people, and carefully communicate why they were doing so. Instead they largely let events do their work for them — once outbreaks were underway and sports seasons were being canceled, they could impose lockdowns without risking a backlash. That cowardice killed tens of thousands of people. Only a handful of state governors, like Washington's Jay Inslee, actually listened to their scientists and got out ahead of events.

Now multiple states are in the throes of accelerating outbreaks, and once again politicians are following events rather than anticipating them. Back in late May many experts warned California Governor Gavin Newsom that he was reopening the state too quickly, but under criticism from those who didn't like lockdowns, he pushed forward. He largely left things up to county officials, many of whom are conservative goofballs who refuse to obey his authority. Now that reopening has plainly backfired — the state shattered its daily case record on both Monday and Tuesday — Newsom has belatedly threatened that counties that refuse to follow pandemic control guidelines may lose state aid. It's a month late and a billion dollars short.

In Texas, Governor Greg Abbot has twisted himself in knots trying to avoid any kind of responsibility. He quickly rescinded his own order closing businesses when conservatives got mad, and refused to allow local cities to implement mandatory mask orders. Instead, he left a loophole allowing them to mandate businesses to require masks, but told nobody about it until a local judge actually tried it. Florida governor Ron DeSantis, meanwhile, is weeks behind the times. At time of writing he has merely promised he will actually enforce pandemic rules on bars and restaurants, and still has not mandated mask-wearing in public. Arizona is also way behind the curve.

Now, as Adam Tooze writes in Foreign Policy, the Federal Reserve is still at the center of the world financial system, and it is still functioning. Indeed, it has rescued much of the world from multiple currency crises, as it did in 2008. Though ordinary citizens in both America and elsewhere did not get the same kid-glove treatment, at least we have not seen a chaotic collapse of the financial system — which nobody else could have prevented. For the moment there is simply no one else to fill the shoes of the United States.

But countries around the world are no doubt grappling with some unpleasant truths. A nation that could elect Donald Trump is deeply, deeply sick. We are comparatively lucky that Trump appointed Jerome Powell chair of the Federal Reserve board (who turned out to be at least in possession of his faculties), instead of, say, Jared Kushner. When a country is as gangrenous as the United States, the rot tends to spread through its entire system sooner or later. So long as the Republican Party is not comprehensively defeated politically, and the Democrats do their utmost to avoid governing, it would be extremely foolish to rely in any way on American institutions. In years to come, our fellow democratic nations may start a containment strategy against the festering American polity so as to prevent its dysfunction from spilling over its borders, as they are now doing to stop the spread of coronavirus. If they have any sense, they're already thinking about it.

https://theweek.com/articles/921833/world-putting-america-quarantine