Category Archives: 2020 Election Issues

Some defiant U.S. churches plan Easter services, ignoring public health guidelines

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Civil Disobedience, Coronavirus, Crisis, Crisis Management, Health Policy, Infection Control, Infectious Virus, Pandemic, Public Health, Public Safety, Social Distancing • Leave a comment

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-easter-usa/some-defiant-u-s-churches-plan-easter-services-ignoring-public-health-guidelines-idUSKCN21S10Y

Churches still offering Easter services

A handful of holdout U.S. churches plan to hold in-person services on Easter Sunday, saying their right to worship in person outweighs public health officials’ warnings against holding large gatherings during the coronavirus outbreak.

Most U.S. churches are expected to be closed on Sunday, and a broad majority of observant Americans are expected to follow authorities’ recommendations to avoid crowds to limit the spread of the potentially lethal COVID-19 respiratory disease caused by the new coronavirus.

But not all of them.

“Satan and a virus will not stop us,” said the Reverend Tony Spell, 42, pastor of the evangelical Life Tabernacle Church near Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He expects a crowd of more than 2,000 to gather in worship at his megachurch on Sunday.

“God will shield us from all harm and sickness,” Spell said in an interview. “We are not afraid. We are called by God to stand against the Antichrist creeping into America’s borders. We will spread the Gospel.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has claimed more than 14,700 lives across the United States and infected more than 431,700 people, with officials predicting the worst is yet to come.

Major U.S. religious institutions, including Roman Catholic dioceses and major Protestant denominations, will hold religious services online as well as through local broadcast radio and television, with just a handful of ministers and priests preaching sermons and reading liturgies to rows of empty pews.

Indeed, some major religious-liberty legal advocacy groups, whose mission is to challenge restrictions on freedom of religion, have not raised objections to the closures, saying churches have been treated the same as other major institutions and that safety comes first.

In Idaho, Ammon Bundy, who has led multiple standoffs against authorities in acts of protest against the federal government, plans to gather hundreds of people for an Easter observance, in defiance of public health advice, according to multiple media reports.

Another holdout church, the evangelical Cross Culture Center in Lodi, California, about 70 miles (110 km) southwest of San Francisco, plans another service even after its members found their church doors locked against them last weekend.

Lay preacher Jon Duncan, 43, who has led the evangelical center for more than 10 years, said that under city orders, his landlord changed the locks and shut them out Sunday morning.

Lodi police officers was standing by the door, because they were defying both local and state “stay-at-home” orders and a court order from the San Joaquin County Public Health Services.

Instead, Duncan held brief curbside prayers with his congregants as they showed up for the 11 a.m. service.

“It is disappointing because we have a valid lease, but we won’t be stopped,” he said. “God commands us to meet and that’s what we’re going to do Easter.”

Duncan expects he and his flock of about 80 regular attendees will be locked out on Easter too, so he has picked an alternate site to meet. He and his attorney declined to disclose the new location to the public for fear of becoming a spectacle instead of a holy service.

The church’s attorney, Dean Broyles, has lodged a complaint against the city, and implored California’s governor in a letter to lift the ban on large church gatherings.

Duncan said he is steadfast in his decision.

“We don’t believe our rights are eroded by a virus,” he said. “We will stand together before God even against the gates of hell.”

 

 

 

Pandemic spurs court fights over mail-in voting

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Coronavirus, Health Policy, Infection Control, Infectious Virus, Lawsuit, Mail-in Ballots, Pandemic, Partisanship, Public Health, Public Safety, Social Distancing, Supreme Court, Voter Disenfranchisement, Voter Suppression, Wishful Thinking • Leave a comment

https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/492135-pandemic-spurs-court-fights-over-mail-in-voting?userid=12325

Pandemic spurs court fights over mail-in voting | TheHill

Election officials are scrambling ahead of the November vote to ramp up alternative methods like mail-in voting as the coronavirus pandemic raises concerns about the safety of in-person voting.

That dash to expand polling options could bring a new wave of court fights around the 2020 election, legal experts say. As states move to bolster balloting options — or face challenges to such plans — both sides in the debate are likely to take those decisions to court.

And when Election Day arrives, questions over the handling of mail-in ballots could lead to more court fights.

“We do not want the election resolved in the courts and so I hope it does not come to that,” said Richard Pildes, a law professor at New York University.

Legal experts say the nightmare scenario would be a situation resembling the Supreme Court’s decision on Bush v. Gore, which was seen as an ideological one that undermined both the legitimacy of the court and the 2000 presidential election results among critics of the decision.

“We know that the current partisan divide over the legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court can be timed to the release of the Bush v. Gore decision,” said Charles Stewart, a political science professor and election expert at MIT. “So, we have to be worried both about the legitimacy of the result and the legitimacy of the courts.”

States are hoping to avoid the situation Wisconsin faced this week where widespread in-person voting took place, despite last-minute efforts to avoid that outcome amid a virus that had infected some 2,500 and killed nearly 80 in the state by the Tuesday vote.

“There’s nonstop work being done by election officials to plan for November,” Stewart said.

The hope is that the pandemic will have abated enough to allow for in-person voting, which could be done more safely if early voting is expanded to reduce crowding on Voting Day. But given the fears over inciting a second wave of infections, that may not be advisable by the fall.

All states allow at least some mail-in balloting for select voters. While some states have relatively expansive mail voting systems, others have few provisions.

The fight over expanding voting options has already sparked legal battles. Texas is one of the states that has cases pending in court over efforts to expand mail-in balloting.

Under the current state election rules in Texas, only voters with a “qualifying reason” — advanced age, disability, incarceration or planned travel — can mail in ballots, despite public health guidance to avoid public gatherings. But a lawsuit filed by Texas Democrats ahead of the July primary runoff seeks to have that criteria expanded by including social distancing as a qualifying disability.

Progress toward developing a voting failsafe by November is likely to be uneven among the states given that not all are beginning from the same starting point, and because the push has increasingly become riven by partisan politics.

States that have a head start will be better off, though, experts said.

“States that already have a well-developed vote-by-mail program may well have the capacity to supersize it, and states that don’t may well have the capacity to provide some incremental vote-by-mail capacity,” said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School.

“But it will be a herculean task for a state without much vote-by-mail capacity to get to almost everyone voting by mail by November. That takes expertise and systems, equipment and personnel, and the capacity to print a lot more ballots. And it is not easy to get any of those quickly.”

Lorraine Minnite, a political science professor at Rutgers University-Camden, put it even more starkly.

“A large-scale change in procedure hastily administered will likely not run smoothly even under the best of conditions,” she said.

Experts warn that expanded mail-in voting could lead to more voter errors and omissions, create more opportunities for fraud or coercion, and pose special challenges for those who move frequently or lack a permanent address. 

Edward Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University, said that if states are too slow to mail out ballots, litigation could arise from those issues.

“The most likely problem to trigger litigation would be if voters request absentee ballots on time, but election officials because they are overwhelmed with the high volume of absentee ballot requests fail to send the ballots to voters in time for voters to return them by the legally specified deadline,” Foley said.

“This, then, creates a problem of wrongful disenfranchisement of eligible voters, through no fault of the voters but because of the government’s own problems, and requires a court to come up with an appropriate remedy,” he added.

Rick Hasen, a professor of law and political science at the University of California Irvine, said that more courts may be drawn into a battle similar to the one playing out in Texas over whether voting by mail should require a valid excuse.

“There are a number of issues courts may address related to the vote by mail and the coronavirus,” he said. “Do states have to expand ballot deadlines to deal with a flood of absentee ballots? Do voters have a right to be told their absentee ballots have been rejected and given the opportunity to ‘cure’ a problem for rejecting a ballot like a purported signature mismatch?”

According to Levitt, one common thread among states is the urgent need for money to ramp up mail-in operations.

“The single most important piece is funding,” he said. “There are a lot of logistics between here and there, including space and machinery and people to process mail ballots, and that takes money.”  

The more than $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus package included $400 million for states to expand early voting, election by mail and for other election matters.

“The recent funding from Congress is an extremely welcome start, but only barely a start,” he added. “There needs to be much more, and quickly: it does little good to get more funding for this in October.”

 

 

 

Pence Blocks Fauci, Birx from Appearing on CNN after Network Stops Airing Full White House Coronavirus Briefings

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Censorship, Communication, Coronavirus, Crisis, Crisis Management, Freedom of the Press, Health Policy, Pandemic, Partisanship, Transparency • Leave a comment

https://news.yahoo.com/pence-blocks-fauci-birx-appearing-163022678.html

Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx are diving into social media to ...

Vice President Mike Pence has blocked Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, as well as other top U.S. health officials, from appearing on CNN following the network’s decision to not air the White House coronavirus press briefings in full.

“When you guys cover the briefings with the health officials then you can expect them back on your air,” a spokesman for the vice president told CNN.

Trump and the White House Coronavirus Task Force, led by Pence, have been giving daily briefings to the press for several weeks after rising numbers of Americans have been infected. A CNN executive said that the network has sometimes cut away from the briefings after Trump speaks, and turns to a panel to fact-check the president. However, the network usually broadcasts only the president’s question-and-answer session.

Fauci and Birx regularly appear at the briefings to give updates on the status of the coronavirus epidemic within the U.S. Fauci has also appeared on CNN virtual townhalls on the coronavirus for the past five weeks, but will not be present this Thursday.

The New York Times, another outlet that has been a target of the Trump administration’s ire, stopped airing the briefings on its website entirely.

“We stopped doing that because they were like campaign rallies,” Elisabeth Bumiller, the paper’s Washington bureau chief, told the Washington Post. “The health experts often have interesting information, so we’re very interested in that, but the president himself often does not.”

 

State-by-state breakdown of 354 rural hospitals at high risk of closing

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Access, Access & Quality of Healthcare, Access to Capital, Bankruptcy, Cash, Cash Reserves, Debt Levels, Financially Distressed, Health Policy, Hospital, Hospital Bankruptcy, Hospital Closure, Operating Expenses, Operating Income, Operating Margin, Operating Performance, Operating Revenue, Rev Cycle Management, Rural Health, Rural Hospital, Safety Net Hospitals, Safety-Net Providers • Leave a comment

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/finance/state-by-state-breakdown-of-354-rural-hospitals-at-high-risk-of-closing.html?utm_medium=email

What Rural Hospital Closures Mean for EMS Professionals

Twenty-five percent of the 1,430 rural hospitals in the U.S. are at high risk of closing unless their finances improve, according to an annual analysis from Guidehouse, a consulting firm. 

The 354 rural hospitals at high risk of closing are spread across 40 states and represent more than 222,000 annual discharges. According to the analysis, 287 of these hospitals — 81 percent — are considered highly essential to the health and economic wellbeing of their communities.

Several factors are putting rural hospitals at risk of closing, according to the analysis, which looked at operating margin, days cash on hand, debt-to-capitalization ratio, current ratio and inpatient census to determine the financial viability of rural hospitals. Declining inpatient volume, clinician shortages, payer mix degradation and revenue cycle management challenges are among the factors driving the rural hospital crisis.

The Guidehouse study analyzed the financial viability of rural hospitals prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the authors noted that the rural hospital crisis could significantly worsen due to the pandemic or any downturn in the economy. 

Here are the number and percentage of rural hospitals at high risk of closing in each state based on the analysis:

Tennessee
Rural hospitals at high risk of closing: 19 (68 percent)

Alabama
Rural hospitals at high risk of closing: 18 (60 percent)

Oklahoma
Rural hospitals at high risk of closing: 28 (60 percent)

Arkansas
Rural hospitals at high risk of closing: 18 (53 percent)

Mississippi
Rural hospitals at high risk of closing: 25 (50 percent)

West Virginia
Rural hospitals at high risk of closing: 9 (50 percent)

South Carolina
Rural hospitals at high risk of closing: 4 (44 percent)

Georgia
Rural hospitals at high risk of closing: 14 (41 percent)

Kentucky
Rural hospitals at high risk of closing: 18 (40 percent)

Louisiana
Rural hospitals at high risk of closing: 11 (37 percent)

Maine
Rural hospitals at high risk of closing: 7 (33 percent)

Indiana
Rural hospitals at high risk of closing: 8 (31 percent)

Kansas
Rural hospitals at high risk of closing: 26 (31 percent)

New Mexico
Rural hospitals at high risk of closing: 3 (30 percent)

Michigan
Rural hospitals at high risk of closing: 13 (29 percent)

Missouri
Rural hospitals at high risk of closing: 10 (26 percent)

Virginia
Rural hospitals at high risk of closing: 5 (25 percent)

Oregon
Rural hospitals at high risk of closing: 4 (24 percent)

California
Rural hospitals at high risk of closing: 6 (23 percent)

North Carolina
Rural hospitals at high risk of closing: 6 (23 percent)

Florida
Rural hospitals at high risk of closing: 2 (22 percent)

North Dakota
Rural hospitals at high risk of closing: 7 (21 percent)

Ohio
Rural hospitals at high risk of closing: 6 (20 percent)

Vermont
Rural hospitals at high risk of closing: 2 (20 percent)

Idaho
Rural hospitals at high risk of closing: 4 (19 percent)

Pennsylvania
Rural hospitals at high risk of closing: 4 (19 percent)

Washington
Rural hospitals at high risk of closing: 5 (18 percent)

Wyoming
Rural hospitals at high risk of closing: 3 (18 percent)

Texas
Rural hospitals at high risk of closing: 14 (16 percent)

Colorado
Rural hospitals at high risk of closing: 4 (14 percent)

Illinois
Rural hospitals at high risk of closing: 7 (14 percent)

Montana
Rural hospitals at high risk of closing: 7 (14 percent)

Nebraska
Rural hospitals at high risk of closing: 8 (13 percent)

New York
Rural hospitals at high risk of closing: 4 (13 percent)

Iowa
Rural hospitals at high risk of closing: 9 (12 percent)

Minnesota
Rural hospitals at high risk of closing: 8 (11 percent)

Alaska
Rural hospitals at high risk of closing: 1 (10 percent)

Arizona
Rural hospitals at high risk of closing: 1 (10 percent)

New Hampshire
Rural hospitals at high risk of closing: 1 (9 percent)

Wisconsin
Rural hospitals at high risk of closing: 5 (9 percent)

 

 

 

What Will U.S. Labor Protections Look Like After Coronavirus?

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, ACA, Coronavirus, Employee Furlough, Employee Layoffs, Employee Pay Cuts, Employee Protections, Employee Reassignment, Employee Redeployment, Employer-Based Health Insurance, Health Insurance Coverage Adequacy, Health Policy, Job Security, Medicare for All, Out of Pocket Expenses, Sick Leave, Single Payer Health System, Single Payer Healthcare System, System-wide Weaknesses, Underinsured, Unemployment, Uninsured, Universal Coverage • Leave a comment

https://hbr.org/2020/04/what-will-u-s-labor-protections-look-like-after-coronavirus?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=hbr&fbclid=IwAR1fNFaJM-Tz1jCoBQ3bTVJG5zdbuqcExQOujKz87J34csjOhRLm8C2Dxjo

As I was writing the draft of this article, I was checking my symptoms and awaiting the results of a test I underwent for Covid-19. This virus has upended my life, as it has for every last one of us, no matter where we fall on the socio-economic scale.

But the consequences fall more heavily on those at the bottom end of the wage distribution. That includes those risking their health as they sell us groceries, check our vitals, and sanitize our hospitals. Easily lost amid the chaos, however, is how this crisis may be an opportunity to improve employee protections — and not temporarily but permanently.

During bull markets, employers and policymakers often paint the hardships befalling low-wage workers as stemming from those workers’ personal failures. But when markets crash, we learn how these workers’ troubles were indicative of persistent, system-wide weaknesses.

As Warren Buffett wrote of the insurance failures exposed by 1993’s Hurricane Andrew, “It’s only when the tide goes out that you learn who’s been swimming naked.” Pundits cite Buffet to refer to firms that appear healthy during bull markets, only to get eaten alive during downturns. This month, however, the markets exposed a new group of skinny dippers: a government and an economic system that fail workers, and employers who haven’t or can’t fill this gap in public policy.

In response to the novel coronavirus, the stock market has been mostly in a free fall since late February. The low-wage service sector is facing widespread layoffs. And the tumbling markets have uncovered other deep inequalities among workers, who fall into two groups: those with access to employment protections like affordable healthcare, remote work accommodations, paid time off, and job security — and those without.

This second group, which includes the working class, often lack healthcare or face high out-of-pocket expenses. There are nearly 24 million uninsured working-age adults in the United States. Those with only a high school diploma or who did not complete high school are the least likely to be insured. Moreover, racial and ethnic minority groups face significant barriers to “good jobs.” They form 60% of the uninsured population but only 40% of the total population.

A quarter of all U.S. workers have no access to paid sick leave. Work-from-home options are slim, but many can’t afford not to work. Among workers at the bottom 10th of the earnings distribution, only 31% have paid sick leave. For comparison, 94% of the top 10% of earners have paid sick leave.

While many professionals enjoy protections that can help them ride out the pandemic with their livelihoods and family’s health intact, workers in the low-wage service sector have few options or resources to stay home to care for themselves, let alone their loved ones. And that burden to provide care largely falls on women. The workers lacking healthcare and paid sick leave are also the most vulnerable to layoffs and lost hours. The fate of service workers in travel and food services indicate what’s to come. Similarly, gig economy workers, migrant laborers, and those in the informal economy are particularly vulnerable.

How did we get here? Since the late 1970s, executives have prioritized boosting dividends for shareholders over protecting their employees, whose work has been outsourced, digitized, and downsized. In our book, Divested: Inequality in the Age of Finance, Ken-Hou Lin and I show how this shift in corporate governance undermined workers’ bargaining power. Although insurance coverage increased from the Affordable Care Act, overall working conditions, protections, and pay have diminished.

A more robust safety net would help to mitigate the consequences for workers today as it shores up the economy against future downturns. For years, U.S. policymakers have considered universal healthcare impractical because of its large scope and high startup costs. But as new unemployment claims surge to historical levels and Americans face the medical precarity of a pandemic, this crisis has laid bare the underlying problem of linking healthcare to employment.

Sick leave and universal healthcare would ease the stressors workers face and ensure the sick have time to recover, making them more productive when they return to work. Without the costs of insuring workers, employers could pay more. An income boost would generate more spending and stimulate the economy.

Broader protections would also support the self-employed, contract workers, and prospective entrepreneurs. The United States has lower rates of self-employment (6.3%) than countries with universal healthcare (e.g., Spain has 16%), and a lower share of employment at small businesses than any OECD country except Russia. Reducing the reliance on big businesses would free workers to find jobs that better fit their skills, creating a more nimble and innovative economy.

The current moment provides an opportunity to make lasting changes to the status quo and improve conditions for all workers. As sociologists have theorized, crises and crashes expose cracks in the systems upholding inequality. And history provides a clue for how crises can provide opportunities to transform society in ways that reduce inequality. After the Great Crash of 1929, unemployment spiked, reaching 25% by 1933. In less than three years, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal reduced unemployment to 9%.The New Deal achieved this feat through a vast and broad range of public works and conservation projects.

The New Deal transformed American society — from erecting iconic buildings and statues, to saving the whooping crane, to developing the rural United States, to planting a billion trees. New Deal workers built and renovated 2,500 hospitals, 45,000 schools, and 700,000 miles of roads. The New Deal hired 60% of the unemployed, including 50,000 teachers and 3,000 writers and artists, such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. The New Deal modernized, preserved, and employed the country, while reducing inequality between the haves and have-nots.

Facing a similar economic threat in the wake of the pandemic, we have a comparable once-in-a-century opportunity to make lasting changes that address the pressing problems of today, from inequality to climate change.

In today’s crisis, we could double down on the “trickle-down” approach of the 2008 financial crisis: stimulus to the banks, corporations, and their investors combined with tax cuts and temporary wage support as a short-term Band-Aid for immiserated workers. But Lin and I find that this approach left many workers flailing and worsened inequality, because the banks deposited, rather than invested, the stimulus funding and corporations borrowed the money to buy back their stocks, enriching top executives and shareholders.

Last week, the president signed into law a sweeping $2 trillion plan that combines money for states, loans for distressed businesses, and tax relief, paid leave, unemployment benefits, and cash for most citizens. But this plan only gives workers temporary benefits. Although the bill has stricter oversight and restricts buybacks, it is unlikely to reduce inequality unless it addresses the structural conditions making some workers more vulnerable.

While a New Deal approach may be infeasible amid a contagious virus, we can and should enact permanent policies protecting all workers. Sick leave and healthcare should be universal rights. We could adopt a “flexicurity” labor policy modeled on the Danish one. The Danes provide both flexibility for employers to hire and fire workers as needed and security for workers through generous benefits and retraining opportunities during unemployment.

Meanwhile, in my household, after 2.5 weeks of symptoms—from a dry cough to a tight chest to a low fever—my test results came back negative. Thanks to the healthcare and insurance provided by my employer, I will continue to do the work I care about.

While I am on the mend, the workers who sell our groceries, serve us food, clean our workplaces, and drive us to the doctor also need to take care. In this pandemic, they are risking their health and lives. And they deserve the same level of care as the people they serve: access to both preventative medicine and comprehensive treatment, and time to take a break, recover, and care for their loved ones. The coronavirus is our chance to extend these protections during times of crisis and far into the future.

 

 

The Most Appalling COVID-19 Lie

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Communication, Coronavirus, Crisis, Crisis Management, Infection Control, Infectious Virus, Intensive Care (ICU), Pandemic, Physician, Quarantine, Ventilators • Leave a comment

https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/85741?xid=nl_mpt_investigative2020-04-08&eun=g885344d0r&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=InvestigativeMD_040820&utm_term=NL_Gen_Int_InvestigateMD_Active

The Most Appalling COVID-19 Lie | MedPage Today

— Doctor breaks down the worst fallacy

Please forgive the basic nature of this video. I’ve enjoyed spending some time with my family finally after my quarantine expired. I wasn’t planning on making a video this weekend, but everybody’s in bed now and I felt that this was important.

I have done a few interviews recently and I’ve been asked the same question every time, which is what is the worst piece of misinformation you’ve heard about coronavirus. The first time I answered I said one of those conspiracy theories that we’ve all heard, but I quickly realized actually that isn’t the most damaging misconception about the current virus at all. The most harmful perception about COVID-19 is that it’s a disease that only affects the very old or the infirm.

The Intensive Care National Audit and Research Centre is a body that collects information from all the intensive care units in the U.K. and they’ve been publishing data about the COVID-19 patients here. I briefly mentioned one of their results in a previous video and I’ve been posting updates on Twitter. The most recent, which is about the first 775 patients admitted with COVID-19 to intensive care units in the U.K., came out a couple of days ago. I put it up on Twitter and it got quite a lot of attention, and so I felt it was useful to talk about that here as well.

The European Society of Intensive Care Medicine (ESICM) has published some preliminary results — I don’t have the full data set yet — for an even bigger group of patients — I think something like 1,800 patients. But from what I have seen, the results are very comparable.

The first headline is that the average age of patients admitted is 60 years old. Now, that doesn’t mean the average age of people getting coronavirus is 60. It’s just that out of the patients admitted to intensive care units with COVID-19 in the U.K., the average age — both mean and median — is around 60. The reason I say it like that is because admissions to ITU [intensive treatment unit] are prioritized for those that have the best chance of survival.

The right-hand column is quite useful here. It shows results for admissions to ITU over the last couple of years in the U.K. for patients with non-COVID viral pneumonia to act as a comparator. We can see immediately that in comparison to the usual viral pneumonia admissions, COVID admissions have a better baseline in that 91% are fully independent compared to 73% normally and fewer have pre-existing comorbidities or medical problems.

You can also see they are much more likely to be mechanically ventilated — i.e., intubated on a breathing machine, a ventilator — which is reflective of the profound hypoxia or low oxygen levels that we’re seeing in COVID-19 and the guidance that these patients deteriorate fast, and so doctors should intubate early.

An interesting pattern that’s emerged from every country’s cohorts is that men are more affected by this than women; 70% of severe infections requiring ITU are male, and perhaps most sobering is that out of all the patients admitted to ITU so far in the U.K., almost half have died — 48%. Comparing that with the usual admissions we see in ICU for viral pneumonia, like say influenza, only 22% of those died. If it needs to be repeated again, this is not “just like the flu.”

If you look at just 16- to 49-year-olds, although numbers are low at the moment, a quarter of them admitted to ITU have died. It remains true that 80% of people that get COVID-19 will have a self-limiting illness, the way I did, that does not require hospital admission. Your risk goes up with increasing age and the pre-existence of medical conditions.

However, overall one in five people that get this will have a severe infection, perhaps requiring hospital admission. Out of that, a quarter will require admission to intensive care. As these figures show, the average age for that subgroup is only 60, and half of those patients die.

Something that’s not captured in these figures is that death is just one marker. If you spend a week on a ventilator and 2 weeks in the hospital overall and then go home alive, that’s hardly what I’d call a mild infection. As I’ve said before, the main risk for most of us is not from the virus itself, but the effect that it’ll have on how healthcare functions in our respective countries.

On the subjects of healthcare, we’ve now seen three doctors here in the U.K., several in America, and 51 in Italy lose their lives directly because of COVID-19 — many or perhaps even most of whom were fit and well beforehand. To my sisters and brothers in healthcare, especially those going into battle like this without the appropriate armor — which is something that I just cannot believe is happening in developed countries, it shouldn’t be happening — I salute you.

That’s it. That’s the video. This isn’t aimed at any particular age group nor political affiliation. I find it remarkable I even have to say that second point because somehow this has become a partisan issue, which again I can’t understand.

Perhaps, if this does have an intended audience, it’s the middle-aged politicians who maybe also think that they’re too young for this disease and promote this appalling fallacy that COVID-19 is only killing patients who would have died sooner or later otherwise. Just stop f**king around.

 

 

 

 

Fauci: ‘Looks like’ US deaths will be lower than original projection

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), Coronavirus, Crisis, Crisis Management, Health Policy, Infection Control, Infectious Virus, Pandemic, Public Health, Public Safety, Social Distancing • Leave a comment

Fauci: ‘Looks like’ US deaths will be lower than original projection

Fauci: 'Looks like' US deaths will be lower than original ...

Dr. Anthony Fauci said Wednesday morning that he thinks the number of U.S. deaths from coronavirus will end up being less than the original projection of 100,000 to 200,000. 

Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, attributed the drop to the success of social distancing measures that have directed people to stay home and closed many businesses.

“Although one of the original models projected 100- to 200,000 deaths, as we’re getting more data and seeing the positive effect of mitigation, those numbers are going to be downgraded,” Fauci said on Fox News. “I don’t know exactly what the numbers are going to be, but right now it looks like it’s going to be less than the original projection.”

By the end of March, the White House was projecting 100,000 to 240,000 deaths as America’s best-case scenario for the pandemic.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield made similar comments on Tuesday, saying he expected the number of deaths to be “much lower” than what was predicted by the models.

A closely watched University of Washington model is now projecting about 60,000 deaths in the U.S. 

Despite some hopeful signs, Fauci emphasized that now is not the time to ease up on social distancing measures, the best way to keep improving the outlook. 

“We’re going to start to see the beginning of a turnaround, so we need to keep pushing on the mitigation strategies because there’s no doubt that that’s having a positive impact,” he said.

“Now’s not the time to pull back at all,” he added. “It’s a time to intensify.”

President Trump has been eager to reopen the economy, and Fauci said planning for that is underway at the White House, where late Tuesday night there was a meeting on the subject in the Roosevelt Room.

“If in fact we are successful it makes sense to at least plan what a reentry into normality would look like,” Fauci said. “That doesn’t mean we’re going to do it right now, but it means we need to be prepared to ease into that. And there’s a lot of activity going on.”

 

 

 

 

Trump considering suspending funding to WHO

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Accusations, Blame, Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), Clinical Research Funding, Clinical Testing, Coronavirus, Crisis, Crisis Management, Excuses, Health Policy, Incoherent, Indecision, Infection Control, Infectious Virus, Pandemic, World Health Organization (WHO) • Leave a comment

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/491671-trump-considering-suspending-funding-to-who?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=28856

WHO declares the outbreak of the new coronavirus is a pandemic ...

President Trump said Tuesday that he would consider placing a hold on funding for the World Health Organization (WHO), expressing grievances with its handling of the novel coronavirus.

“They missed the call. They could have called it months earlier. They would have known, and they should have known, and they probably did know,” Trump told reporters at a White House press briefing, suggesting the WHO failed to sufficiently warn the global community about the virus.

“We’re going to be looking into that very carefully, and we’re going to put a hold on money spent to the WHO,” Trump continued. “We’re going to put a very powerful hold on it, and we’re going to see. It’s a great thing if it works, but when they call every shot wrong, that’s not good.”

Pressed later by a reporter on whether it was a good idea to put a hold on funding during a global pandemic, the president clarified that he was considering suspending funding to the WHO.

“I’m not going to say I’m going to do it,” Trump said. “We will look at ending funding.”

The United States is the largest contributor to the WHO’s budget. The president’s fiscal 2021 budget request proposed slashing funding to the WHO, a body of the United Nations responsible for international public health, from $122 million to about $58 million.

The president said the WHO seemed to be “very biased towards China” and accused the organization of disagreeing with his travel restriction on flights coming in from China. He suggested the organization was blind to the extent of the outbreak in Wuhan, the capital of China’s Hubei province, where the virus originated.

The WHO said in early February that widespread travel bans that interfere with international travel and trade were not necessary to prevent the spread of COVID-19, days after the Trump administration announced it would restrict travel coming into the U.S. from China. It did not take particular issue with the president’s travel restriction.

“They actually criticized and disagreed with my travel ban at the time I did it, and they were wrong. They’ve been wrong about a lot of things. They had a lot of information early, and they didn’t — they seemed to be very China-centric. We have to look into it,” Trump told reporters.

When a reporter asked Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to answer a question on the WHO, Trump interjected before he answered, saying Fauci “respects the WHO, and I think that’s good.”

“But they did give us some pretty bad play-calling,” Trump said.

The remarks, expanding on a critical tweet he sent earlier Tuesday, come amid growing criticism among conservatives of the WHO’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak. Some have accused the organization of leaving other nations unprepared for the virus.

Sen. Martha McSally (R-Ariz.) last week called on WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus to resign, after reports emerged that the U.S. intelligence community had concluded China underreported its count of coronavirus cases. McSally accused the WHO of helping China conceal the extent of the outbreak.

Trump has faced criticism for at first downplaying the threat from the coronavirus, and his administration has been scrutinized for early delays in testing that hampered the overall response. Trump has often pointed to his early action restricting travel from China as a sign his administration was quick to confront the outbreak.

Ezekiel Emanuel, a special adviser to the director general of the WHO, was critical of Trump’s remarks on the coronavirus at the end of February, saying he found much of what Trump said at his first press briefing on the domestic virus outbreak to be “incoherent.”

 

 

 

 

Trump says IG report finding hospital shortages is ‘just wrong’

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, American Hospital Association (AHA), Clinical Testing, Communication, Coronavirus, Crisis, Crisis Management, Dept of Health and Human Services (HHS), Health Policy, Healthcare Providers, Nurses, Office of Inspector General (IG), Pandemic, Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), Physician, Public Health, Public Safety • Leave a comment

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/491454-trump-says-ig-report-finding-hospital-shortages-is-just-wrong?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=28856

Hospital Experiences Responding to the COVID-19 Pandemic: Results ...

President Trump on Monday claimed that an inspector general report finding “severe” shortages of supplies at hospitals to fight the novel coronavirus is “just wrong.”

Trump did not provide evidence for why the conclusions of the 34-page report are wrong.

He implied that he is mistrustful of inspectors general more broadly. He recently fired the inspector general of the intelligence community, which has drawn outrage from Democrats.

“Did I hear the word inspector general?” Trump said in response to the reporter’s question about the findings.

“It’s just wrong,” Trump said of the report.

The inspector general report, released earlier Monday, was based on a survey of 323 randomly selected hospitals across the country.

It found “severe” shortages of tests and wait times as long as seven days for hospitals. It also found “widespread” shortfalls of protective equipment such as masks for health workers, something that doctors and nurses have also noted for weeks.

“The level of anxiety among staff is like nothing I’ve ever seen,” one hospital administrator said in the report.

Brett Giroir, an assistant secretary of Health and Human Services, noted that the report’s survey of hospitals was conducted March 23 to March 27. He said testing had improved since then and that it was “quite a long time ago.”

Trump asked who the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services is.

“Where did he come from, the inspector general?” Trump said, adding, “What’s his name?”

The office is currently led by Christi Grimm, the principal deputy inspector general.

According to her online biography, Grimm joined the inspector general’s office in 1999. 
Trump said the U.S. has now done more testing than any other country. “We are doing an incredible job on testing,” he said.
He also berated the reporter asking the question, saying testing has been a success.
“You should say, ‘Congratulations. Great job’ instead of being so horrid,” Trump said.
The American Hospital Association (AHA) on Monday said the inspector general report was accurate.

The report “accurately captures the crisis that hospitals and health systems, physicians and nurses on the front lines face of not having enough personal protective equipment (PPE), medical supplies and equipment in their fight against COVID-19,” the AHA said.

https://oig.hhs.gov/oei/reports/oei-06-20-00300.pdf?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=28856

 

 

 

 

Wisconsin Election: Voters Find Long Lines and Closed Polling Sites

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Absentee Ballots, Coronavirus, Crisis, Crisis Management, Gerrymandering, Health Policy, Infection Control, Infectious Virus, Pandemic, Partisanship, Public Health, Public Safety, Social Distancing, Voter Suppression • Leave a comment

Wisconsin Election: Voters Find Long Lines and Closed Polling ...

The state is the first to hold a major election with in-person voting since stay-at-home orders were widely instituted because of the coronavirus.

Many voters say they never received the absentee ballots they requested.

  • Wisconsin is the first state to hold a major election with in-person voting despite stay-at-home orders for Americans protecting themselves from the coronavirus.

  • Polls will close at 9 p.m. Eastern time. Long lines have been seen in cities like Milwaukee, which has only five polling places open, and social distancing is a concern.

  • Wisconsin is holding its presidential primary between former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Senator Bernie Sanders. Mr. Biden had a strong lead in a recent, widely respected poll.

  • The state’s elections commission has ordered municipal clerks not to release any results until April 13, in compliance with a federal court ruling.

  • Wisconsin Democrats wanted to extend absentee voting and even postpone the election altogether, but Republicans successfully blocked both in court. As a result, Democratic turnout is likely to be depressed because of the virus and the deadlines for absentee voting. A crucial seat on the State Supreme Court is on the ballot.

A morning of voting brings disruption and confusion.

MILWAUKEE — After a morning of voting across Wisconsin, in an election that has drawn derision from public health experts and inflamed partisan tensions, a picture is emerging of long lines, some flaring tempers and a dose of chaos and confusion in the state’s most heavily populated areas.

Voters in Milwaukee, the state’s Democratic base and most populous city, have experienced significant disruptions at polling places. Election workers in the city expected more than 50,000 voters on Tuesday, but the number of polling locations was drastically reduced, from more than 180 to just five. Some voters waited in line for more than two hours, spread out over blocks as they tried to practice social distancing to guard against the coronavirus.

In other parts of the state, especially in smaller communities that tend to be less Democratic, the in-person voting process was running relatively smoothly, with wait times more closely resembling a normal election.

Democratic officials in Wisconsin have lashed out at Republicans, saying they created an atmosphere that amounts to voter suppression with a key statewide Supreme Court race on the ballot. It remains to be seen how the disruptions could affect the Democratic presidential primary contest between Mr. Biden and Mr. Sanders.

Many voters say their absentee ballots never arrived.

Across Wisconsin, would-be voters complained that the absentee ballots they requested had never arrived in the mail, even though figures released by the state seemed to indicate the problem was not widespread.

Representative Gordon Hintz, the Democratic minority leader in the State Assembly, said there may have been a glitch in the system, perhaps because of overwhelmed elections offices. “It appears that people who requested their ballots between March the 20th and 24th, or maybe the 25th, have not received their ballots,” Mr. Hintz said.

Official state figures showed that of 1,282,762 ballots requested, 1,273,374 had been sent, a shortfall of about 9,000.

But Mr. Hintz estimated that hundreds, it not thousands, of voters in his Oshkosh district alone had not received the ballots they asked for, leaving them in a predicament over whether to vote in person and risk contracting or spreading the coronavirus.

One of them was Mr. Hintz himself, who had decided not to vote Tuesday because the ballot he requested on March 22 had not arrived. The Wisconsin Elections Commission’s website says it was mailed to him on March 24.

Roger Luhn, a psychiatrist in Milwaukee, said Tuesday that he was also among the voters who had not received an absentee ballot.

“According to the website, they mailed the ballot to me on March 23,” said Dr. Luhn, who is medical director of a psychiatric hospital. “Yesterday, I gave up. I called the election commission. They put you on extended hold.”

Dr. Luhn said he would not go to the polls on Tuesday out of concern for his family, his patients and his fellow staff members. “There is no good outcome for today’s election,” he said. “No matter what happens, not enough people will have had an opportunity to safely cast their ballots.”

Voters encounter long lines — and social distancing.

The effects of shuttering so many polling sites in Milwaukee were immediately apparent on Tuesday morning: Across the city, lines stretched for blocks even before 7 a.m. local time.

On the South Side of the city, the parking lot of Alexander Hamilton High School was already full as daylight broke. By 8 a.m., more than 300 voters waited in a line that snaked through the parking lot and down the street.

At other locations nearby that would have normally been open for voting, signs were posted directing voters to Hamilton High School. But many of the locations were in heavily immigrant neighborhoods, predominantly Spanish or Hmong, and the only signs posted were in English.

At Marshall High School, in the northern part of Milwaukee, the line stretched for more than three blocks, with voters keeping six feet of space between each other. Most wore masks or other facial coverings.

The northern part of the city, which is predominantly black, has been hit the hardest by the coronavirus. Yet hundreds of voters had already queued by early morning.

The lines weren’t limited to Milwaukee. In Waukesha, a suburb just outside of Milwaukee, only one polling location was open for a city of 70,000. A similarly long line wrapped around a parking lot, as cones denoting a safe distance between voters helped break up the line.

A woman sick with coronavirus is unable to vote.

Hannah Gleeson is a health care worker who lives in Milwaukee, is 17 weeks pregnant and recently tested positive for the coronavirus. She says she has voted in every election she has been eligible for — “I enjoy going in person. I like getting my sticker,” she said — but since contracting the virus she realized that going to a polling place would not be an option.

“I feel like especially right now, when there are so many things that can make you feel hopeless, voting is one of the only things that is still within your power,” Ms. Gleeson, 34, said.

So she requested an absentee ballot a week ago, well within the deadlines set by the state. But she never received one. When she saw that the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down an extension of the deadlines, she called the state elections commission.

“They kind of said, yeah, that really sucks, hopefully you’ll have better luck with the next election,” Ms. Gleeson said. She said that some friends in Milwaukee had also not received ballots: one who made a request on March 26, and another on March 9.

Now, Ms. Gleeson and her husband, who is not showing symptoms but is also isolating himself since Ms. Gleeson is sick, are not able to vote, or at least not able to do so without putting hundreds of people at risk. “I’ve always said that every vote matters, every vote counts, and it’s your one chance to have your voice heard,” she said. “And it’s now something that I really feel has been taken away from me, and my husband as well.”

A missing absentee ballot snaps a 30-year voting streak.

In the city of Oshkosh, where officials have implemented curbside voting, Brian Binder, 49, was one of many Wisconsin voters who reported not receiving the absentee ballots they applied for. Mr. Binder’s wife, who applied at the same time, received hers.

“There’s a large number of people who just did not get them,” said Mr. Binder, an employee of a food packaging company.

As a result of all the confusion and the coronavirus, Mr. Binder said he would not vote in this election, breaking a 30-year streak.

“I vote in every election, local primaries, since I was 18. I’m a person that takes it very seriously, your right and your responsibility to vote. However, given the situation with the virus I’m not sure I want to endanger myself or other people at the polls,” said Mr. Binder, who has been working from home for the past two weeks.

He also expressed frustration with the state’s deeply entrenched political division.

“I feel that this is something they shouldn’t play politics with,” said Mr. Binder, a lifelong Republican who said his support for the party had waned since President Trump’s election. “I don’t know why we couldn’t postpone to keep people safe. I don’t know what the goal was.”

Partisan brawling and a logistical tangle have led to chaos.

Like so much else in Wisconsin over the last decade, the state’s coronavirus response and opinions about moving the election broke along partisan lines.

Democrats, aiming to expand turnout especially in the state’s largest cities, Milwaukee and Madison, sought to expand mail voting and delay the election until June. Republicans, wary of affording new powers to a Democratic governor and content with suppressing turnout in urban centers where the coronavirus has struck hardest, refused to entertain proposals for relief.

“Thousands will wake up and have to choose between exercising their right to vote and staying healthy and safe,” Gov. Tony Evers said Monday after the state’s Supreme Court blocked his effort to postpone the election.

But Dean Knudson, a Republican former state legislator who is chairman of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, said late Monday that voters who wished to participate in Tuesday’s contest would have no recourse but to venture to the polls — even if they had requested but had not yet received an absentee ballot.

“If they haven’t got their ballot in the mail,” he said, “they are going to have to go to the polling place tomorrow.”

Other Republicans have played down the danger to public health of voting during a pandemic. One Republican county chair, Jim Miller of Sawyer County, said the process would be similar to people picking up food to eat during the state’s stay-at-home order.

“If you can go out and get fast food, you can go vote curbside,” Mr. Miller said. “It’s the same procedure.”

Why are Wisconsin Republicans so adamant about holding Tuesday’s elections?

It’s not just a presidential primary on the ballot in Wisconsin. Also at stake is the makeup of the Wisconsin Supreme Court — the very court that struck down Mr. Evers’s effort to delay Tuesday’s elections.

Statewide races in Wisconsin tend to be close, and Supreme Court elections, which come with 10-year terms, are often even closer.

Last year Brian Hagedorn, a conservative judge, defeated a liberal challenger by less than 6,000 votes out of 1.2 million cast. In 2011, another conservative, David T. Prosser Jr., won by 7,000 votes after officials in Waukesha County found 14,000 overlooked ballots the day after the election.

For now, conservatives hold five of seven seats on the officially nonpartisan court. The incumbent in Tuesday’s contest, Justice Daniel Kelly, was appointed to replace Justice Prosser by Gov. Scott Walker in 2016 and is seeking his first full term. He faces Jill Karofsky, a liberal circuit court judge.

President Trump has posted several messages on Twitter endorsing Justice Kelly in recent days.

If Justice Kelly wins, it will cement the conservative majority’s ability to block future Democratic efforts to change the state’s strict voting laws and litigate an expected stalemate over congressional and state legislative boundaries during post-2020 redistricting.

Liberals would need to flip just one of the conservatives’ votes if Judge Karofsky wins. Unless a justice retires or resigns, they would not have an opportunity to win a court majority until the 2023 elections.

Polls will close at 9 p.m. Eastern, but that’s unlikely to be the end of the elections.

Though voting may end on Tuesday night, there will most likely be a new round of lawsuits challenging both the results and the disenfranchisement of many voters. Many allied groups in Wisconsin were already gathering accounts of voters unable to get a ballot or vote in anticipation of litigation.

Adding to the uncertainty, the results themselves will most likely be delayed by almost a full week: The Wisconsin Elections Commission has directed local municipal and county clerks not to release results until next Monday afternoon, in compliance with a federal court ruling.

“Instead of having Iowa-style results where no one knows what to expect, if we stick to this we’re going to have a clean election tomorrow but we’re not going to report the results until the following week,” said Mr. Knudson, the elections commission chairman.