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Originally posted by leswp1
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That has to be the scariest, most terrifying experience anyone can have. To be told that, and then nothing to do but wait. Words cannot express.
What kind of cheese are you planning to put on top? -
Which begs the question: Why are kids allowed to attend summer camp?Originally posted by jerphisch View Post
Oh wait, it's Georgia. Never mind.What kind of cheese are you planning to put on top?Comment
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Mass today- the town one over from us had a huge grad party- hotspot. That's OK because the people down the street have been around folks who went and they are going to the neighborhood party that is still happening (we gave that a pass). Then they are going to have a BD party for their kid the next day with 'close friends'. Wouldn't you love to contact trace that?
And then there was the brilliant brainchild who decided to have a football camp with kids from 17 different towns and guess what happened there...Comment
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That would be "misuse"...Originally posted by Jeb2020 View Post
Go ahead and study for that GED, already. It might earn you a little credibility on here.
(Or not.)Comment
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So wait...the 70k new cases and 1400 deaths arent new but are all legacy? Is that the bit now?"It's as if the Drumpf Administration is made up of the worst and unfunny parts of the Cleveland Browns, Washington Generals, and the alien Mon-Stars from Space Jam."
-aparch
"Scenes in "Empire Strikes Back" that take place on the tundra planet Hoth were shot on the present-day site of Ralph Engelstad Arena."
-INCH
Of course I'm a fan of the Vikings. A sick and demented Masochist of a fan, but a fan none the less.
-ScoobyDoo 12/17/2007Comment
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I will give you guys kudos for stillll trying to respond to the ignored one. Are you per chance parents of toddlers or preschool teachers? If so it would explain your never ending energy to keep on responding.Comment
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I agree. It is bad. I have gotten pretty deep with many of the science deniers on the site and wasted much time, but this one is a new level.Originally posted by leswp1 View PostIn the immortal words of Jean Paul Sartre, 'Au revoir, gopher'.
Originally posted by burdComment
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This if fu***ng criminal. I copied quite a bit of text here but it's only a fraction of a very well detailed article and I encourage you all to read through it. Jeb you can gfy.
How Jared Kushner’s Secret Testing Plan “Went Poof Into Thin Air”
During that period, more than 2.4 million Americans contracted COVID-19 and 123,331 of them died of the illness. First in New York, and then in states around the country, governors, public health experts, and frightened citizens sounded the alarm that a critical shortage of tests, and the ballooning time to get results, were crippling the U.S. pandemic response.
But the million tests, some of which were distributed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to several states, were of no help. According to documents obtained by Vanity Fair, they were examined in two separate government laboratories and found to be “contaminated and unusable.”
The secret, and legally dubious, acquisition of those test kits was the work of a task force at the White House, where Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and special adviser, has assumed a sprawling role in the pandemic response. That explains the “WH” on the invoice. While it’s unclear whether Kushner himself played a role in the acquisition, improper procurement of supplies “is a serious deal,” said a former White House staffer. “That is appropriations 101. That would be not good.”
Inside the White House, over much of March and early April, Kushner’s handpicked group of young business associates, which included a former college roommate, teamed up with several top experts from the diagnostic-testing industry. Together, they hammered out the outline of a national testing strategy. The group—working night and day, using the encrypted platform WhatsApp—emerged with a detailed plan obtained by Vanity Fair.
Rather than have states fight each other for scarce diagnostic tests and limited lab capacity, the plan would have set up a system of national oversight and coordination to surge supplies, allocate test kits, lift regulatory and contractual roadblocks, and establish a widespread virus surveillance system by the fall, to help pinpoint subsequent outbreaks.
The solutions it proposed weren’t rocket science—or even comparable to the dauntingly complex undertaking of developing a new vaccine. Any national plan to address testing deficits would likely be more on the level of “replicating UPS for an industry,” said Dr. Mike Pellini, the managing partner of Section 32, a technology and health care venture capital fund. “Imagine if UPS or FedEx didn’t have infrastructure to connect all the dots. It would be complete chaos.”
The plan crafted at the White House, then, set out to connect the dots. Some of those who worked on the plan were told that it would be presented to President Trump and likely announced in the Rose Garden in early April. “I was beyond optimistic,” said one participant. “My understanding was that the final document would make its way to the president over that weekend” and would result in a “significant announcement.”
But no nationally coordinated testing strategy was ever announced. The plan, according to the participant, “just went poof into thin air.”As it evolved, Kushner’s group called on the help of several top diagnostic-testing experts. Together, they worked around the clock, and through a forest of WhatsApp messages. The effort of the White House team was “apolitical,” said the participant, and undertaken “with the nation’s best interests in mind.”
Kushner’s team hammered out a detailed plan, which Vanity Fair obtained. It stated, “Current challenges that need to be resolved include uneven testing capacity and supplies throughout the US, both between and within regions, significant delays in reporting results (4-11 days), and national supply chain constraints, such as PPE, swabs, and certain testing reagents.”
The plan called for the federal government to coordinate distribution of test kits, so they could be surged to heavily affected areas, and oversee a national contact-tracing infrastructure. It also proposed lifting contract restrictions on where doctors and hospitals send tests, allowing any laboratory with capacity to test any sample. It proposed a massive scale-up of antibody testing to facilitate a return to work. It called for mandating that all COVID-19 test results from any kind of testing, taken anywhere, be reported to a national repository as well as to state and local health departments.
And it proposed establishing “a national Sentinel Surveillance System” with “real-time intelligence capabilities to understand leading indicators where hot spots are arising and where the risks are high vs. where people can get back to work.”
By early April, some who worked on the plan were given the strong impression that it would soon be shared with President Trump and announced by the White House. The plan, though imperfect, was a starting point. Simply working together as a nation on it “would have put us in a fundamentally different place,” said the participant.
But the effort ran headlong into shifting sentiment at the White House. Trusting his vaunted political instincts, President Trump had been downplaying concerns about the virus and spreading misinformation about it—efforts that were soon amplified by Republican elected officials and right-wing media figures. Worried about the stock market and his reelection prospects, Trump also feared that more testing would only lead to higher case counts and more bad publicity. Meanwhile, Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, was reportedly sharing models with senior staff that optimistically—and erroneously, it would turn out—predicted the virus would soon fade away.
Against that background, the prospect of launching a large-scale national plan was losing favor, said one public health expert in frequent contact with the White House’s official coronavirus task force.
Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert.On April 27, Trump stepped to a podium in the Rose Garden, flanked by members of his coronavirus task force and leaders of America’s big commercial testing laboratories, Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp, and finally announced a testing plan: It bore almost no resemblance to the one that had been forged in late March, and shifted the problem of diagnostic testing almost entirely to individual states.
Under the plan released that day, the federal government would act as a facilitator to help increase needed supplies and rapidly approve new versions of diagnostic-testing kits. But the bulk of the effort to operate testing sites and find available labs fell to the states.
“I had this naive optimism: This is too important to be caught in a partisan filter of how we view truth and the world,” said Rick Klausner, a Rockefeller Foundation adviser and former director of the National Cancer Institute. “But the federal government has decided to abrogate responsibility, and basically throw 50 states onto their own.”
It soon became clear that ceding testing responsibility to the states was a recipe for disaster, not just in Democratic-governed areas but across the country.
In April, Phoenix, Arizona, was struggling just to provide tests to its health care workers and patients with severe symptoms of COVID-19. When Mayor Kate Gallego reached out to the federal government for help, she got an unmistakable message back: America’s fifth-largest city was on its own. “We didn’t have a sufficient number of cases to warrant” the help, Gallego told Vanity Fair.
Phoenix found itself in a catch-22, which the city’s government relations manager explained to lawyers in an April 21 email obtained by Vanity Fair through a public records request: “On a call with the county last week the Mayor was told that the region has [not] received FEMA funds related to testing because we don’t have bad numbers. The problem with that logic is that the Mayor believes we don’t have bad numbers because [of] a lack of testing.”
In June, Phoenix’s case counts began to rise dramatically. At a drive-through testing site near her house, Gallego saw miles-long lines of cars waiting in temperatures above 100 degrees. “We had people waiting 13 hours to get a test,” said Gallego. “These are people who are struggling to breathe, whose bodies ache, who have to sit in a car for hours. One man, his car had run out of gas and he had to refill while struggling to breathe.”
Gallego’s own staff members were waiting two weeks to get back test results, a period in which they could have been unwittingly transmitting the virus. “The turnaround times are way beyond what’s clinically relevant,” said Dr. James Lawler, executive director of international programs and innovation at the Global Center for Health Security at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
By July 5, Gallego was out of patience. She went on ABC News, wearing a neon-pink blouse, and politely blasted the federal response: “We’ve asked FEMA if they could come and do community-based testing here. We were told they’re moving away from that, which feels like they’re declaring victory while we’re still in crisis mode.”
Three days later, at a press conference, the White House’s testing czar, Admiral Giroir, blasted her back by name. Claiming that the federal government was already operating or contributing support for 41 Phoenix testing sites, he said: “Now, two days ago, I heard that Mayor Gallego was unhappy because there was no federal support…. It was clear to me that Phoenix was not in tune with all the things that the state were doing.”
Gallego recounted how her mother “just happened to catch this on CNN. She sent me a text message saying, ‘I don’t think they like you at the White House.’”
Despite Giroir’s defensiveness, however, Gallego ultimately prevailed in her public demand for help: Health and Human Services agreed to set up a surge testing site in Phoenix. “The effect was, we had to be in a massive crisis before they would help,” said Gallego.
And that is where the U.S. finds itself today—in a massive testing crisis. States have been forced to go their own way, amid rising case counts, skyrocketing demand for tests, and dwindling laboratory capacity. By mid-July, Quest Diagnostics announced that the average time to turn around test results was seven days.
It is obvious to experts that 50 individual states cannot effectively deploy testing resources amid vast regulatory, financial, and supply-chain obstacles. The diagnostic-testing industry is a “loosely constructed web,” said Dr. Pellini of Section 32, “and COVID-19 is a stage five hurricane.”Comment
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Yeah I posted that the other day.
quit being hysterical, it’s nothing that affects people. Just ask hoveyComment
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How can lockdown deaths be rising when we're not in a lockdown?
And what's a 'lockdown' death anyway?What kind of cheese are you planning to put on top?Comment
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7/17 still holding has peak.Originally posted by Handyman View Post
https://mobile.twitter.com/jhaskinsc...42121640136704
Florida reported 257 new deaths today. Here are the actual dates of the deaths:
7/30 - 24
7/29 - 28
7/28 - 15
7/27 - 10
7/26 - 38
7/25 - 27
7/24 - 28
7/23 - 14
7/22 - 7
7/21 - 11
7/20 - 5
7/19 - 3
7/18 - 4
7/17 - 1
7/16 - 8
7/15 -6
7/14 - 4
7/13 - 9 (more)
7/12 - 6
7/11 - 3
7/10 - 2
7/3 - 1
6/10 - 3
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...y0jwo/htmlviewComment
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https://mobile.twitter.com/pwyowell/...99855093420032
Sweden update 31 July. Zero deaths in past 3 days; 5 in the past week. No lockdowns, no masks, no panic.Comment
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Florida looks to have peaked on 7/17.Originally posted by alfablueComment
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