Monday, June 01, 2020

Coronavirus News (127)

Social distancing strictures fall away as crowds gather to party and protest  Local health officials reported that at least one person tested positive for the coronavirus after being in the lake area last weekend. ....... Similar scenes played out around the country as many Americans, eager to recapture a sense of normalcy and seemingly confident that the risk was low, enjoyed public recreation and seemed unbothered by the crowds. .........  Warning that hospitals were “on the verge of being overrun,” Walz said “demonstrators should wear masks and try to practice social distancing.” ........  President Trump, Vice President Pence and their official parties who gathered with other VIPs to watch the launch at the Kennedy Space Center were not seen wearing face masks. .........  “It’s not a crisis. The actual virus is real, but the pandemic is made up,” said Joe Florio, standing in line with his daughter and grandson. ........... others said they were disbelieving or simply mad at what they considered an exaggerated threat. ..........  “All of us old, belligerent people refuse to wear those d----- things,” Lenny Kempf, an 82-year-old retired home builder, said of face masks as he watched the boats easing into slips at the yacht club in Osage Beach, Mo. “I wish I could wring [Anthony S.] Fauci’s neck” ...........   Two to four weeks after many states began lifting restrictions on restaurants, bars and larger gatherings, cases are rising in areas that had previously dodged the worst of the virus’s impact. Arizona, Mississippi, South Carolina, Utah and Wisconsin all set record highs for new cases reported Friday. Restaurants, gyms, and other businesses have been allowed open for at least two weeks in all of the states. ..............  In many areas, large gatherings are cited as the center of major outbreaks. ........  Rex Archer, director of health for nearby Kansas City, Mo., bemoaned not only the behavior of those in attendance, but also the lack of consistent messaging from the federal government that he said facilitated it. ......... “If we had stronger messages, if the CDC had been allowed to give daily briefs, if the public were hearing the concerns and the risks, we might have been able to do differently” 

Buildings burn, and Trump talks tough. Where are the healers? As protests quickly flipped from peaceful to fiery in more than two dozen U.S. cities, President Trump said little Saturday about the frustrations that drove thousands of people to crowd into downtown streets in the middle of a pandemic. Instead, the president defaulted to his usual style of leadership: tearing people down and talking tough. .......... Trump maintained the strategy he has used throughout his tenure, emphasizing the nation’s divisions and seeking to capitalize on them. .......... There is no magic formula for averting a long, hot summer of street violence and social discord, of raging flames and physical confrontations. ......... the people Americans have chosen to take charge in times of crisis have more often left a leadership vacuum — such as the remarkable absence of police and public officials on the streets of Minneapolis in recent days. ..........  A rare exception came on Friday night in Atlanta. As fires burned and angry crowds banged up against lines of police officers, the city’s police chief, Erika Shields, waded into a clot of protesters and listened to their grievances. ...........  Rep. Ilhan Omar (D), who represents Minneapolis, posted a video saying that “we can’t ask our community to be peaceful if we continue to not deliver justice for them.” .........  City leaders “just said okay, if we just give them the precinct, we’ll feed the beast and they’ll be satisfied,” said Gerold, who left the department in 2014. “That’s just feeding the fire. . . . I think that opened the door for the rest of it.” ..........  Probably no political gesture, speech or legislative action could have prevented this week’s explosion of frustrations. But in the long, ugly history of American political street violence, the enduring images of healing often involve dramatic scenes of politicians and police who, rather than facing off against protesters, waded in for tough, painful confrontations that pointed a path toward reforms. ................ On the night the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., was assassinated in 1968, as 34 U.S. cities burned in riots of grief and anger, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy stepped before a crowd in an Indianapolis neighborhood already engulfed in protest. Police had declined to accompany Kennedy because the crowd was too hot. Standing on a flatbed truck, Kennedy said to a virtually all-black crowd: “You can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization — black people among black, white people among white, filled with hatred toward one another. “Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love.” ...............  The president at that moment, Lyndon Johnson, made no such gesture as U.S. cities burned. He felt betrayed, believing that by winning historic civil rights laws, he had done more for the country’s black population than any president in decades. .............  On Saturday afternoon, Trump urged the nation’s mayors to “get tougher,” and he dismissed protesters as “a lot of radical left bad people.” ........... D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D), whom the president had accused of failing to provide police support for Secret Service officers guarding the White House, blasted Trump on Saturday for his brand of leadership. ......... “We need leaders who . . . in times of great turmoil and despair can provide us a sense of calm and a sense of hope. Instead, what we’ve got in the last two days from the White House is the glorification of violence against American citizens,” Bowser said. ..........  Turkey’s leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said that a “racist and fascist approach” led to Floyd’s death and was a symbol of an “unjust order” in the United States. In Iran, people held a candlelight vigil in memory of Floyd. In China, state television broadcast a commentary contending that excessive police force “shows the deep social contradictions” in the United States. .......... Trump continued to talk tough; on Saturday, he reiterated an offer to make the Army available to suppress riots, saying, “We have our military ready, willing and able.” ...........  “This is not a protest,” said Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms (D). “This is not in the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr. This is chaos. A protest has purpose. . . . You’re not protesting anything running out with brown liquor in your hands and breaking windows in this city. . . . Go home!” .........   “That’s not going to come from this president, but policing is still mostly a local and state issue,” Zelizer said. “Just as we’ve seen with the pandemic, governors can and will step up.” ........... police brutality and racial bias continue to hold explosive power as political issues, and few elected officials spend much energy confronting the problem. It’s easier for some leaders to traffic in pat slogans, bashing either the police or the protesters. .......... Late Saturday, as the nation braced for another scary night, Trump continued his campaign, tweeting, as ever: “Fake News is the Enemy of the People!”



The case for reopening schools this fall “Tinderbox: How the West Sparked the AIDS Epidemic and How the World Can Finally Overcome It.” .............  While most countries have shuttered schools, others such as Taiwan have achieved effective responses without closures. In Denmark and Norway, where schools began reopening in mid-April, covid-19 cases and deaths have decreased. Normally, gregarious youngsters are efficient spreaders of respiratory pathogens. But this appears not to be the case with covid-19. .........  much like with the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic in 2003, children are less likely to become infected with this coronavirus ............  A German study that warns against reopening schools found viral loads in infected children at levels comparable to adults. ........  Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, recently warned against reopening schools too early, and noted complications in some children that resemble Kawasaki disease. ......... The low numbers of children affected by covid-19 and the new syndrome should be considered in additional context: More than 200 U.S. children were killed last year by flu; some 10,000 others died from various childhood diseases. A rare condition that is not commonly fatal does not justify keeping 55 million American students home into the next academic year. ...........  2 to 4 percent of covid-19 deaths in Britain might be prevented by closing schools and colleges, compared with a potential 17 percent to 21 percent prevented from self-isolating. ...... Other consequences of school closures include recent surges in child abuse; hunger from missed subsidized meals; greater anxiety, depression and isolation. Students with autism, Down syndrome, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and other special needs are at particular risk. But months away from friends and school structure takes a toll on all students, as beleaguered parents everywhere can attest. ........ Although some covid-19 cases regrettably may result from reopening schools, the existing evidence does not warrant inflicting potentially long-term academic, social and vocational disadvantages on millions of children.

Biden leads Trump in Post-ABC poll as president’s coronavirus rating slips  Biden leads Trump 53 percent to 43 percent among registered voters nationally. That 10 percentage-point margin compares with what was a virtual dead heat between the two candidates two months ago, when Biden was at 49 percent and Trump 47 percent. Among all adults, Biden’s margin widens to 13 points (53 percent to 40 percent).......  When a Biden-Trump contest is filtered only through those who currently say they are certain to vote, the former vice president’s margin is cut in half (51-46 percent).  ........ On the question of making voting by mail easier, 87 percent of Democrats and 67 percent of independents favor such moves by the states, while 61 percent of Republicans oppose such changes, including 53 percent who say they are strongly opposed. Overall, 65 percent of adults express support. .......... 40 million people have applied for unemployment insurance    







How to Make this Moment the Turning Point for Real Change   Ultimately, it’s going to be up to a new generation of activists to shape strategies that best fit the times. But I believe there are some basic lessons to draw from past efforts that are worth remembering. ......... The overwhelming majority of participants have been peaceful, courageous, responsible, and inspiring. .........   throughout American history, it’s often only been in response to protests and civil disobedience that the political system has even paid attention to marginalized communities. But eventually, aspirations have to be translated into specific laws and institutional practices — and in a democracy, that only happens when we elect government officials who are responsive to our demands. ....... the bottom line is this: if we want to bring about real change, then the choice isn’t between protest and politics. We have to do both. We have to mobilize to raise awareness, and we have to organize and cast our ballots to make sure that we elect candidates who will act on reform. ........ the more specific we can make demands for criminal justice and police reform, the harder it will be for elected officials to just offer lip service to the cause and then fall back into business as usual once protests have gone away 



Coronavirus May Be a Blood Vessel Disease, Which Explains Everything Many of the infection’s bizarre symptoms have one thing in common ........  In April, blood clots emerged as one of the many mysterious symptoms attributed to Covid-19, a disease that had initially been thought to largely affect the lungs in the form of pneumonia. Quickly after came reports of young people dying due to coronavirus-related strokes. Next it was Covid toes — painful red or purple digits. .........  40% of deaths from Covid-19 are related to cardiovascular complications, and the disease starts to look like a vascular infection instead of a purely respiratory one. .......... “All these Covid-associated complications were a mystery. We see blood clotting, we see kidney damage, we see inflammation of the heart, we see stroke, we see encephalitis [swelling of the brain],” says William Li, MD, president of the Angiogenesis Foundation. “A whole myriad of seemingly unconnected phenomena that you do not normally see with SARS or H1N1 or, frankly, most infectious diseases.” ......... “If you start to put all of the data together that’s emerging, it turns out that this virus is probably a vasculotropic virus, meaning that it affects the [blood vessels]” ............ the SARS-CoV-2 virus can infect the endothelial cells that line the inside of blood vessels. ....... damage to endothelial cells in the lungs, heart, kidneys, liver, and intestines in people with Covid-19. .........  A respiratory virus infecting blood cells and circulating through the body is virtually unheard of. ............ infection of the blood vessels may be how the virus travels through the body and infects other organs — something that’s atypical of respiratory infections. ....... The good news is that if Covid-19 is a vascular disease, there are existing drugs that can help protect against endothelial cell damage. ........ “It turns out that both statins and ACE inhibitors are extremely protective on vascular dysfunction,” Mehra says. “Most of their benefit in the continuum of cardiovascular illness — be it high blood pressure, be it stroke, be it heart attack, be it arrhythmia, be it heart failure — in any situation the mechanism by which they protect the cardiovascular system starts with their ability to stabilize the endothelial cells.” ....... “What we’re saying is that maybe the best antiviral therapy is not actually an antiviral therapy. The best therapy might actually be a drug that stabilizes the vascular endothelial. We’re building a drastically different concept.” 


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Saturday, May 30, 2020

Coronavirus News (126)

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Gripped by disease, unemployment and outrage at the police, America plunges into crisis  A global pandemic has now killed more than 100,000 Americans and left 40 million unemployed in its wake. Protests — some of them violent — have once again erupted in spots across the country over police killings of black Americans. .........  “The threads of our civic life could start unraveling, because everybody’s living in a tinderbox” ...........  “People are seething about all kinds of things” ........ “There are major turning points and ruptures in history. . . . This is one of these moments, but we’ve not seen how it will fully play out.” ..........  some said the tumult, set in the broader context of the twin health and economic emergencies, could mark a rupture as dramatic as signature turning points in the country’s history, from the economic dislocation of the Great Depression to the social convulsions of 1968. ........ the past is filled with events whose outcomes have not been as sweeping as they seemed to portend ........ the European revolutions of 1848 — famously said to be the “turning point at which modern history failed to turn” — and Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which exposed lethal failures but did not cause political transformation. ...........  Floyd’s death followed the slaying of a black man, Ahmaud Arbery, who was jogging in Georgia, and a viral dust-up in New York’s Central Park when a white woman called the police on a black man there to bird-watch. ...........  A president’s impeachment, demonstrations over police killings and even global pandemics all have precedents. But their confluence in such a short span of time — under this president, who consistently pushes the boundaries of historic norms associated with his office — has exacerbated the nation’s sense of unease. .........  for millions of Americans, being treated differently on account of race is tragically, painfully, maddeningly ‘normal’ — whether it’s while dealing with the health care system, or interacting with the criminal justice system, or jogging down the street, or just watching birds in a park. ........... Trump responded to the latest crisis Friday as he often does: by lashing out. .......   the unrest was a result of “generations of pain, of anguish” over racism in policing. ............  Trump, he said, seems to see the unrest as a potentially helpful “political issue,” if he can position himself as a law-and-order candidate cracking down on anarchy and possibly distract from the pandemic. ......... “Is this going to be the summer of covid-19? Or is this going to be the summer of urban unrest?” Brinkley said. “And Trump does not want it to be the summer of covid-19.” ..........  at a time when what is most needed is thoughtful, calm, deliberate leadership, we have the opposite 




Pandemic’s overall death toll in U.S. likely surpassed 100,000 weeks ago A state-by-state analysis shows that deaths officially attributed to covid- 19 only partially account for unusually high mortality during the pandemic ........ Between March 1 and May 9, the nation recorded an estimated 101,600 excess deaths, or deaths beyond the number that would normally be expected for that time of year .........   Allies of President Trump have claimed that the government tally is inflated, contending that it includes people with other medical conditions who would have died with or without an infection. ........  an examination of excess deaths by state paints a portrait of two Americas, one pummeled by the pandemic and the other only lightly scathed. ..........  the gap between excess deaths and official covid-19 tallies has been particularly pronounced in several states that currently have the least restrictive social distancing rules in place.  

South Korea closes schools again amid coronavirus spike, days after reopening School districts in the United States that have been closed for months are now trying to figure out when and how they can reopen safely. Some are watching how other countries are handling the reopening of schools, including South Korea, which has been successful in containing the spread of the virus. ............  After putting plastic barriers in many schools to separate students while they eat and learn, disinfecting, and other preventive steps, some schools began to open last week for the first time in several months ..........  But new clusters of the coronavirus have been identified in recent days, leading the government to close not only schools but also parks and museums — and people are being urged again not to gather in big numbers.   





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