COVID-19 | Corona Virus April 2020

Ari Meermans said:

I'm no seamstress so I ordered handmade masks with filters for our trip to his oncologist next week. And I hate that we have to go because there are SO many reported cases in the Metroplex. But, of course, the masks haven't arrived yet so I quickly made him a no-sew mask using a bandana and a couple of rubber bands and handed him a pair of latex gloves & "ordered" him to wear them. You can only do so much when dealing with supposed adults. *sigh*

(Luckily, he was so early he was the only shopper in the two stores he went to. No slippers, tho'. Ha!)

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Sage said:

I talked her down from grocery shopping, but she still went out for cigarettes twice (the 2nd times she stopped for money and picked up snacks too).

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Ari Meermans said:

When I went for the big grocery trip, I was being good about wiping everything down before putting it away, told them not to help me put things away; Mom got impatient and started putting away groceries.

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AW Admin said:

Do you have a cell phone? You can call when you arrive and wait in the car until they are ready to see him.

This is becoming standard for a lot of hospitals/doctors.

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kikazaru said:

Here's a little something to uplift your day.
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry...8a9aa3c5b6e7d76c6633c3?utm_hp_ref=ca-homepage

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Some local officials are disappointed the federal government will end funding for coronavirus testing sites this Friday. In a few places those sites will close as a result. This as criticism continues that not enough testing is available.

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Arkoosh says local hospitals do have their own testing sites set up now, but it's not yet clear if they will be able to handle the extra testing now that the federal help is being withdrawn.

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Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), has yet to embrace hydroxychloroquine, the drug the President touts, without evidence, as a miracle treatment for Covid-19.

But someone in the administration has stepped up to promote the drug: Peter Navarro.

Navarro may seem like an odd person to be stepping into this role. Unlike Fauci, an infectious disease specialist who has directed NIAID under six presidents, Navarro is an economist. His principal role in the White House is to oversee trade policy.

But Navarro is ready to put his credentials up against Fauci’s any day. As he told CNN on Monday: “My qualifications in terms of looking at the science is that I’m a social scientist. I have a PhD. And I understand how to read statistical studies, whether it’s in medicine, the law, economics or whatever.”

While that’s more expertise than President Trump claims — “I’m not a doctor, but I have common sense,” Trump said while promoting the drug on Sunday — it’s a specious claim to expertise, one that fits in well with the administration’s long-running war against experts.

The misinformation emanating from the White House and conservative media during the pandemic has shown us the high price of rejecting expertise. But it has also illustrated how multifaceted the war on expertise really is — that it is as much about co-opting and distorting expertise as it is discrediting it altogether.

Navarro’s claim that his social science PhD makes him a medical expert qualified to debate or dispute Fauci has roots in the late 19th century, when new systems of credentials emerged as a way of signaling expertise. As medicine, teaching, journalism, economics and other fields professionalized, they created a parallel set of institutions — schools, degrees, licenses, associations — that credentialed people who had completed courses, passed exams and agreed to adhere to a set of professional rules....

...He is an economist who shifted to punditry and began to style himself as a China expert, despite not speaking any Chinese dialect nor having spent significant time in the country, according to Foreign Policy.

As such, Navarro represents exactly the sort of expert Trump, with his disdain for genuine expertise, admires: well-credentialed at something (even if it’s not the field in question), television-ready and willing to jettison any knowledge that conflicts with the Presidents aims. It’s no wonder that Navarro is the one appearing on news programs on Monday morning, after Trump blocked Dr. Fauci from answering questions about the president’s favorite drug on Sunday evening.

Trump has, by and large, gotten away with his disdain for expertise for much of his administration, because many Americans have also grown wary of experts, for a wide range or reasons. Faith in institutions has declined sharply since the 1960s, leaving Americans uncertain of who, exactly, they should trust. The right has pummeled universities, climate scientists, journalists and other experts for decades now, offering up an alternative network of trust knitted together by shared ideology rather than expertise....

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The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has abruptly switched its guidance for use of a drug touted by President Donald Trump as a possible treatment for COVID-19, dropping its reference to anecdotal dosages to say simply that there are no approved drugs for dealing with the disease.

The CDC's online advice for hydroxychloroquine was updated April 7, three days after Reuters reported that the CDC was offering what the news agency called "highly unusual guidance" for the drug's use based on "unattributed anecdotes rather than peer-reviewed science."

The updated, and shortened, guidance says simply that "hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine are under investigation in clinical trials” for use on coronavirus patients and "there are no drugs or other therapeutics approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to prevent or treat COVID-19."

The CDC originally told Reuters that the earlier guidance was crafted for doctors at the request of a White House coronavirus task force, which had urged prompt action.

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Peter Navarro, the top trade and manufacturing aide to the president who is coordinating the use of the Defense Production Act against the virus for the White House, told CNN's John Berman recently that he believes a "second opinion" is needed about hydroxychloroquine as a treatment.

"I let (Fauci) speak for himself, John, but I would have two words for you: second opinion," Navarro said. "Doctors disagree about things all the time."

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Dr. Sanjay Gupta took the wind right out of Peter Navarro's arrogance by putting some facts on the table....

...SANJAY GUPTA: It's a total clash here, Alisyn. Understandably and I think John made this point very clearly, of course, everybody would love for a therapeutic to get out there, and to work. I mean, you know, when I say everyone, I mean everyone on the planet wants this, something to work at some point. Fact of the matter is, we don't know if hydroxychloroquine works. We don't even know if maybe it works for some people and not others. Could it make some people worse? Small example, this is a medication that seems to suppress your immune system. That's why it works for patients of autoimmune diseases. If you're somebody who needs a strong immune system because you're elderly and your immune system has not been working well, would you want to suppress that person's immune system? Probably not. I don't know. Nobody knows. That's sort of the point, and someone who has an overreaction of their immune system to this maybe it might work. We don't know. You want to do the studies here. Could it be harmful to some people? Possibly. That would be obviously a terrible outcome. We don't know the dosing that should be given, we don't know the duration that should be given. John was quite right in terms of having characterized the studies. They've been the studies that have involved mild patients with mild disease. Now why is that important? That's important because thankfully most patients still recover from coronavirus. So if you have two groups, and one group they have mild disease, the other group has mild disease, one group gets the medication, the other group doesn't get the medication, they're both very likely to improve. How do you really make sense of that sort of data, especially when it's a really small trial? Look, I'm trying to give a little bit of the reasoning behind why trials are done. You don't want to harm people. There is a real potential here for that, so that it is not a can't hurt/might help/why not situation. It just isn't. I want there to be a therapy. You want there to be a therapy, John, everybody wants there to be a therapy, but we got to be sure and it could happen quickly, but why wouldn't we do that? Why wouldn't we do the trials?

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Peter Navarro is sorta right on one thing -- setting up a "both sides" argument on Coronavirus GUARANTEES that one side is going to be pushing fake-science propaganda for Trump. Stick with actual medical professionals with proven science behind their statements, CNN, or you're once again complicit in backing up the lyingest president ever.

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Lyv said:

Federal Support Ends For Coronavirus Testing Sites As Pandemic Peak Nears

Anything to keep the numbers down. So what if more people die? Gotta think of the "ratings."

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MaeZe said:

CDC website drops guidance, anecdotal data on Trump-backed hydroxychloroquine as COVID-19 treatment

They were called on their inconsistency posting a few anecdotes as evidence for a treatment.

Someone stood up to incompetrump.

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The first (reason) is that Trump is listening to all the wrong people. We know that he finds those with advanced degrees extremely intimidating, activating his contempt and envy for experts. So when all the doctors and public health experts and epidemiologists tell him that while we can look into the potential of hydroxychloroquine, there’s no reason to think it’s going to be transformative, it makes him more, not less, convinced that it must be spectacular. And he's getting advice from medical quacks, the kind of people some Americans turn to for all kinds of reasons. Dr. Oz is another quack doctor who has touted this drug.

Trump compensates for his own insecurity by working to convince himself and everyone else that the experts don’t know what they’re talking about, and he knows more than them about everything. As he said in an appearance at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability.” The scientists standing with him neither burst out in laughter nor began weeping uncontrollably, a tribute to their self-control.

So who is he listening to? Here’s an excerpt from a recent New York Times article:

Mr. Trump first expressed interest in hydroxychloroquine a few weeks ago, telling associates that Mr. [Larry] Ellison, a billionaire and a founder of Oracle, had discussed it with him. At the time, Dr. Mehmet Oz, the host of television’s “The Doctor Oz Show,” was in touch with Mr. Trump’s advisers about expediting approval to use the drug for the coronavirus.
Mr. [Rudolph] Giuliani has urged Mr. Trump to embrace the drug, based in part on the advice of Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, a self-described simple country doctor who has become a hit on conservative media after administering a cocktail of hydroxychloroquine, the antibiotic azithromycin and zinc sulfate.

So: Trump is getting his medical advice from CEOs, a TV doctor who has been assailed for promoting “quack treatments,” and Giuliani. One of Giuliani’s main sources of information on this topic is a guy who runs a company providing medical supplies to cruise ships and who was once sentenced to a year in jail for extorting Steven Seagal.

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But that’s only a partial explanation for Trump’s enthusiasm for hydroxychloroquine. The most important factor is that he’s desperate, he wants to come out of this a hero and it’s the only drug he’s heard of that might give him the opportunity...

Looking across that landscape, Trump needs a miracle if he’s going to get reelected, and he knows it. Or more precisely, a miracle cure.

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lizmonster said:

The thing is, we don't have real data on how dangerous it is to bring in objects that have been somewhere else. I hear everything from "isolate your mail for 24 hours" to "yeah, there's zero evidence you can catch it that way unless someone's just coughed on your water bill." Which is why I'm annoyed, terrified, and frustrated all at once.

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I loathe our federal government. Instead of focusing on science and coordinating facts, they're letting a corrupt, narcissistic child rant and rave on television every day. The media absolutely needs to stop showing those briefings live. They're actively hindering our response to this thing.

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LittlePinto said:

And if people die? Well, it's mainly Black people, which suits those rotten white supremacist souls just fine.

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Friendly Frog said:

There was a study about how long corona-virusses survive on surfaces. I remember cardboard and paper being one of the first to disappate and safe to handle in a few hours. So I have been taking packages and letters indoors (can't leave them out), wash my hands and open them the next day just to be on the safe side.

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Friendly Frog said:

....

The accounts I heard of people being unable to take basic protection measures, like medical masks or even a bandana across the face, because they're Black and a masked black person is so much more likely to be accused, attacked and /or killed, are fairly heart-breaking. Protecting yourself from a virus shouldn't increase your chances of getting killed! But here we are.

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MaeZe said:

Nothing like that is being discussed here as a reason for disproportionate deaths in the black and brown populations. The most likely culprit is poor underlying health in those populations. There is more/more severe hypertension and heart disease in the black population. I'm not sure the specific health issues in Hispanics but I suspect obesity is an issue in both groups (not that everyone doesn't have a high level of obesity in this country). Bottom line, poor health is the most likely culprit.

Other things might be exposure to larger family groups or ignoring self-isolation. I doubt sincerely it has anything to do with being afraid to wear masks.

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MaeZe said:

And in the magical place that is Trumplandia:

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