| Comment | One of the most touching things to me is that, on the rare occasions when we do go out, we see even little kids, as young as three or four, bravely wearing their child-size masks, just like Mommy or Daddy. Mini-heroes. (-: I'm sorry that kids have to go through all this, but I hope most of them will be okay in the end, with some extra help and encouragement. Re fireworks, I'll be crossing my fingers that Hugo's brother can come over and set off some pretty ones ('Ooh! Aah!'), and sparklers for the kids, but not too many loud firecrackers ('Bang! Pop!') which are the bane of any holiday. I feel bad for all those in choirs, but I hope Harri has caught up on reading by now and figured out that singing in groups indoors is still a very high-risk activity. Maybe churches can't ban it, but they would be crazy not to try to limit it as much as possible. About holiday travel, I would still be inclined to just say 'Don't!', especially if anyone in the family is at high risk. But the articles I've read actually cover a range of views, so here's another batch. ___________________ I Traced My Covid Bubble, and It's Enormous
And if you have kids, yours probably is, too. ...
... I went to all of my regular close contacts, then I went to all of their contacts, and so on, asking everyone about their potential exposure to the virus.
What I found floored me. ...
Once I had counted everyone, I realized that visiting my parents for Thanksgiving would be like asking them to sit down with over 100 people. ...
So that sealed the deal, then, right — we’re staying home for Thanksgiving?
Well, not so fast. ... I discovered that my network is robust in ways that I hadn’t anticipated. All of my indirect contacts are taking the virus seriously ... None of them were beyond risk, but I was also satisfied that they seemed to be doing the best they could to avoid getting sick. ...
So, after thinking long and hard about this, and after extended conversations with my eager parents, my wife and I decided that we would travel for Thanksgiving. ... the exercise prompted us to add several important safety measures to substantially reduce the risks. ...
I can’t promise that they won’t hug our children, but our plan is to have the outdoor meal socially distanced. Our celebration will involve a total of seven people — fewer than the 10-person limit that many states have imposed on gatherings. Afterward, we plan to stay overnight in the area, not in their home, and to drive back the next afternoon.https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/20/opinion/su...Small Gatherings Spread the Virus, but Are They Causing the Surge?
Yes, the coronavirus can be transmitted over cocktails and dinners. But these get-togethers may not account for the huge rise in cases. ...
Most states don’t collect or report detailed information about the exposure that led to a new infection. But in states where a breakdown is available, long-term care facilities, food processing plants, prisons, health care settings, and restaurants and bars are still the leading sources of spread, the data suggest.
An analysis of nearly 800 nursing homes in six states experiencing the biggest surges, including North Dakota, South Dakota and Wisconsin, found that these homes are still hot spots of viral transmission and that little has been done since the spring to reduce that risk.https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/23/health/cor...‘Gram, Are You Sad?’ This Year, We’re Spending the Holidays Alone
None of our grandchildren will be at our table for Thanksgiving or Christmas. But the pandemic winter still leaves room for the imagination. ...
As Covid-19 cases in my city climb to record levels and county officials warn the vulnerable among us to shelter in place, I feel as if I’m living in the cursed kingdom of Narnia, in C.S. Lewis’s children’s fantasy “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.” In Narnia, it’s “always winter and never Christmas.”
Like Americans everywhere, my family and friends have begun planning for the holidays. Some will ignore the Covid curse in our midst and gather anyway. My husband and I are battening down for a long winter.
When my 3-year-old granddaughter recently came over to play, I blocked the door she usually enters into the house. “Sorry, Eliza,” I said, stooping to her eye level, “we have to play outside from now on.”
She looked stunned.
“Why, Gram?” she said. “Are there germs in there?”
“Germs,” in our family, is code for Covid. They are what make the places our grandchildren know and love, like Pops’s and Gram’s house, off limits. ...
This Thanksgiving and Christmas, for the first time in our lives, none of our 10 children and grandchildren will be at our table.
When the pandemic began, we tried to form Covid bubbles, where groups of us followed enough safety rules to continue doing life up close.
But our secure little pods developed leaks whenever our adult children had responsibilities that exposed them to risk. A daughter who’s a lawyer spent days in hearings at the courthouse where someone was infected. Eliza’s mom, a pastor, is back at church, singing with her congregation. One son, who’s an E.M.T., swabs suspected Covid-19 patients at an urgent care center. ...
Few people in my circle follow Dr. Anthony Fauci’s guidelines or C.D.C. recommendations. It’s made me wonder, “Am I the one who’s crazy?” Or have we so blurred the lines between fantasy and reality that some of us have forgotten that Narnia is cursed … that Thanksgiving and Christmas in a pandemic spell disaster.
“Come meet us outdoors at the restaurant for dinner,” several close friends texted me weeks ago, the day our community moved back into the red zone.
“We’re not supposed to be meeting now,” I typed into the group chat. How would we all sit six feet apart at a dinner table?
“Don’t be so extreme,” a friend texted. “You’re missing out on so much of life.”
When it comes to grandchildren, almost all of my friends ignore the warnings. ...
I am missing out on joy and I’m probably the most isolated in my little world. But when I catch even the mildest respiratory virus, I develop asthma, so I probably fear Covid more than most. ...
As Eliza’s mother strapped her into the car seat to drive home after one of our awkward backyard visits, my granddaughter looked at me and said, “Gram, are you sad?”
I thought I’d hidden those feelings.
“Yes, I’m sad,” I said.
“It’s gonna be all right,” she reassured me. “When the germs go away, we’ll be together again.”https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/19/opinion/su...A traveler tested negative for covid-19 before a flight. He had the virus and infected 4 passengers.
The study details an outbreak linked to one passenger on an 18-hour flight from Dubai to New Zealand in September. ...
Health officials in New Zealand, a country that has a strict 14-day quarantine in place for arriving travelers, released a case study on Friday that details the risks of traveling on long-haul flights during the coronavirus pandemic — even if negative coronavirus tests are required before the flight.
The report details a coronavirus outbreak linked through DNA analysis to one passenger on an 18-hour flight from Dubai to New Zealand in September. The traveler, who tested negative for the coronavirus with a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test within 48 hours of the flight, was contagious but pre-symptomatic onboard the plane, and infected at least four other passengers.
In total there were seven cases linked to the flight, which had 86 passengers onboard. ...
Transatlantic flights requiring rapid antigen testing preflight have also become available recently, but rapid tests are only about 70 percent as effective.
On Thursday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended against Thanksgiving travel by air and train in the United States, where new coronavirus infections are rising to record levels.https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2020/11...Evidence Builds That an Early Mutation Made the Pandemic Harder to Stop
Scientists were initially skeptical that a mutation made the coronavirus more contagious. But new research has changed many of their minds. ...
The mutation, known as 614G, was first spotted in eastern China in January and then spread quickly throughout Europe and New York City. Within months, the variant took over much of the world, displacing other variants.
For months, scientists have been fiercely debating why. Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory argued in May that the variant had probably evolved the ability to infect people more efficiently. Many were skeptical, arguing that the variant may have been simply lucky, appearing more often by chance in large epidemics, like Northern Italy’s, that seeded outbreaks elsewhere.
But a host of new research — including close genetic analysis of outbreaks and lab work with hamsters and human lung tissue — has supported the view that the mutated virus did in fact have a distinct advantage, infecting people more easily than the original variant detected in Wuhan, China.https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/world/covi...Politics, Science and the Remarkable Race for a Coronavirus Vaccine
The furious race to develop a coronavirus vaccine played out against a presidential election, between a pharmaceutical giant and a biotech upstart, with the stakes as high as they could get. ...
Dr. Bourla had chosen from the start to keep Pfizer and its research partner, the German firm BioNTech, at arms length from the government, declining research and development money from the crash federal effort, called Operation Warp Speed.
Mr. Bancel, with a far smaller company, made the opposite bet, embracing the assistance of a government led by a science-denying president. Moderna got nearly $2.5 billion to develop, manufacture and sell its vaccine to the federal government and teamed up with the National Institutes of Health on the scientific work, a highly successful partnership that managed to sidestep the political meddling by Mr. Trump and his aides that had bedeviled other efforts to confront the virus.https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/21/us/politic...The death rate in Bulgaria soars as hospitals struggle to cope and doctors fall ill.
Bulgaria, after enforcing a strict lockdown in the spring and largely containing the spread of the coronavirus, is now confronting a surge in infections that is straining an already underfunded health care system.
The surge has led the Balkan country to have one of the highest coronavirus death rates in Europe, with more than 15 people of every one million dying from the virus, according to the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, which gathers data from national agencies. In the past week, the percentage of positive tests was between 37 and 44 percent. ...
Last week, two men died after being left to wait at the steps of a hospital in Plovdiv, Bulgaria’s second largest city. ... At the end of October, a 33-year-old man died after waiting for hours for an ambulance in Bulgaria’s capital, Sofia.https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/23/world/the-...Why Covid Caused Such Suffering in Italy's Wealthiest Region
Lombardy has been overwhelmed by the pandemic, in part because of a poorly executed medical privatization program ...
Anchored by Milan, Italy’s financial and fashion capital, Lombardy boasts sophisticated industry and world-class medical facilities. Yet it was overwhelmed by the first wave of the global pandemic,forcing doctors to ration ventilators and hospital beds, while having to decide who lived and who died.
The catastrophe in Italy’s most affluent region was in part a consequence of having entrusted much of the public health care system to private, profit-making companies while failing to coordinate their services. Over the previous quarter-century, substantial investment has flowed into lucrative specialties like cardiac surgery and oncology. Areas on the front lines of the pandemic, like family medicine and public health, have been neglected, leaving people excessively reliant on hospitals for care.
As Italy now contends with a brutal second wave, Lombardy is again near the breaking point, with three-fourths of its hospital beds occupied by Covid-19 patients — nearly double the level considered dangerous by the national Health Ministry.https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/19/business/l...Now the U.S. Has Lots of Ventilators, but Too Few Specialists to Operate Them
A burst of production solved the dire shortage that defined the first wave of the coronavirus. But the surplus may not be enough to prevent large numbers of deaths. ...
Since the spring, American medical device makers have radically ramped up the country’s ventilator capacity by producing more than 200,000 critical care ventilators, with 155,000 of them going to the Strategic National Stockpile. At the same time, doctors have figured out other ways to deliver oxygen to some patients struggling to breathe — including using inexpensive sleep apnea machines or simple nasal cannulas that force air into the lungs through plastic tubes.
But with new cases approaching 200,000 per day and a flood of patients straining hospitals across the country, public health experts warn that the ample supply of available ventilators may not be enough to save many critically ill patients.https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/22/health/Cov...Africa's largest Covid treatment clinical trial launched by 13-country network
Anticov study with international research institutions aims to stop disease progression and protect fragile health systems ...
A network of 13 African countries has joined forces with global researchers to launch the largest clinical trial of potential Covid-19 treatments on the continent.
The Anticov study, involving Antwerp’s Institute of Tropical Medicine and international research institutions, aims to identify treatments that can be used to treat mild and moderate cases of Covid-19 early and prevent spikes in hospitalisation that could overwhelm fragile and already overburdened health systems in Africa.
The clinical trial will be carried out at 19 sites in 13 countries and led by doctors from African countries.https://www.theguardian.com/global-developmen...Room Rater was a beloved pandemic distraction. But the backlash has arrived, courtesy of Jeb Bush. ...
... the Room Rater Twitter account ..., which is run by Claude Taylor and his fiance, Jessie Bahrey, became an early pandemic diversion, like sourdough bread, Netflix watch parties and newly adopted puppies. Pundits were suddenly appearing on the cable news channels not from remote studios but on Zoom or Skype from bedrooms, living rooms and makeshift offices. Taylor and Bahrey rate their home setups, docking points for things like visible cords or a poorly angled screen and awarded them for well-organized bookcases or stylish art. ...
... critics ... say the account is invasive, cruel and potentially classist.https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/202... |
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