Coronavirus 3

[JMarie]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Gee, who would have thought that cramming all those people into a school would result in a spread of Covid? /sarcasm

 

The school is now temporarily closed for cleaning

[47of74]

Since #CovidKim won’t do her part others are doing theirs. 

Quote

For a humid Sunday morning, the scene at Bever Park in southeast Cedar Rapids was active.

Kids ran around the playground, families flew back and forth on swings, dogs and their humans played fetch — and dozens of teachers lined up around the park’s pavilion to prepare their living wills.

A Cedar Rapids law firm, Scott Shoemaker & Associates, offered to help any school employee in Linn Count for free to prepare a living will, healthcare power of attorney, and HIPAA release before they return to the classroom this year.

“To make sure that if something happens to an individual, then they’ve empowered the people that they care about, that they’ve chosen, to make healthcare decisions on their behalf,” Scott Shoemaker, an estate planning attorney, said.

I wonder if Kimmy will complain about this - saying it makes her look bad? 

[Florita]

I'm smiling at the irony of my daughter starting school here today in Coronazona at the dining room table. Yes, after years of snarking on SOTDRT I am now a SOTDRT mom thanks to COVID.

However, we are going to start the day off with geometry, not copying Bible verses. And unlike Lori Alexander, I'm not going to have her do a couple worksheets then head to the beach for the afternoon. There is no MOTH chart in sight (however, I am not ruling that out).

Anyone else doing SOTDRT?  

[MamaJunebug]

Just heard from a friend who held a funeral at a small country church a week ago in the Southeast. She pushed the pews around so as  to enforce social distancing in the seating, and sprayed surfaces with sanitizer; and absolutely insisted on masks. Side-hugs were exchanged. All attendees report that they continue  in good health. 

Another funeral scheduled at the church, an hour after the conclusion of that one,  was maskless and included “a buncha people from ... Florida!”  as my friend ominously reported.

Latest COVID count from that one: Eight. Including the preacher. 

I could’ve gone to a breakfast party yesterday but didn’t. Photos on the club’s FB show nary a mask in sight. I fear for my fellow members. 

I’m  praying for  teachers and children whose administrations insist on attendance. To read about the attempts at safety teachers are making, at their own expense — I’ve never been so ashamed at the so-called leadership of this country. 

[Ozlsn]

Auckland, NZ, is going back into stage 3 lock down after cases were detected there.

After 102 days of no new cases they have four within a family, and are trying to determine the infection source. Obviously it's worrying because it indicates likely community transmission, which means a small outbreak is possible.

Meanwhile in Victoria we had our highest number of deaths in a day. On the positive side the number of new daily cases has dropped and we are trying not to get too optimistic in case it all goes pear shaped again. Most deaths were aged over 60, but we had two 30 year olds die on sequential days - no further information except they weren't healthcare workers. The city is noticeably quieter - I crossed all six lanes of a local highway against the lights at 6.30pm on a weeknight, something which I would not normally contemplate. The traffic was so light though you had major gaps between light cycles.

[Howl]

I've joined a vaccine study trial. Had my intake yesterday, including a nose swab.  There will be 365 people in the age 65+ cohort.  It's a double blind study: 300 get the vaccine, 65 will receive a placebo (saline).  I'm so hoping to get the real stuff! 

They are having trouble recruiting participants and I don't know why.  Participants have the possibility to develop antibodies to this shit illness.  It's a contribution to the greater good. They pay money. 

Vaccine science is well understood, and the vaccine has gone through numerous tests to get to the point where it is administered to humans.  I see very little risk and a LOT of potential benefit. There are daily diaries to fill out for a week after each jab, and follow ups, some of which can be done over the phone. 

I'll get one more nose swab, then receive the jab sometime next week.  There will be a second inoculation in 57 days.  The full process, including long-term follow-up, goes on for 15 months.  

The intake involved a comprehensive medical history, list of meds, blood draw, urine sample, temp, blood pressure, doctor's exam (a peek in both ears, a look in the mouth and eyes, more questions re: health history. 

So, after all of that, there's one more step!  I got in my car and parked near the exit of the parking garage in a specially designated parking spot.  Two staff related to the study came out in full PPE (gowns, face shield, masks), I rolled down the window and they administered the swab while I sat in the car.  

The nose swab wasn't pleasant, but it was a mid nose swab, not the one that goes all the way back.  The actual swab takes about 3 seconds/nose. It was a two-part deal: One swab in each nostril, then repeated with a second swab in each nostril.  Each swab is sent to a different lab for processing. 

Edited August 11, 2020 by Howl

[GreyhoundFan]

An excellent column: "If you can punish a teenage girl for spaghetti straps, you can enforce a mask mandate"

Spoiler

Call it karma or science (it’s science), but over the weekend news broke that nine people, both students and staff, had tested positive for the coronavirus at North Paulding High School. This is the Georgia school made notorious last week by a photo of a hallway swarming with shoulder-to-shoulder unmasked students. It’s where the girl who posted that photo online was initially suspended for her whistleblowing, and where the superintendent claimed, “wearing a mask is a personal choice and there is no practical way to enforce a mandate to wear them.” It is also the place where irony died, because the school had proved it did have at least one tool — suspension — for dealing with students it believed were in the wrong.

North Paulding has temporarily closed.

But for when they return to the classroom, here are some additional notes for school systems and other ruling bodies on how to enforce mandates:

Punish mask noncompliance the way many schools have for decades wrongly punished teenage girls for spaghetti straps, shorter skirts and scooped necklines (all prohibited in North Paulding’s dress code), yanking those girls out of class for “distracting” their fellow classmates with scandalous body parts like knee caps.

You know what is truly a distraction? Being yanked out of class while you’re just trying to learn trigonometry. Hearing that your male classmates’ learning experience is your responsibility. Fearing that a visible bra strap, or the “personal choice” of your clothing will get you called a slut.

But I digress. North Paulding’s handbook also says the administration “reserves the right to alter the dress code for special occasions,” and as this pandemic is pretty special, I would advise school districts to picture a face without a mask as if it’s a girl without sleeves, and proceed accordingly.

For government officials:

Legislate the “personal choice” of mask noncompliance the way you have for decades tried to legislate women over their own deeply personal decisions.

After refusing to wear a mask or to instruct his staff to work remotely, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) tested positive for the coronavirus. He then tweeted that he would be taking hydroxychloroquine, despite top infectious-disease specialists, including Anthony S. Fauci, noting that the anti-malarial drug has not been proved an effective treatment. “It is what was decided as the best course of action between my doctor and me — not by government bureaucrats,” Gohmert wrote.

Was he plagiarizing Busy Philipps? Because last year at a hearing on abortion, the actor and activist told Gohmert, “I don’t believe that a politician’s place is to decide what’s best for a woman. It’s a choice between a woman and her doctor.”

Gohmert, who is antiabortion, was not persuaded then. He has repeatedly shown he feels it is exactly his business, as a government bureaucrat, to regulate individuals’ conversations with their doctors. At a House hearing he once said women should carry a brain-dead fetus to term.

In a funhouse-mirror situation, the de facto slogan of the anti-mask crowd has become “My body, my choice,” the chant originally created by women in the abortion rights movement. In that context, the goal was to argue that a woman’s decisions about her health, her family, her morals and her soul were up to her, possibly in consultation with her doctor, her partner or her pastor.

You might believe that abortion is murder, but you cannot say that it is contagious and airborne, something you can catch or transmit unknowingly to others. You cannot argue that, upon choosing to have an abortion, a pregnant person walks into a grocery store and infects 50 other innocent shoppers with abortion. As clever and self-righteous as anti-maskers may believe themselves to be, public health concerns are completely different from individual medical procedures.

But if that’s the comparison that anti-mask folks want to make — fine. Prepare to be judged and harangued the way women are for seeking abortions. And prepare to deserve it, because unlike what goes on inside a Planned Parenthood clinic, public health actually is the business of the public.

We could keep going.

Pretend an unmasked face is a woman trying to obtain the birth control that her doctor has prescribed but her employer disavows. You know what to do: Find your inner bureaucrat and go to town. Pretend an unmasked face is a member of the LGBTQ community asking for the same treatment and rights as the rest of the population; you will surely then find a way to enforce some mandates.

I don’t think this is about the ability to enforce mandates. Schools, legislators and workplaces have all found ways to enforce mandates on women’s bodies, or gender nonconforming bodies, for years. This is about a sickness that is far more pervasive than the coronavirus: the belief that one’s comfort is more important than someone else’s life. The stubborn resistance to science for reasons that often boil down to, “I don’t wanna.” The refusal to acknowledge that living in a functioning society sometimes means sacrificing a tiny smidgen of personal liberty for the well-being of the group — and that there are circumstances exceeding the boundaries of taste and discretion, where those sacrifices should be mandated: The presence of a deadly virus in the halls of a school is a better reason to enforce a dress code than the presence of bare shoulders.

We could have been done with this pandemic. We still could be done with this pandemic, pretty much whenever “we” want to. Like many other nations in the world, we could spend several weeks hunkering down, truly loving our neighbors as ourselves, with the government financial support necessary to make that hunkering possible.

But unfortunately — for all of us — it turns out that ending the pandemic is not an individual choice.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

How many people with those 97K students infect?

 

[WiseGirl]

On 8/10/2020 at 10:53 AM, Florita said:

Anyone else doing SOTDRT?  

There is a thread "The School at My Dining Room Table Sucks."  I don't know how to link it. May wiser minds post the link.

[Audrey2]

1 hour ago, WiseGirl said:

There is a thread "The School at My Dining Room Table Sucks."  I don't know how to link it. May wiser minds post the link.

I appreciate that we now have threads for both parents doing distance learning (In my mind homeschooling is completely different than distance learning) and for the teachers, whether working in the school, leading distance learning, or a hybrid.

[Ozlsn]

https://www.freejinger.org/topic/33230-the-school-at-my-dining-room-table-sucks/

Hoping this works? Took me ages to remember where it was!

[Cartmann99]

4 hours ago, WiseGirl said:

There is a thread "The School at My Dining Room Table Sucks."  I don't know how to link it. May wiser minds post the link.

Look at the top righthand side of the posts in this thread. You see that little thing that looks like a "V" on its side next to where it says "report post"?  Click on the "V" and a box will pop up:

Spoiler

Just cut and paste the link it shows you into your reply, and this is what you will get:

If you want to draw attention to a whole thread, do that to the first post in the thread. If there's a specific post further down that you want to highlight, then select the post you desire, and do it for that one.

[Glasgowghirl]

Here in Scotland Nicola Sturgeon has now threatened to call time on the football season two weeks in after players of two teams broke rules and potentially risked spreading covid. 

8 Aberdeen player's were forced to apologise for breeching club rules and going to a bar after their defeat to Rangers, some of the players tested positive for Covid following the incident. Their matches this week had to be prosponed this week. 

Celtic player Boli Bolingoli decided to fly to Spain for 24 hours after being given a two days off after the opening game, Manager Neil Lennon had instructed players not to leave Glasgow and upon his return didn't tell the manager he had been to Spain and didn't self isolate following the current UK guidelines, he then played in Sunday's match against Kilmarnock. He now faces discipline by the club and could be let go.  Celtic games are also cancelled this week. 

It is frustrating to be following all the guidelines in place in your country and then see high profile people thinking rules don't apply to them. Especially when one of them flies to Spain for a day. 

 

 

[Audrey2]

Then there's this. I respect  Cleveland for this.

Zach Plesac sent home after violating health and safety protocols and 3 more things we learned Sunday about the Cleveland Indians

https://www.cleveland.com/tribe/2020/08/zach-plesac-sent-home-after-violating-health-and-safety-protocols-and-3-more-things-we-learned-sunday-about-the-cleveland-indians.html

Quote

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Zach Plesac was sent back to Cleveland after the Indians learned Sunday he had violated health and safety protocols and the team’s code of conduct by going out in Chicago with friends following Saturday’s game against the White Sox.

As first reported by The Athletic, Plesac, 25, was kept isolated from teammates and the rest of the Indians’ traveling party after the club discovered he left the the team hotel. Plesac pitched six scoreless innings against Chicago on Saturday afternoon in a 7-1 Indians victory.

The Indians were reportedly extremely displeased with Plesac’s decision, as were some of his teammates. According to ESPN’s Jeff Passan, rather than putting Plesac on a flight back to Cleveland, the Indians hailed a car service to drive the young right-hander home from the Windy City.

 

[Florita]

6 hours ago, Ozlsn said:

https://www.freejinger.org/topic/33230-the-school-at-my-dining-room-table-sucks/

Hoping this works? Took me ages to remember where it was!

Thank you! I hadn't thought to look under "Shit I Fucked Up" for SOTDRT discussion! It isn't going that bad...yet. ?

[louisa05]

A moron I went to HS with posted a link with “12 peer reviewed studies that prove masks don’t prevent Covid”. 
 

There are indeed 12 studies. I did not confirm if they’re peer reviewed or not. But they are dated between 2009 and 2017. Three specifically address influenza and one the common cold. Several address NP5 masks in medical settings and seem to be about improper use. The rest reference general respiratory infections in the titles.

Her post has inspired many commenters to (quoting one) “not worry about wearing a mask”. ?

[HereComesTreble]

12 hours ago, Florita said:

Thank you! I hadn't thought to look under "Shit I Fucked Up" for SOTDRT discussion! It isn't going that bad...yet. ?

I made the thread and put it under Shit I Fucked Up, because, dang, every single day of homeschooling I felt like queen of Failurepalooza.

[Howl]

We thought it was just a respiratory virus. We were wrong.

This is the very best current article I've read about the infection mechanism used by this astoundingly sneaky virus, why it has so many different symptoms and where research is on understanding and unraveling it's many different manifestations. 

It love it when really good science journalists write excellent and readable articles about science! 

 

[47of74]

On 8/12/2020 at 9:13 AM, louisa05 said:

A moron I went to HS with posted a link with “12 peer reviewed studies that prove masks don’t prevent Covid”. 
 

There are indeed 12 studies. I did not confirm if they’re peer reviewed or not. But they are dated between 2009 and 2017. Three specifically address influenza and one the common cold. Several address NP5 masks in medical settings and seem to be about improper use. The rest reference general respiratory infections in the titles.

Her post has inspired many commenters to (quoting one) “not worry about wearing a mask”. ?

I'm actually getting a little irritated with all the people with JDs, MDs, or PhD degrees from Facebook University.  I had classmates who had to hang it up last spring and go back to their day jobs as medical professionals to deal with the pandemic and God only knows if they'll be able to resume their studies.  And then there's all these fornicate sticks pass along garbage like this.

[Smash!]

We are now at 21 new cases per million inhabitants and our government does... nothing [emoji35] With school starting soon and people returning from vacation cases likely will go up but nothing happens. I can‘t believe it.

[louisa05]

My batshit crazy cousin moved from our home state to another state around six years ago. Since childhood she’s had this weird competitive thing about places where any place she lives or has been is superior to where other people live or have been. This weird preoccupation has gone into overdrive with the pandemic. She has been personally tracking case numbers in both states to prove her current state of residence is better. She’s been making spreadsheets of daily care counts and positive test rates. 
Yesterday, she went over the top and posted graphs that she created to show that her current state has had fewer cases than our home state which apparently proves that she personally is a better person. 
This doesn’t seem normal or mentally healthy. But maybe that’s just me. 

[Howl]

1 hour ago, louisa05 said:

This doesn’t seem normal or mentally healthy. But maybe that’s just me. 

Nah, I think it's just her.  Too bad she can't put her statistical obsession to good use. 

[Smash!]

Covid Toes seem to be caused by SARS-CoV-2, they just didn‘t run the right test. This thread is so interesting!

[Cartmann99]

After attending Trump's mask-optional fundraiser in Texas, a state senator receives some bad news:

His symptoms started thirteen days after the July 29th fundraiser.

[Ozlsn]

39 minutes ago, Cartmann99 said:

After attending Trump's mask-optional fundraiser in Texas, a state senator receives some bad news:

His symptoms started thirteen days after the July 29th fundraiser.

Take stupid risks, win stupid prizes. Wonder who else he's infected.