(03-06-2021, 08:10 PM)GMDino Wrote: Things like this make me start to doubt evolution as a species...but then I remember there were offshoots that died out.

Parents encouraging kids to burn masks on Idaho Capitol steps pic.twitter.com/VOYfOYqwwt

— Sergio Olmos (@MrOlmos) March 6, 2021

(03-06-2021, 08:17 PM)Nately120 Wrote: Does this count as cancelling masks?  Side note, I sort of love how the adults are constantly telling the kids to be careful and to hold up and watch the fire and other words of caution as they encourage them to disregard the dangers of something else.

Be careful near that fire!
Should I be careful about covid?
No, don't be stupid you dumbass kid.  Fire hot.  Covid fake.

(03-06-2021, 09:01 PM)GMDino Wrote: I'm old enough to remember when the right had a fit about the left "using kids" to push their message.  

(03-10-2021, 01:36 PM)michaelsean Wrote: Ooh Ooh Mr Kotter Mr Kotter.  Call on me!

Quote:We asked Michael R. Fraser, CEO of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, if the Trump administration had a plan for vaccine distribution.


"It is all in what you mean by ‘plan," Fraser said. "If you mean a tactical guidebook on how to do vaccination from A to Z, no, there is no federal plan." 


Prakash Nagarkatti, vice president for research at the University of South Carolina, told USA Today that "there was total lack of planning at the state level for mass vaccination, and the federal government did not help the states overcome the hurdles."


In September, the Trump administration announced a general strategy to distribute the vaccine which included deliveries to states and, later, pharmacy chains. A partnership with CVS and Walgreens administered vaccines in some long-term care facilities. 


The closest thing to a federal plan was the playbook the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gave states to help them create their own distribution plans.


States wrote broad plans and submitted them in October. They lacked important details , such as how many doses they would get and when. (At the time, no vaccines were approved.)


Without dollars to make them happen, state plans were essentially wish lists, Claire Hannan, executive director of the Association of Immunization Managers, said on a podcast. It wasn’t until December that Congress approved a COVID-19 package with $8 billion for vaccine distribution. 

Quote:New study finds Covid-19 death rates were higher in states with GOP governors

March 13, 2021
[/url]   


A new study shows that while states led by Democratic governors were overwhelmed by the coronavirus pandemic in the early months of the crisis, per-capita rates of Covid-19 cases and deaths eventually became most severe in states with Republican governors—a finding the researchers attribute to diverging approaches to public health policies that affected the spread of the virus.

"From March to early June, Republican-led states had lower Covid-19 incidence rates compared with Democratic-led states. On June 3, the association reversed, and Republican-led states had higher incidence," reads the [url=https://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(21)00135-5/fulltext]study, conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Medical University of South Carolina.


"For death rates," the authors added, "Republican-led states had lower rates early in the pandemic, but higher rates from July 4 through mid-December."

According to the researchers, "The early trends could be explained by high Covid-19 cases and deaths among Democratic-led states that are home to initial ports of entry for the virus in early 2020"—such as Seattle and New York City.

"However," they continued, "the subsequent reversal in trends, particularly with respect to testing, may reflect policy differences that could have facilitated the spread of the virus."

The study, published this week in the peer-reviewed American Journal of Preventive Medicine, examined Covid-19 "incidence, death, testing, and test positivity rates from March 15 through December 15, 2020," when there were more than 16 million confirmed cases and 300,000 deaths in the U.S.

Making statistical adjustments to account for population density, the analysis focused on per-capita infection and death rates in the 26 GOP-led states and 25 Democratic-led jurisdictions, including Washington, D.C.

As the researchers noted, the response to the pandemic "became increasingly politicized in the U.S.," and according to the study, the "political affiliation of state leaders may contribute to policies affecting the spread of the disease."

The new paper cited other recent studies, which found that "Republican governors... were slower to adopt stay-at-home orders, if they did so at all," while "Democratic governors had longer durations of stay-at-home orders." In addition, the researchers pointed out that having a Democratic governor was "the most important predictor of state mandates to wear face masks."

In a March 23, 2020 appearance on "Tucker Carlson Tonight," Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick ® claimed that reopening the economy was more important than adhering to public health guidelines, even though abandoning social distancing requirements and other disease mitigation measures meant exacerbating the deadly Covid-19 pandemic.

After consulting a group of Wall Street titans last March, then-President Donald Trump ignored the advice of epidemiologists and followed through with his call for a premature end to coronavirus-related restrictions. The U.S. will "soon be open for business," Trump said at the time, aiming for an Easter reopening date.

The study suggested that "decisions by Republican governors in spring 2020 to retract policies, such as the lifting of stay-at-home orders on April 28 in Georgia, may have contributed to increased cases and deaths."

In a statement, Sara Benjamin-Neelon, a professor at Johns Hopkins and co-author of the paper, said that "governors' party affiliation may have contributed to a range of policy decisions that, together, influenced the spread of the virus."
As NBC News reported:

Quote:Bruce Y. Lee, a professor of health policy and management at the City University of New York School of Public Health, who was not involved in the review, called it "a very enlightening and well-done study." While the study doesn't necessarily show "cause and effect," it does suggest "there were associations" between a governor's political party and the spread of the virus, he said.

"The actual spread of the virus is more complex than general correlations, but those can show us more gross general insight," Lee said, adding that the report bolsters the evidence that measures like masks and social distancing can help stop the spread of the virus.

"One of the most concerning things last year is the politicization of public health restrictions," Lee said. "They're not opinions, they're based on evidence."

The Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. surpassed 530,000 on Thursday, the one-year anniversary of the World Health Organization's declaration of a pandemic. The global death toll is now over 2,634,000.



Earlier this month, Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott tried to defend his widely condemned decision to scrap the Lone Star State's mask mandate with only 7% of residents fully vaccinated, a move that critics characterized as reckless.


Several experts, as Common Dreams reported last week, are once again warning against lifting statewide mask mandates and other coronavirus-related precautions, given that a premature rollback of public health measures threatens to derail progress in curbing the pandemic just as the potential of widespread vaccination grows.

"Despite a more coordinated federal response this year, governors still play a key role in the pandemic response," said Benjamin-Neelon. "As we're seeing, several states have lifted mask requirements even though we have yet to make substantial progress in controlling the spread of the virus."

"These findings underscore the need for state policy actions that are guided by public health considerations rather than by partisan politics," Benjamin-Neelon said of the paper.

Quote:States Are Finding More Unreported Covid-19 Deaths
Backlogs can temporarily raise daily death tolls; ‘Nobody likes surprises’



By 
[i]Jon Kamp[/i]
March 14, 2021 10:00 am ET

While Covid-19 deaths head lower, raising hopes that the U.S. is turning a corner as vaccinations continue, states around the country are steadily finding previously unreported deaths that are causing data confusion.
The issues largely involve systems that states are using to try to report Covid-19 data in near real time, and not deaths reported more slowly through death certificates. These front-line numbers are the ones that fuel state dashboards and data trackers, like the closely watched one created by Johns Hopkins University, which help policy makers and the public closely monitor pandemic trends.


Ohio in February announced more than 4,000 additional deaths while reconciling its data, and Indiana added about 1,500. Smaller revisions have also recently come from Virginia, Minnesota and Rhode Island. On Thursday, authorities in West Virginia said medical providers hadn’t properly reported 168 deaths to the state’s public-health department.

“Nobody likes surprises, and nobody likes data that’s wrong because that’s what drives decisions,” said Ayne Amjad, West Virginia’s state health officer.

These issues underscore ways in which Covid-19 can still challenge data-reporting systems in the U.S. Like many countries, the U.S. is trying to track pandemic events nearly as they happen, and a big part of this effort has required speeding up how deaths are reported.
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In West Virginia, reporting deaths would typically require waiting many weeks for death certificates to be completed, Dr. Amjad said. But the state last year asked medical providers to also fill out a one-page report for Covid-19 deaths to create a faster record. The state discovered the recent undercount, of all deaths from December and January, by using death certificates to determine that the 168 death reports weren’t properly filled out, Dr. Amjad said.

She said the reporting issues were at about 70 sites, mostly hospitals and long-term-care facilities. A Covid-19 surge like the one that hit the U.S. this winter can slow reporting, she said, but she and Gov. Jim Justice called the reporting errors unacceptable. The U.S. has seen more than 530,000 Covid-19 deaths, about half of them since Thanksgiving, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

Daily reported Covid-19 deaths in the U.S.
March 1March 1Mar. 1201,0002,0003,0004,000deaths-33.7% ↓two-week trendSeven-day rolling average
Notes: For all 50 states and D.C., U.S. territories and cruises. Last updated March 12, at 5:41 a.m.
Source: Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering

On Tuesday, Minnesota health officials said an audit found four private laboratories failed to report lab results, and that led to finding another 138 deaths. These had been recorded on death certificates, a health-department spokesman said.
An audit in Indiana uncovered 1,507 historical deaths, mostly from 2020, state authorities said in early February. Death certificates were used to verify those fatalities, a spokeswoman for the state health department said. Soon after, an issue with unreconciled mortality data led Ohio’s health department to find 4,000 unreported Covid-19 deaths.

In Virginia, it was a system problem that recently led the state to add about 900 deaths. Officials there realized the number of deaths they were reporting didn’t seem to track a rise in cases, and death certificates helped correct the error, said Lilian Peake, Virginia’s state epidemiologist. “We realized something was wrong,” she said.

Monitoring the U.S. Outbreak
Confirmed cases by state, ranked by latest full-day count
Daily confirmed cases per 100,000 residents
TrendOverall0255075100+MarchAprilMayJuneJulyAug.Sep.Oct.Nov.Dec.Jan.Feb.MarchDelawareRhode IslandNew JerseyNew YorkAlaskaArizonaKentuckyMassachusettsMichiganFloridaMississippiSouth DakotaTennesseeNew HampshirePennsylvaniaVermontConnecticutIdahoUtahNevadaTexasNorth CarolinaMinnesotaWest VirginiaSouth CarolinaAlabamaOklahomaDistrict of ColumbiaMontanaWyomingColoradoGeorgiaNebraskaMarylandVirginiaIowaNorth DakotaMaineIndianaIllinoisOhioArkansasWisconsinNew MexicoWashingtonLouisianaCaliforniaOregonHawaiiKansasMissouri▲▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▲▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▲▼▼▼▼▲▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼89,680130,120826,6321,720,19960,099830,655414,131597,073665,1411,962,651299,124114,163788,10977,764961,09216,500289,392174,610376,973297,7652,715,993879,825494,106134,496529,392502,263430,94442,128101,42455,112440,2201,030,146203,890390,490590,625341,837100,72646,448670,0741,204,323984,934326,040623,801187,720347,884435,9353,614,852158,64428,284299,562568,918
Note: Trend indicates whether a state had an increase or decrease in total number of cases in the past seven days compared with previous seven days. Last updated March 12, at 5:41 a.m.
Sources: Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering; the Lancet; Associated Press; U.S. Census
These state fixes aren’t filling in major gaps in what researchers believe is a significant undercount of Covid-19 deaths. This is underscored by a wide gap between known Covid-19 deaths and excess deaths, or deaths above average levels in recent years.

Misreporting Covid-19 deaths was particularly likely early in the pandemic, when testing was scarce and doctors filling out death certificates were less familiar with the disease, according to public-health experts. They have also chalked up some excess deaths to other issues, such as people avoiding hospitals during health emergencies.

“We’re kind of stuck with this underreporting, especially at the beginning of the pandemic,” said Robert Anderson, chief of the mortality-statistics branch at the National Center for Health Statistics, which is part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Matching front-line surveillance data with death certificates can improve data in both systems, and can sometimes lead to rewritten certificates, Mr. Anderson said. But changing death certificates isn’t easy, he said. The person who filled out the death certificate—often a doctor—has to agree to amend the record.

“We are seeing some deaths that were not Covid before that had been attributed to Covid when amended, but it’s a relatively small number,” Mr. Anderson said.

The big changes at the state level can create at least temporary, and artificial, bulges in the data that Johns Hopkins and others are knitting together to show daily trends.

This briefly happened with the backlog of mortality data from Indiana and Ohio, before those were backdated, which Johns Hopkins tracks and reflects in its records when possible. There is still an artificially large, 469-death bulge in Iowa on Dec. 11, conversely, from when that state changed the way it reports Covid-19 deaths.

“This is the challenge, and this is why we need to work to improve our national surveillance,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

(03-15-2021, 09:26 AM)michaelsean Wrote: It seems to me they aren’t sure how long these vaccines last.  It seems possible that before everyone that wants one gets one, the people who got the vaccine first could need to get it again.

Quote:Trump staffers, even those who worked for officials who publicly flouted coronavirus safety guidelines, were secretly scrambling for a COVID-19 vaccine: report

Lauren Frias 
9 hours ago

[/url][url=https://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.businessinsider.com%2Ftrump-staffers-secretly-scrambling-for-covid-19-vaccine-vanity-fair-2021-3&title=Trump%20staffers%2C%20even%20those%20who%20worked%20for%20officials%20who%20publicly%20flouted%20coronavirus%20safety%20guidelines%2C%20were%20secretly%20scrambling%20for%20a%20COVID-19%20vaccine%3A%20report&summary=Despite%20publicly%20flouting%20health%20safety%20guidelines%2C%20one%20senior%20official%20said%20some%20staffers%20wanted%20the%20vaccine%20to%20%22maintain%22%20their%20normal%20lifestyles.&mini=true&utmSource=linkedIn&utmContent=referral&utmTerm=topbar&referrer=linkedIn][/url]
[url=https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-staffers-secretly-scrambling-for-covid-19-vaccine-vanity-fair-2021-3]




Vials of undiluted Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine are prepared to administer to staff and residents at a senior living community in Falls Church, Virginia, on December 30, 2020. Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images

• Trump staffers "shamelessly" attempted to get COVID-19 vaccines amid the initial rollout, Vanity Fair reported.
• Ex-officials said the effort was like first-class passengers on the Titanic rushing to the lifeboats.
• Despite publicly flouting safeguards, one official said they wanted a vaccine to "maintain" their normal lifestyle.
• See more stories on Insider's business page.
  

Staffers working for Trump officials who publicly flouted coronavirus health safety guidelines secretly scrambled to get a COVID-19 vaccine at the beginning of the US rollout, Vanity Fair reported.

A senior administration official told Vanity Fair that staff from across the administration had "shamelessly" attempted to jump ahead in line to get a vaccine during the chaotic distribution earlier this year.

The outlet reported that former officials likened the effort to first-class passengers aboard the Titanic shoving others out of the way to get to the lifeboats.

"The moves they were pulling were unorthodox," the former senior administration official told Vanity Fair. "These other agencies were getting it outside of a formal interagency process."

The secret clamber for a COVID-19 vaccine came as then-President Donald Trump tweeted in mid-December that White House staff would be vaccinated "somewhat later in the program, unless specifically necessary."
"I have asked that this adjustment be made," the former president tweeted. "I am not scheduled to take the vaccine, but look forward to doing so at the appropriate time. Thank you!"

The outlet reported that the effort came from "almost every stripe of political appointee, at almost every rung of the ladder," including "representatives of cabinet secretaries to young White House desk jockeys to those prepared to leverage their connections to President Donald Trump's senior adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner."

Also among the group were "chiefs of staff of cabinet agencies, some of whose bosses had become notorious for publicly disregarding pandemic safeguards," according to Vanity Fair.

One senior official said while it seemed some chiefs of staff would claim the request was made on behalf of their office staff, "their ask was not about their employees."

Though it seemed contrary for those officials who were publicly disregarding health safety guidelines to be so concerned about getting a vaccine, the senior administration official said the vaccines would allow them to "maintain" their normal lifestyles.

(03-16-2021, 11:13 AM)Au165 Wrote: Moderna is starting their study on the vaccine in children, which is a big step in our ability to get back to normal. I think we will still see restrictions until we can get kids vaccinated as well so this is really the point to watch going forward.

(03-16-2021, 11:29 AM)GMDino Wrote: I remain hopeful that enough people will get the vaccine for that.  So many simply refusing is disheartening.

(03-16-2021, 11:38 AM)Au165 Wrote: There is precedent for legally requiring vaccines and I think it may come to such a requirement yet again. 

(03-16-2021, 11:44 AM)GMDino Wrote: In some areas maybe.  But this particular batch of crazy lost their collective minds about wearing a mask in public.  Forcing them to take a vaccine won't go over well I don't think.

(03-16-2021, 11:46 AM)michaelsean Wrote: Nor should it go over well.  I'm scheduled for mine, and most people I know have had it or are getting it, but requiring it is a step too far.

(03-16-2021, 11:48 AM)Au165 Wrote: The Supreme Court disagrees with you. It has been affirmed many times that the health of the collective, and ensuring it, is an imperative duty of the government. 

(03-16-2021, 11:50 AM)michaelsean Wrote: I don't know what that has to do with what I said.  We all disagree with Supreme Court decisions.

Once again we will discover who the authoritarians are.