Category Archives: Out of Control

66 hospitals postponing elective procedures amid the COVID-19 resurgence

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Hospitals still scheduling elective surgery during coronavirus crisis

Hospitals across the U.S. are beginning to suspend elective procedures to respond to an uptick in hospitalized COVID-19 patients. 

Below is a breakdown of 66 hospitals postponing or canceling the procedures to free up space, ensure proper staffing or enough protective gear to care for COVID-19 patients:

1. Mercy Health Youngstown (Ohio) will indefinitely suspend elective procedures that require an inpatient admission starting Nov. 26, according to the Tribune Chronicle. 

2. Prescot, Ariz.-based Yavapai Regional Medical Center, which recently joined Dignity Health, will limit elective procedures effective Nov. 26 to Dec. 4, according to The Daily Courier. 

3. South Bend, Ind.-based Beacon Health System is suspending nonemergency surgeries to free up bed space and staff to care for a surge in COVID-19 cases, according to WSBT. The surgeries affected include those that require an inpatient stay. 

4. Citing a spike in COVID-19 cases, Goshen (Ind.) Health is suspending nonurgent surgeries, according to WSBT.

5. Stormont Vail Health in Topeka, Kan., is rescheduling some elective surgeries that require overnight stays to free up bed space, according to local news station WIBW. 

6. UW Medicine in Seattle will suspend nonemergency surgeries that require an inpatient hospital stay, effective Nov. 23 through Feb. 1.

7. Mercy Hospital South in St. Louis plans to delay some nonurgent procedures that require longer hospital stays amid a spike in COVID-19 hospitalizations, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.  

8. Metro Health-University of Michigan Health in Wyoming, Mich., has delayed some surgeries that require an inpatient stay, according to MiBiz.

9. Albuquerque, N.M.-based Presbyterian Healthcare Services is canceling nonurgent surgeries that require hospitalization, according to local news station KBOB. The health system said it will postpone those surgeries that can be delayed for six weeks or longer safely.  

10. HSHS Sacred Heart Hospital in Eau Claire, Wis., is postponing electives on a case-by-case basis amid a surge in COVID-19 cases, according to The Leader-Telegram.

11. IU Health Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis has started to reduce the amount of elective procedures it will perform, while still trying to catch up on those that were postponed during the initial surge, according to MedPageToday.

12. Carson Tahoe Hospital in Carson City, Nev., has delayed non-time sensitive surgeries for a few weeks to free up space and staff to care for a surge in COVID-19 hospitalizations, according to local station News 4. 

13. The 267-bed Mercy Health Muskegon (Mich.) has begun to delay elective surgeries as needed amid an influx of COVID-19 cases, according to MiBiz.

14. Buffalo, N.Y.-based Catholic Health will halt all inpatient elective surgeries that require an overnight stay for two weeks amid a COVID-19 hospitalization surge, according to Buffalo News. The healthcare system will start rescheduling procedures Nov. 21, and reevaluate if an extension is needed Dec. 5. 

15. Chicago-based Northwestern Medicine will reduce the number of nonemergency surgeries it performs to help preserve bed capacity and staff to help care for a surge in COVID-19 cases, according to the Northwest Herald. 

16. Morris (Ill.) Hospital and Healthcare Centers postponed some inpatient surgeries requiring overnight stays the week of Nov. 16 due to a bed shortage exacerbated by the rise in COVID-19 cases, according to NBC Chicago. 

17. Memorial Community Hospital and Health System in Blair, Neb., is limiting elective surgeries requiring an overnight hospital stay for several weeks to preserve bed capacity and ensure proper staffing levels to care for the influx of COVID-19 cases, according to the Pilot-Tribune & Enterprise. 

18. Spectrum Health in Grand Rapids, Mich., is deferring elective surgeries requiring an overnight hospital stay, according to Michigan Radio. The deferral rate is about 10 percent, according to the report. 

19. Avera St. Mary’s Hospital in Pierre, S.D., is postponing nonemergency procedures so staff can care for the influx of COVID-19 cases and respond to emergent needs, according to DRGNews.

20. Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Healthcare will postpone some surgeries that require an inpatient admission to free up beds, preserve supplies and free up providers amid a surge in COVID-19 hospitalizations. The hospital system will only delay those that can be safely postponed. 

21. Froedtert Health in Wauwatosa, Wis., will delay non-urgent surgeries that require an inpatient admission post-surgery in an effort to free up staff and beds amid the coronavirus case surge in Wisconsin, according to local news station TMJ4. The hospitals are located in Wauwatosa, Menomonee Falls and West Bend. 

22. Memorial Hospital in Aurora, Neb., has suspended elective surgeries that take place at its Wortman Surgery Center to dedicate staff to inpatient and emergency care.

23. Minneapolis-based Allina Health is delaying some non-urgent procedures at three of its hospitals until at least Nov. 27, according to The Star Tribune. The delays will affect non-urgent procedures that require an overnight hospital stay. 

24. Bloomington, Minn.-based HealthPartners has started postponing some total joint surgeries, including hip or knee replacements, at three Minnesota hospitals, according to The Twin Cities Business Journal. The affected hospitals are Methodist Hospital in St. Louis Park, Regions Hospital in St. Paul and Lakeview Hospital in Stillwater. 

25. Southern Illinois Healthcare, a two-hospital system based in Carbondale, will reduce its elective surgery volume by about 50 percent as more people seek inpatient care for COVID-19, according to The Southern Illinoisan. The surgeries affected by the delay include those that require an overnight hospital stay.

26. University of Cincinnati Health activated surge operations Nov. 16, requiring a 50 percent reduction in elective inpatient surgeries and procedures across the health system, according to local news station WLWT.

27. Rochester, Minn.-based Mayo Clinic has started scaling back elective care to ensure it can care for patients with emergent needs and a high influx of COVID-19 patients, according to The Post Bulletin. 

28. Citing a 1,500 percent increase in COVID-19 hospitalizations between Nov. 1 and Nov. 17, Lake Health in Concord Township, Ohio, is pausing elective surgeries that require an overnight stay, according to The News-Herald. The pause will continue through Nov. 20, but the system will reevaluate if the pause needs to be extended on a weekly basis. 

29. Cook County Health, the public hospital system based in Chicago, is suspending elective surgeries requiring inpatient stays, according to WBEZ. The decision was made to ensure adequate staffing to care for an influx in COVID-19 cases.  

30. Urbana, Ill.-based Carle Foundation Hospital has canceled some elective procedures that require an overnight hospital stay in an effort to free up beds and staff to care for COVID-19 patients, according to The News Gazette.

31. Elkhart (Ind.) General Hospital stopped all elective surgeries Nov. 17 after more than 200 patients were admitted to its 144-bed hospital, according to The New York Times. Of those patients 90 were being treated with COVID-19. The hospital also diverted ambulances during this time.

32. Advocate Aurora Health, with dual headquarters in Milwaukee and Downers Grove, Ill., has started reducing elective procedures by 50 percent at some of its facilities, according to a Nov. 16 media briefing. The health system said that more hospitals will look into the option to postpone elective procedures later the week of Nov. 16. 

33. The University of Kansas Health System in Kansas City started postponing some elective surgeries to free up inpatient beds Nov. 12.

34. St. Luke’s Health System in Boise, Idaho, will stop scheduling certain elective surgeries and procedures through Dec. 25, according to a company news release. The temporary delay starts Nov. 16. St. Luke’s medical centers in Boise, Meridian, Magic Valley and Nampa will also cancel elective cases requiring an overnight stay scheduled for the week of Nov. 16, according to the news release. 

35. Citing an increased demand for inpatient beds, Ascension Genesys Hospital in Grand Blanc, Mich., will not schedule any new inpatient elective surgeries until at least Nov. 30. The hospital said it has asked surgeons to “thoughtfully examine” already scheduled cases requiring extended recovery through Nov. 30.

36. SSM Health St. Mary’s Hospital in Madison began rescheduling nonemergent surgeries to free up intensive care unit bed space, according to local news station NBC 15.

37. Cedar Rapids, Iowa-based Mercy Medical Center will reduce elective surgery cases through Nov. 20. It also temporarily stopped scheduling new elective procedures.

38. Columbia Memorial Hospital in Astoria, Ore., will reduce some elective procedures due to an increase in COVID-19 cases, according to the Cannon Beach Gazette.

39. St. Louis-based BJC HealthCare will postpone some elective surgery cases at all 15 of its hospitals and ambulatory care settings starting Nov. 16. The surgery postponement will last eight weeks. The announcement comes just one week after the health system started rescheduling nonemergency surgeries at four of its hospitals.

40. Citing a significant increase in COVID-19 hospitalizations, Cleveland Clinic said it will postpone some nonemergency surgeries. Cleveland Clinic said it will reschedule nonessential surgical cases that require an inpatient stay at its hospitals in Ohio through Nov. 20.  It will reassess its scheduled surgical cases daily to determine if more cases need to be delayed.

41. Baxter County Regional Medical Center in Mountain Home, Ark., said Nov. 11 it will begin postponing nonemergency surgeries. The hospital will only defer procedures requiring an overnight hospital stay in order to free up beds for COVID-19 patients. 

42. Portland, Ore.-based Legacy Health will reduce the number of elective procedures requiring an overnight hospital stay by 25 percent.

“We will monitor the situation and adjust as needed,” Trent Green, Legacy Health COO, wrote in an email to staff. “If the number of hospitalized patients continues to grow, we may cancel more surgeries. As hospital volumes lower, we will add back elective surgeries.”

43. Kaiser Permanente Northwest, which has hospitals in Oregon and southwest Washington state, is implementing a “scheduling pause” at some of its Oregon medical centers through Dec. 31.

44. Portland-based Oregon Health & Sciences University is implementing voluntary elective surgery deferrals. The hospital system will evaluate surgical cases daily to ensure it has the appropriate capacity to care for all patients.

45. Aurora, Colo.-based UCHealth began postponing some nonemergency surgeries due to a surge in COVID-19 hospitalizations. The health system will defer nonemergent surgeries that require inpatient admission. The health system began postponing some of those surgeries the week of Nov. 2.

46. As of Nov. 11, Grand Rapids, Mich.-based Spectrum Health has 14 hospitals nearing capacity amid a surge of COVID-19 cases. As a result it is starting to delay inpatient surgeries that require overnight stays.

47. Community Memorial Hospital in Cloquet, Minn., has halted some elective surgeries to free up beds amid a surge in hospitalizations.

48. Sarah Bush Lincoln, a 145-bed hospital in Mattoon, Ill., is postponing most inpatient elective surgeries due to bed capacity constraints. The hospital said it will make the decision on whether to postpone a surgery on a case-by-case basis. 

49. Memorial Health System in Springfield, Ill., will begin delaying some nonurgent surgeries Nov. 16.

50. Evanston, Ill.-based NorthShore University HealthSystem, has started evaluating elective surgeries on a case-by-case basis and delaying those that can be postponed safely.

51. UnityPoint Health Meriter in Madison, Wis., is rescheduling nonemergent surgeries that require overnight stays to save beds for COVID-19 patients. The hospital has seen a “significant” uptick in COVID-19-related hospitalizations, with about one-third of UnityPoint Meriter’s beds occupied by patients with the virus.

52. St. Luke’s, a two-hospital system in Duluth, Minn., is postponing nonemergency surgeries amid a surge in COVID-19 patients. The health system said it will only delay surgeries that require an overnight stay and can be rescheduled safely.

53. Omaha, Neb.-based Methodist Health System began postponing elective surgeries at its flagship hospital Oct. 29, president and CEO Steve Goeser told Becker’s. It is reviewing the surgery schedule to determine which ones can be postponed safely.

54. Omaha-based Nebraska Medicine is limiting nonurgent procedures due to a rise in COVID-19 hospitalizations. The health system said that it has enough beds, but high-level intensive care unit providers “aren’t an infinite resource.”

55. CHI Health in Omaha, Neb., said that some nonurgent procedures will be postponed amid the COVID-19 resurgence. By postponing some surgeries, CHI Health said it aims to free up beds and capacity for patients.

56. Sanford Health, a 46-hospital system based in Sioux Falls, S.D., will begin rescheduling some nonemergency inpatient surgeries that require an overnight hospital stay due to an influx of COVID-19 patients. 

57. Bryan Health, based in Lincoln, Neb., will begin scaling back elective surgeries requiring an overnight hospitalization due to a rise in COVID-19 cases. The system said it will decrease elective surgeries requiring overnight stay by 10 percent for the week of Nov. 2 to ensure it is able to care for COVID-19 patients and perform essential surgeries.

58. Mayo Clinic Health System began deferring elective procedures at its hospitals in Northwest Wisconsin Oct. 31 amid an escalation of COVID-19 cases. The health system did not say when elective procedures will restart. The Mayo Clinic Health System has clinics, hospitals and other facilities across Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

59. Madison, Wis.-based UW Health is postponing a small number of elective procedures to free up bed capacity to care for COVID-19 patients, according to WKOW. Jeff Pothof, MD, UW Health’s chief quality officer, said that patients may be asked to push back a non-emergency procedure by about a week. 

60. Saint Vincent Hospital in Erie, Pa., will postpone a small number of elective procedures after some patients and caregivers tested positive for COVID-19. The hospital did not specify the number of patients and staff who tested positive. 

61. Johnson City, Tenn.-based Ballad Health will begin deferring elective procedures at three of its Tennessee hospitals due to a spike in COVID-19 hospitalizations. On Oct. 26, Ballad began rescheduling up to 25 percent of elective services at Holston Valley Medical Center in Kingsport, Tenn. Procedures are also expected to begin being deferred at Bristol Regional Medical Center and Johnson City Medical Center. 

62. Maury Regional Medical Center in Columbia, Tenn., will suspend elective procedures requiring an overnight stay for two weeks. Hospital leadership will re-evaluate the feasibility of elective surgeries by Nov. 9.

63. Cookeville (Tenn.) Regional Medical Center said Oct. 26 it suspended elective procedures requiring an overnight stay after it was caring for a record high of 71 COVID-19 patients, according to WKRN.

64. Salt Lake City-based University of Utah Hospital canceled elective procedures after its intensive care unit hit capacity on Oct. 16. The hospital said it needed to postpone the elective care to allocate staff to care for critically ill patients. 

65. Sanford Health in Sioux Falls, S.D., will stop scheduling new elective surgery cases requiring an overnight stay, according to system CMO Mike Wilde, MD. New elective cases requiring an overnight stay were not scheduled for Oct. 19-23, but previously scheduled elective surgeries were performed.

66. Billings (Mont.) Clinic began evaluating each surgical case for urgency in late September. It is postponing those it says can wait, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Cartoon – State of the Union on Covid 19

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Pax on both houses: Cartoon: Team Trump Responds To Covid-19

COVID-19 hospitalizations top 90,000 in US: Why this number is one to watch even more closely right now

Posted on by • Posted in Asymptomatic Transmission, Clinical Testing, Coronavirus, Crisis, Crisis Management, Evidence-based Leadership, Evidence-Based Plan, Evidence-Based Policy, Infection Control, Infection Control Plan, Infectious Virus, Leadership Decentralized, Mortality, National Strategy, Out of Control, Pandemic, Public Health, Public Opinion, Public Perception, Public Safety, Public Trust, Quarantine, Scientists, Social Distancing • Leave a comment
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90,000 Americans are hospitalized as COVID-19 cases skyrocket Video - ABC News

The United States recorded 90,481 people currently hospitalized with COVID-19 Nov. 26, marking the 17th consecutive day of record hospitalizations and the first time the daily count topped 90,000, according to The COVID Tracking Project. 

The Project has noted that several data points will likely “wobble” over the next several days due to the Thanksgiving holiday, which may cause data points for COVID-19 testing, new cases and deaths to flatten or drop for several days before spiking. It is unlikely that Thanksgiving infections will be clearly visible in official case data until at least the second week of December.

However, the Project’s staff has noted that the new admissions metric in the public hospitalization dataset from HHS shows only moderate volatility and will likely be an additional source of useful data through the expected holiday dip and subsequent spike in test, case and death data.

“If you’re a reporter covering COVID-19, we recommend focusing on current hospitalizations and new admissions as the most reliable indicator of what is actually happening in your area and in the country as a whole,” reads the Nov. 24 blog from The COVID Tracking Project.

Coronavirus: US tops 90,000 COVID-19 cases in 24 hours for the first time | Al Arabiya English

Supreme Court shows conservative effect in key coronavirus ruling

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/supreme-court-coronavirus-restrictions/2020/11/26/5cf84020-2ffb-11eb-bae0-50bb17126614_story.html?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F2d129f0%2F5fc12d5b9d2fda0efb75518d%2F5b63a342ade4e2779550ca1b%2F13%2F71%2F5fc12d5b9d2fda0efb75518d

The Supreme Court’s new conservative majority showed its muscle on Thanksgiving Eve, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett playing a key role in reversing the court’s past deference to local officials when weighing pandemic-related restrictions on religious organizations.

All three of President Trump’s nominees to the court were in the 5-to-4 majority that blocked New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s restrictions on houses of worship in temporary hot spots where the coronavirus is raging.

The court’s most conservative justices distanced themselves from Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, Trump’s first nominee, went out of his way to say that lower courts should no longer follow Roberts’s guidance of deference, calling it “mistaken from the start.”

“Even if the Constitution has taken a holiday during this pandemic, it cannot become a sabbatical,” Gorsuch wrote. Rather than applying “nonbinding and expired” guidance from Roberts in an earlier case from California, Gorsuch said, “courts must resume applying the Free Exercise Clause.”

“Today, a majority of the court makes this plain.”

The halt of Cuomo’s orders, which had been allowed to remain in place by lower courts, was the first evidence that Roberts may no longer play the pivotal role he occupied over the past couple of years. He had been at the center of the court, with four consistently more conservative justices and four more liberal ones.

Barrett’s replacement of liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg means there are now five members of the court — a majority — more willing to move it quickly in a more conservative direction.

And pandemic-related restrictions on worship services have drawn the ire of the conservatives for months.

They were previously outvoted when Ginsburg was alive, as she and the other liberals joined with Roberts to leave in place restrictions in California and Nevada that imposed limits on in-person services at houses of worship.

In the cases involved in the court’s midnight order Wednesday, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn and Jewish organizations led by Agudath Israel challenged Cuomo’s system of imposing drastic restrictions on certain neighborhoods when coronavirus cases spike.

Under Cuomo’s plan, in areas designated “red zones,” where the virus risk is highest, worship services are capped at 10 people. At the next level, “orange zones,” there is an attendance cap of 25. The size of the facility does not factor in to the capacity limit.

The diocese said in its petition that the plan subjects “houses of worship alone” to “onerous ­fixed-capacity caps while permitting a host of secular businesses to remain open in ‘red’ and ‘orange’ zones without any restrictions whatsoever.”

And the Jewish organizations noted that Cuomo, a Democrat, had specifically mentioned outbreaks in Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods when imposing the restrictions. “This court should not permit such remarkable scapegoating of a religious minority to stand,” the organizations said in court documents.

Cuomo attributed the court’s order to its more conservative majority. “I think that Supreme Court ruling on the religious gatherings is more illustrative of the Supreme Court than anything else,” Cuomo told reporters. “It’s irrelevant from a practical impact because the zone that they were talking about has already been moved. It expired last week. I think this was really just an opportunity for the court to express its philosophy and politics.”

Technically, the court’s order blocks Cuomo’s restrictions from being reimposed while legal challenges continue. But the court’s unsigned opinion would appear to make the ultimate outcome clear.

“Even in a pandemic, the Constitution cannot be put away and forgotten,” the opinion said. “The restrictions at issue here, by effectively barring many from attending religious services, strike at the very heart of the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious liberty.”

The opinion was endorsed by Barrett, Gorsuch and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Brett M. Kavanaugh, Trump’s second appointment to the court. It was mild compared with recent comments from Alito and the Gorsuch opinion, which no other justices joined.

Alito, who did not write a separate opinion, recently told the conservative legal organization the Federalist Society that the pandemic “has resulted in previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty.”

“It pains me to say this, but in certain quarters, religious liberty is fast becoming a disfavored right,” Alito said.

But Justice Stephen G. Breyer, writing for fellow liberals Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, said it was a strange time for the court to be offering relief.

“The number of new confirmed cases per day is now higher than it has ever been,” Breyer wrote, pointing to the growing national death toll and the outsize number of fatalities New York has suffered, which tracking by The Washington Post puts at more than 34,000.

“The nature of the epidemic, the spikes, the uncertainties, and the need for quick action, taken together, mean that the State has countervailing arguments based upon health, safety, and administrative considerations that must be balanced against the applicants’ First Amendment challenges,” Breyer wrote.

Sotomayor was more pointed in a separate opinion joined by Kagan: “Justices of this court play a deadly game in second guessing the expert judgment of health officials about the environments in which a contagious virus, now infecting a million Americans each week, spreads most easily.”

Roberts noted in his opinion that the rules might be unduly restrictive but said Cuomo has already eased them, essentially giving the churches and synagogues the relief they had requested.

“The Governor might reinstate the restrictions. But he also might not,” the chief justice wrote. “And it is a significant matter to override determinations made by public health officials concerning what is necessary for public safety in the midst of a deadly pandemic.”

Gorsuch disagreed.

“It is time — past time — to make plain that, while the pandemic poses many grave challenges, there is no world in which the Constitution tolerates color-coded executive edicts that reopen liquor stores and bike shops but shutter churches, synagogues, and mosques,” he wrote.

Gorsuch’s solo opinion was at times scathing and sarcastic. He noted that Cuomo had designated, among others, hardware stores, acupuncturists, liquor stores and bicycle repair shops as essential businesses not subject to the most strict limits.

“So, at least according to the governor, it may be unsafe to go to church, but it is always fine to pick up another bottle of wine, shop for a new bike, or spend the afternoon exploring your distal points and meridians,” Gorsuch wrote. “Who knew public health would so perfectly align with secular convenience?”

Gorsuch criticized Roberts for relying on one of the court’s 1905 precedents for his position that the court should defer to local officials during health crises.

The chief justice seemed taken aback. He said his earlier opinion in the California case asserted only that the Constitution chiefly leaves such decisions to local officials.

That, he wrote, “should be uncontroversial, and the [Gorsuch] concurrence must reach beyond the words themselves to find the target it is looking for.”

He also defended the liberal justices from Gorsuch’s tough words, even though Roberts did not join their dissents.

“I do not regard my dissenting colleagues as ‘cutting the Constitution loose during a pandemic,’ yielding to ‘a particular judicial impulse to stay out of the way in times of crisis,’ or ‘shelter[ing] in place when the Constitution is under attack,’ ” Roberts wrote, quoting Gorsuch’s opinion.

“They simply view the matter differently after careful study and analysis reflecting their best efforts to fulfill their responsibility under the Constitution.”

Conservative religious organizations praised the court’s action.

“Governor Cuomo should have known that openly targeting Jews for a special covid crackdown was never going to be constitutional,” said Eric Rassbach, vice president and senior counsel at the Becket Fund, which represented Agudath Israel. Covid-19 is the disease caused by the coronavirus. “The Supreme Court was right to step in and allow Jews and Catholics to worship as they have for centuries.”

But Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said the court’s action was dangerous.

“New York’s temporary restrictions on indoor gatherings do not discriminate against houses of worship, and, in fact, treat them better than comparable non-religious gatherings,” Lieberman said in a statement. “The Supreme Court’s decision will unfortunately undermine New York’s efforts to curb the pandemic.”

A growing number of Americans are going hungry

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A growing number of Americans are going hungry – Washington Sources

26 million now say they don’t have enough to eat, as the pandemic worsens and holidays near.

It was 5 a.m., not a hint of sun in the Houston sky, as Randy Young and his mom pulled into the line for a free Thanksgiving meal. They were three hours early. Hundreds of cars and trucks already idled in front of them outside NRG Stadium. This was where Young worked before the pandemic. He was a stadium cook. Now, after losing his job and struggling to get by, he and his 80-year-old mother hoped to get enough food for a holiday meal.

“It’s a lot of people out here,” said Young, 58. “I was just telling my mom, ‘You look at people pulling up in Mercedes and stuff, come on.’ If a person driving a Mercedes is in need of food, you know it’s bad.”

More Americans are going hungry now than at any point during the deadly coronavirus pandemic, according to a Post analysis of new federal data — a problem created by an economic downturn that has tightened its grip on millions of Americans and compounded by government relief programs that expired or will terminate at the end of the year. Experts say it is likely that there’s more hunger in the United States today than at any point since 1998, when the Census Bureau began collecting comparable data about households’ ability to get enough food.

One in 8 Americans reported they sometimes or often didn’t have enough food to eat in the past week, hitting nearly 26 million American adults, an increase several times greater than the most comparable pre-pandemic figure, according to Census Bureau survey data collected in late October and early November. That number climbed to more than 1 in 6 adults in households with children.

“It’s been driven by the virus and the unpredictable government response,” said Jeremy K. Everett, executive director of the Baylor Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty in Waco, Tex.

Nowhere has there been a hunger surge worse than in Houston, with a metro-area population of 7 million people. Houston was pulverized in summer when the coronavirus overwhelmed hospitals, and the local economy was been particularly hard hit by weak oil prices, making matters worse.

More than 1 in 5 adults in Houston reported going hungry recently, including 3 in 10 adults in households with children. The growth in hunger rates has hit Hispanic and Black households harder than White ones, a devastating consequence of a weak economy that has left so many people trying to secure food even during dangerous conditions.

On Saturday, these statistics manifested themselves in the thousands of cars waiting in multiple lines outside NRG Stadium. The people in these cars represented much of the country. Old. Young. Black. White. Asian. Hispanic. Families. Neighbors. People all alone.

Inside a maroon Hyundai Santa Fe was Neicie Chatman, 68, who had been waiting since 6:20 a.m., listening to recordings of a minister’s sermon piped into large earphones.

“I’ve been feeding my spirit,” she said.

Her hours at her job as an administrator have been unsteady since the pandemic began. Her sister was laid off. They both live with their mother, who has been sick for the past year. She planned to take the food home to feed her family and share with her older neighbors.

“It’s been hard to survive. Money is low. No jobs. Hard to find work.”

— Randy Young

“I lost my business and I lost my dream.”

— Adriana Contreras

Now, a new wave of coronavirus infections threatens more economic pain.

Yet the hunger crisis seems to have escaped widespread notice in a nation where millions of households have weathered the pandemic relatively untouched. The stock market fell sharply in March before roaring back and has recovered all of its losses. This gave the White House and some lawmakers optimism about the economy’s condition. Congress left for its Thanksgiving break without making any progress on a new pandemic aid deal even as food banks across the country report a crush of demand heading into the holidays.

“The hardship is incredibly widespread. Large parts of America are saying, ‘I couldn’t afford food for my family,’ ” said Stacy Dean, who focuses on food-assistance policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “It’s disappointing this hasn’t broken through.”

No place has been spared. In one of the nation’s richest counties, not far from Trump National Golf Club in Virginia, Loudoun Hunger Relief provided food to a record 887 households in a single week recently. That’s three times the Leesburg, Va.-based group’s pre-pandemic normal.

“We are continuing to see people who have never used our services before,” said Jennifer Montgomery, the group’s executive director.

Hunger rates spiked nationwide after shutdowns in late March closed large chunks of the U.S. economy. The situation improved somewhat as businesses reopened and the benefits from a $2.2 trillion federal pandemic aid package flowed into people’s pockets, with beefed-up unemployment benefits, support for food programs and incentives for companies to keep workers on the payroll.

But those effects were short-lived. The bulk of the federal aid had faded by September. And more than 12 million workers stand to lose unemployment benefits before year’s end if Congress doesn’t extend key programs.

“Everything is a disaster,” said Northwestern University economist Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, a leading expert on the economics of food insecurity. “I’m usually a pleasant person, but this is just crazy.”

Economic conditions are the main driver behind rising rates of hunger, but other factors play a role, Schanzenbach said. In the Great Recession that began in 2008, people received almost two years of unemployment aid — which helped reduce hunger rates. Some long-term unemployed workers qualified for even more help.

But the less-generous benefits from the pandemic unemployment assistance programs passed by Congress in March have already disappeared or soon will for millions of Americans.

Even programs that Congress agreed to extend have stumbled. A program giving families additional cash assistance to replace school meals missed by students learning at home was renewed for a year on Oct. 1. But the payments were delayed because many states still needed to get the U.S. Agriculture Department’s approval for their plans. The benefit works out to only about $6 per student for each missed school day. But experts say the program has been a lifeline for struggling families.

One program that has continued to provide expanded emergency benefits is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. The Agriculture Department issued an emergency order allowing states to provide more families the maximum benefit and to suspend the time limit on benefits for younger unemployed adults without children.

The sharpest rise in hunger was reported by groups who have long experienced the highest levels of it, particularly Black Americans. Twenty-two percent of Black U.S. households reported going hungry in the past week, nearly twice the rate faced by all American adults and more than two-and-a-half times the rate for White Americans.

The Houston area was posting some of its lowest hunger rates before the pandemic, thanks to a booming economy and a strong energy sector, Everett said. Then, the pandemic hit. Hunger surged, concentrated among the city’s sizable low-income population, in a state that still allows for the federally mandated minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. Houston’s hunger rates — like those nationwide — fell significantly after the $1,200 stimulus checks were mailed out in April and other pandemic aid plans took effect, Everett said.

But most of the effects of that aid are gone.

“Without sustained aid at the federal level, we’ll be hard pressed to keep up,” said Celia Call, chief executive of Feeding Texas, which advocates for 21 food banks in the state. “We’re just bracing for the worst.”

Schools are one of the most important sources of food for low-income families in Houston. The Houston Independent School District has 210,000 students — many of whom qualify for free or reduced-priced meals. But the pandemic closed schools in the spring. They reopened in the fall with less than half of the students choosing a hybrid model of in-school and at-home instruction. That has made feeding these children a difficult task.

“We’ve made an all-out effort to capture these kids and feed them,” said Betti Wiggins, the school district’s nutrition services officer.

The district provided curbside meal pickups outside schools. Anyone could come, not just schoolchildren. School staffers set up neighborhood distribution sites in the areas with the highest need. They started a program to serve meals to children living in apartment buildings. Sometimes the meal program required police escorts.

“I’m doing everything but serving in the gas station when they’re pumping the gas,” Wiggins said.

Wiggins said the normal school meals program she ran before the pandemic has been transformed into providing food for entire families far beyond a school’s walls. She has noticed unfamiliar faces in her meal lines. The “new poor,” she calls them, parents who might have worked in the airline or energy industries crushed by the pandemic.

“I’m seeing folks who don’t know how to handle the poverty thing,” she said, adding that it became her mission to make sure they had food.

The Houston Food Bank is the nation’s largest, serving 18 counties in Southeast Texas with help from 1,500 partner agencies. Last month, the food bank distributed 20.6 million pounds of food — down from the 27.8 million pounds handed out in May, but still 45 percent more than what it distributed in October 2019, with no end in sight.

The biggest worry for food banks right now is finding enough food, said Brian Greene, president of the Houston Food Bank. Food banks buy bulk food with donations. They take in donated food items, too. Food banks also benefited from an Agriculture Department program that purchased excess food from U.S. farmers hurt by the ongoing trade war with China, typically apples, milk and pork products. But funding for that program ended in September. Other federal pandemic programs are still buying hundreds of millions of dollars in food and donating it to food banks. But Greene said he worries about facing “a commodity cliff” even as demand grows.

Teresa Croft, who volunteers at a food distribution site at a church in the Houston suburb of Manvel, said the need is still overwhelming. She handles the paperwork for people visiting the food bank for the first time. They’re often embarrassed, she said. They never expected to be there. Sometimes, Croft tries to make them feel better by telling her own story — how she started at the food bank as a client, but got back on her feet financially more than a decade ago and is now a food bank volunteer.

“They feel so bad they’re having to ask for help. I tell them they shouldn’t feel bad. We’re all in this together,” Croft said. “If you need it, you need it.”

The pandemic changed how the Houston Food Bank runs. Everything is drive-through and walk-up. Items are preselected and bagged. The food bank has held several food distribution events in the parking lots outside NRG Stadium — a $325 million, retractable-roof temple to sports and home to the National Football League’s Houston Texans.

Last weekend, instead of holding the 71st annual Thanksgiving Day Parade in Houston, the city and H-E-B supermarkets decided to sponsor the food bank’s distribution event at NRG Stadium. The plan was to feed 5,000 families.

The first cars arrived at the stadium around 1 a.m. Saturday, long before the gates opened for the 8 a.m. event. By the time Young and his mother drove up, the line of vehicles stretched into the distance. Organizers opened the gates early. The cars and trucks began to slowly snake through the stadium’s parking lot toward a series of white tents, where the food was loaded into trunks by volunteers. The boxes contained enough food for multiple meals during the holiday week, with canned vegetables such as corn and sweet potatoes, a package of rolls, cranberry sauce and a box of masks. People picking up food were also given a bag of cereal and some resealable bags, a ham, a gallon of milk, and finally a turkey and pumpkin pie.

The food for 5,000 families ran out. The Houston Food Bank — knowing that would not be enough — was able to assemble more.

It provided food to 7,160 vehicles and 261 people who walked up to the event.

Troy Coakley, 56, came to the event looking for food to feed his family for the week. He still had his job breaking apart molds at a plant that makes parts for oil field and water companies. But his hours were cut when the economy took a hit in March. Coakley went from working overtime to three days a week.

He was struggling. Behind on rent. Unsure what was to come.

But for the moment, his trunk filled with food, he had one less thing to worry about.

“Other than [the pandemic], we were doing just fine,” Coakley said. “But now it’s getting worse and worse.”

We’re celebrating Thanksgiving amid a pandemic. Here’s how we did it in 1918 – and what happened next

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On Thanksgiving more than a century ago, many Americans were living under quarantines, and officials warned people to stay home for the holiday.

More than 200,000 dead since March. Cities in lockdown. Vaccine trials underway.

And a holiday message, of sorts: “See that Thanksgiving celebrations are restricted as much as possible so as to prevent another flare-up.”

It isn’t the message of Thanksgiving 2020. It’s the Thanksgiving Day notice that ran in the Omaha World Herald on Nov. 28, 1918, when Americans found themselves in a similar predicament to the millions now grappling with how to celebrate the holiday season amid the coronavirus pandemic.

“Every time I hear someone say these are unprecedented times, I say no, no, they’re not,” said Brittany Hutchinson, assistant curator at the Chicago History Museum. “They did this in 1918.”

On Thanksgiving more than a century ago, many Americans, like today, lived under various phases of quarantines and face mask orders. Millions mourned loved ones. And health officials in many cities issued the same holiday warning: Stay home and stay safe.

Giving thanks for WWI victory, beating pandemic

By late November 1918, the USA – in the midst of the suffrage movement, Jim Crow and the tail end of WWI – battled the ebbing second wave of the H1N1 influenza epidemic, also known as the Spanish flu.

The first cases were detected in the USA in March of that year, growing exponentially by the fall. In October, the virus burned through the nation. Dozens of cities implemented face mask orders and curfews and locked down for two to three weeks, temporarily closing schools, libraries, theaters, movie houses, dance halls, churches, ice cream parlors and soda shops. The virus killed about 195,000 Americans during October alone.

As Thanksgiving rolled around, some cities celebrated the relaxation of flu-related restrictions– partly due to opposition campaigns by retailers, theater owners, unions, mass transportation companies and other economically stressed stakeholders. Washington, Indianapolis and Oakland, California, had lifted restrictions days before, and San Francisco was on the brink of lifting its mask mandate.

San Francisco had one of the nation’s largest anti-masking campaigns, spearheaded by the Anti-Mask League of San Francisco, according to Howard Markel, a professor of the history of medicine at the University of Michigan and co-editor-in chief of The American Influenza Epidemic of 1918-1919. Many people refused to wear masks and were arrested, and when the “line into the courtroom was so long, they laid off arresting people because the system couldn’t enforce it,” Markel said.

On Nov. 13, the San Francisco Examiner reported that “Thanksgiving Day will be celebrated in San Francisco by the discarding of gauze masks, if the present rate of decrease in influenza continues.”

A week later, San Franciscans ceremoniously removed their masks as a whistle sounded across the city at noon. “San Francisco Joyously Discards Masks In Twinkling; Faces Beam As Gauze Covers Come Off At Time Fixed,” the San Francisco Chronicle wrote on its front page Nov. 22.

Resistance to public health measures was not as “vociferous or widespread as today,” but it was there, Markel said. “A lot of these rules and regulations were wrapped up in the patriotism of World War I, and most people followed them. But we don’t have that unifying situation right now. You would think the pandemic would be unifying.”

In some cities, Thanksgiving rituals brought a welcome sense of normalcy. Many Americans returned to religious services, performed charity work and went through with planned football games, parties and performances.

In Portland, a “grand reunion service” was planned for the Sunday after Thanksgiving, “in honor of the reassembling after being debarred from worship on account of the epidemic for the last five weeks.” Members of various congregations were “ready to greet each other after the long absence,” according to the Oregon Daily Journal on Nov. 16.

“The chimes of church bells will once more be heard on Sunday morning throughout the city, beckoning one and all to attend their chosen place of worship, where a double celebration will be held, first over the suppression of autocracy and, second, over the eradication of a frightful plague,” the paper wrote.

Rabbis, priests, pastors and more conveyed a unified message, Hutchinson said – one of “forgiveness and compassion.”

“People are urging to be considerate of one another, to care for one another,” Hutchinson said. “There are messages of putting the smallness of the individual into perspective with the vastness of humanity.”

Other cities were still trending in the opposite direction.

Lockdowns, quarantines on Thanksgiving

By the end of November, cases were rising in cities such as Atlanta, Denver, Louisville, Kentucky, Milwaukee, Omaha, Nebraska, Portland, Oregon, and Richmond, Virginia. Many health experts attributed the “renewal of the grip epidemic” to festivities Nov. 11 – later designated as Armistice Day – when thousands flooded the streets to celebrate the end of WWI.

“It is not the lifting of the closure ban that is the cause of spreading of the epidemic but the putting aside of all precautions and restrictions by the people of Denver when they celebrated on Victory Day,” City Manager of Health and Charity William H. Sharpley told the Denver Post in a story Nov. 21.

On Nov. 27, the day before Thanksgiving, St. Louis reported its highest new daily case count since the epidemic began, and Buffalo, New York, reported its largest jump in daily cases since the lifting of its pandemic ban weeks earlier. Both cities subsequently cracked down on public gatherings, limited the number of passengers on streetcars and ordered those cars to be ventilated and cleaned.

In Salt Lake City, residents were under “quarantine” on Thanksgiving, shops were prohibited from holding sales and celebrations were postponed until Christmas Day. Placards indicating households infected with influenza were placed on the front and rear entrances of 2,000 homes.

“Owing to the influenza quarantine, the day’s festivities … had to be postponed till Christmas day. But Thanksgiving services of some sort are being held in nearly every home,” an article on the front page of the Desert Evening News said. “Because the influenza quarantine prevents public gatherings, the day in Utah is being observed quietly and without any spectacular features.”

Officials in Los Angeles promoted a “Stay at Home Week” over Thanksgiving. The Los Angeles Times issued a call on its front page to “REMEMBER AFFLICTED THANKSGIVING DAY; Influenza Ban Is Felt,” saying, “Thanksgiving Day held many attractions, although in a modified sense.”

“The salvation Army served fifty pounds of turkeys to fifty old men, but dispensed with its usual big dinner to the outcasts at the headquarters, because of the influenza ban,” the Times wrote.

Denver, which was under a face mask order, had just opened three emergency hospitals and issued an urgent call for nurses. Churches were expected to hold Thanksgiving services, but “extra precautions will be taken to guard against spread of epidemic,” the Rocky Mountain News reported the day before. 

“Special pains have been taken to provide all the ventilation necessary and to make attendance at the services safe in spite of the influenza epidemic. In a number of churches electric fans have been placed in the auditoriums so as to change the air every few minutes,” the article said.

In many cities, traditional Thanksgiving Day pageants were held outside. In Cincinnati, which saw a surge in cases among children and firemen, Thanksgiving “exercises” at school were held in auditoriums instead of classrooms to “avoid crowding,” the Cincinnati Enquirer wrote Nov. 28.

A handful of cities began to see a surge in cases on Thanksgiving.

Cities see cases rise on Thanksgiving

Cincinnati health officials “requested parents to forego children’s parties and gatherings during the Thanksgiving vacation,” but the number of hospitalized patients rose on the holiday. Schools added an extra day of vacation to the Thanksgiving holiday break to promote “a beneficial result in the influenza situation.”

“We are not in a happy frame of mind tonight,” Dr. Walter List, superintendent of the city’s General Hospital, told the Cincinnati Enquirer on Thanksgiving. “An institution such as this can stand the strain of an epidemic for five or six weeks, but when it continues for such a long period the situation is complicated.”

Kansas City saw a similar trend. The week of Thanksgiving, the number of flu cases at the city’s General Hospital doubled, and on Thanksgiving Day, city health officials reinstituted home quarantine for influenza victims and their families. Schools on break for Thanksgiving were closed until further notice.

Public dance halls and restaurants were closed on Thanksgiving in Spokane, Washington, and private parties were prohibited. The next day, the city’s emergency hospital received more applications for admission than on any other day during the entire epidemic. On Thanksgiving, “the hospital was filled and death a frequent visitor,” the Spokesman-Review wrote.

Jefferson, Iowa, physician C.W. Blake spent much of his Thanksgiving evening making house calls on people ill from influenza, author Thomas Morain wrote in his 1998 book, “Prairie Grass Roots.” Blake was attending a Thanksgiving dinner at a farm outside town and let the local phone operator know he would be available later in the day. When he received the call about patients in the early evening, the operator had a list of 54 patients who had come down with the flu that day.

“At one farm north of Jefferson a family of four was too sick even to make themselves the most simple meal,” Morain wrote. “While Blake checked each one, (his assistant) made a soup from ingredients on hand and left it for the family.”

Hopes of a vaccine on Thanksgiving

By the fall of 1918, scientists were working on an influenza vaccine, and many were developed and used over the course of the pandemic. Researchers in New York, Boston, Pittsburgh, New Orleans and Seattle developed vaccines, and thousands of people in those cities and many others were inoculated.

Days before Thanksgiving, health officers in Rochester, New York, encouraged people to obtain the vaccine available at a health bureau. In Salt Lake City, the emergency hospital gave more than 100 vaccinations Nov. 30. By early December, free inoculation clinics were established across the city, and thousands of residents lined up for their vaccinations.

The problem? Researchers didn’t know influenza was a virus.

“The vaccine that was made was a vaccine against (a bacteria), which they thought was the cause of influenza,” Markel said. “So not only were vaccines of this era crude and not all that effective, the vaccine that they did produce was for the wrong organism.”

Vaccine science was nowhere near the scientifically advanced level of 2020, said Markel, whose mother died from COVID-19 this year. The study of virology was in its infancy, and researchers didn’t have the tools to see viruses. Though bacteria are much larger and can be viewed under a light microscope, viruses require an electron microscope, which had not been invented in 1918, Markel said.

The vaccines that researchers developed did not stop an impending third wave of the flu.

Third wave of influenza surges after the holidays

Just as cases rose after Armistice Day celebrations, they rose again after Thanksgiving. Dallas, Minneapolis, San Antonio, San Francisco and Seattle saw surges. Omaha relaunched a public health campaign. Parts of Cleveland and its suburbs closed schools and enacted influenza bans in early December.

On Dec. 6, the St. Paul Daily News announced that more than 40 Minneapolis schools were closed because of the flu, below the headline “SANTA CLAUS IS DOWN WITH THE FLU.” Health officials asked “moving picture show” managers to exclude children, closed Sunday schools and ordered department stores to dispense with “Santa Claus programs.”

On Christmas Eve, health officials in Nebraska made influenza a mandatory quarantine disease, and fines ranged from $15 to $100 for violations. Approximately 1,000 homes in Omaha were placarded, meaning their occupants were unable to leave for at least four days after the fever had subsided.

In Denver, the Salvation Army canceled its annual Christmas parties for children, and the Women’s Press Club canceled its New Year’s Eve ball. School Christmas assemblies were canceled in Fall River, Massachusetts, and families with an influenza patient in their homes were warned not to entertain guests and barred from borrowing books from the library.

By January, the USA was fully engulfed in its third wave of influenza. The virus spread throughout the winter and spring, killing thousands more. It infected one-third of the world’s population and killed approximately 675,000 Americans before subsiding in the summer of 1919.

“What did they do wrong? That’s hard to say, but all of these measures are like Swiss cheese. They have holes, so you try to use as many layers as possible,” Markel said. “To me, those surges just represented whether there was social distancing or not. Flu didn’t stop circulating, the question was when did people go out and get exposed to it? And that’s what’s going on now.”

A warning for 2020: ‘Stay home and stay safe’

A century later, the nation has recorded more than 12 million cases of COVID-19, and more than 255,000 people in the USA have died. Dozens of states reimplemented coronavirus-related restrictions, and health officials echo the stay-at-home guidance issued decades ago.

“The risk of not traveling is less than the risk of traveling,” Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, told USA TODAY Wednesday. “During this interesting period of a lot of infection going on, colder weather, indoors: Do you want to travel and go to a Thanksgiving meal where there may be 12, 15, 20 people?”

Fauci said his three adult daughters won’t come home for Thanksgiving this year. Hutchinson, the Chicago-based curator who had COVID-19 in April, said she plans to celebrate Thanksgiving at home with her dog and Facetime family members. Markel, in Ann Arbor, said he plans to eat Thanksgiving dinner alone, downsize from a full turkey to a sliced turkey breast and Zoom with family.

If history tells us anything, Markel said, it’s that “the risk of contracting the virus or spreading the virus by congregating in groups or even traditional holiday parties is right now too great.”

“It is disappointing, but let’s get through this, so we can celebrate many, many more Thanksgivings,” he said. “The better part of valor is to stay home and stay safe.”

Economists nervously watching pandemic for signs of further financial impacts

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/11/23/finance-202-economists-nervously-watching-pandemic-signs-further-financial-impacts/

BLINKING RED: This is a critical week in the coronavirus pandemic. Economists are nervously watching as much of the nation experiences a worsening fall wave, with U.S. case counts near 200,000 a day and record hospitalizations in many parts of the country, my colleagues Paulina Firozi, Lena H. Sun and Hannah Knowles report. 

Whether a crest arrives soon could largely be determined by the Thanksgiving holiday, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and health experts warn against traveling and many of the once commonplace rituals of family gatherings. 

  • Early data doesn’t look great: More than 1 million people went through Transportation Security Administration checkpoints in the nation’s airports on Friday — that’s the second-highest single-day rush since March 16. Meanwhile, nearly 80 percent of epidemiologists surveyed recently by the New York Times said they were having Thanksgiving celebrations with people only in their households or not at all.
  • One bright spot: A third vaccine, made by AstraZeneca, is 90 percent effective if administered in two doses (a half-dose followed by a full-dose booster) and is easier to store than vaccines by Pfizer and Moderna, my colleagues reported this morning. 
  • “The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is likely to be cheaper than those made by Pfizer and Moderna, and it does not need to be stored at subzero temperatures but can be kept in ordinary refrigerators in pharmacies and doctor’s offices,” they wrote.

A Season of COVID uncertainty

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https://www.axios.com/season-covid-uncertainty-7558f740-88f8-4934-8686-2e799811a36d.html

Illustration of a dead tree with surgical masks on the branches blowing in the wind

The frightening, post-election COVID surge is making everything feel strange, different and unsettled all over again.

Why it matters: With Thanksgiving canceled, doctors quitting their practices and grocers limiting purchase quantities (again), Americans have the ambient sense that our safety net is unraveling. Not only are things not returning to normal, they may not return to normal for a long time.

The people and institutions we look toward for guidance and leadership — like elected officials and medical authorities — seem as flummoxed by the pandemic as we are. They issue new rules day by day (closing schools, restricting shopping, issuing curfews), yet look helpless and flailing as infections rise.

  • Our comforting touch points, like family get-togethers and holiday rituals, are suddenly off-limits.
  • There are fewer entertainments and distractions, with movie theaters closed and our appetites for TV bingeing satiated a long time ago.
  • For those who derive comfort from their faith, remote worship offers less fulfillment.

Strangely, CEOs and corporate America have been serving as a rare anchor in this unmoored reality, attempting to provide some moral suasion and fueling the engine behind the stock market’s rally.

  • Companies like Pfizer and Moderna are looking like the heroes of the day — though their vaccines can’t come soon enough to allay our worst fears.
  • Meanwhile, the restaurateurs and merchants who form the pillars of our communities are suffering with growing intensity before our eyes.

Economically, the nation is heading into uncharted territory, with COVID-related uncertainty obliterating all forecast attempts.

  • While many Americans are doing fine financially, it’s hard not to think that a lot of people’s personal finances may be poised to head off a cliff — and the promise of federal help is looking questionable.

Politically, the standoff between President Trump and the rightfully elected new administration has left a vacuum.

  • By all accounts, the situation is thwarting efforts to attack the coronavirus.

Socially, we feel isolated and trapped in our pandemic ruts, not even permitted to savor the promise of holidays we’ve been looking forward to.

  • Doctors say pandemic-induced loneliness will shorten life expectancies.

Culturally and intellectually, the arts, concerts, films and literary output that we rely on to enhance our lives are dampened or depressed by pandemic strictures.

Emotionally, we worry about ourselves, our loved ones and all of our futures. How will the pandemic stunt my child’s education, my career trajectory, my experience of the world? And what if I get sick and there’s no hospital bed available?

  • “Thousands of medical practices have closed during the pandemic,” per the NYT.

What’s next: “Next Thanksgiving will be different,” Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases told CNN’s Chris Cuomo on Thursday.

  • Americans who persevere through 2021 will, we can all hope, weather this turmoil and see flourishing times ahead.

Over 1 million U.S. travelers flew on Friday, despite calls to avoid holiday travel

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https://www.axios.com/1-million-air-travel-friday-holiday-plane-coronavirus-033f9f0e-5c13-40aa-a6b6-0affe81dbf60.html

Is Windows 10 an Impending Disaster for Microsoft? - Life, Liberty, and Technology

More than 1 million people flew through U.S. airports on Friday, according to TSA data, the second highest number since the coronavirus pandemic began hit the U.S. in mid-March.

Why it matters: As coronavirus cases and hospitalizations continued to soar this week, the CDC issued new guidance on Thursday advising Americans not to travel for Thanksgiving, warning doing so may increase the chance of getting and spreading COVID-19.

By the numbers: The 1,019,836 people TSA screened at U.S. airports on Friday is still less than half the number (2,550,459) that passed through screenings on the same weekday a year ago.

  • TSA screened 1,031,505 passengers on Oct. 18, the highest number since March 17.

Go deeper: Americans line up for coronavirus testing ahead of Thanksgiving