Coronavirus, Monkeypox, and Other Contagious Diseases

[LFC]

Moderna has created a new vaccine that they say is more effective against Omicron.

A combination COVID-19 booster dose that targets the ancestral strain of SARS-CoV-2 and the initial omicron variant, BA.1, appears to outperform the current booster against both of those versions of the virus, Moderna reported Wednesday.

Specifically, Moderna says the combination booster increased neutralizing antibodies against omicron 8-fold, while the original booster only increased antibody levels around 4.4-fold.

The vaccine maker is angling to have this bivalent shot—dubbed mRNA-1273.214—be the go-to booster for seasonal shots this fall. The company will be submitting its data to the Food and Drug Administration in the coming weeks and says it hopes to have the bivalent booster available by late summer, if not early fall.

Moderna says this dose is the second bivalent design that can outcompete its current booster. In April, the company reported data that a bivalent booster targeting the ancestral strain and the beta variant (booster mRNA-1273.211) could also outperform the current booster. That data solidified the company's track to focus on bivalent boosters moving forward.

"We are thrilled to share the preliminary data analysis on mRNA-1273.214," Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said in a statement on Wednesday. "Looking at these data alongside the durability we saw with our first bivalent booster candidate, mRNA-1273.211, we anticipate more durable protection against variants of concern with mRNA-1273.214, making it our lead candidate for a fall 2022 booster."

[Bact PhD]

Jun 9, 2022 16:20:12 GMT LFC said:

Moderna has created a new vaccine that they say is more effective against Omicron.

A combination COVID-19 booster dose that targets the ancestral strain of SARS-CoV-2 and the initial omicron variant, BA.1, appears to outperform the current booster against both of those versions of the virus, Moderna reported Wednesday.

Specifically, Moderna says the combination booster increased neutralizing antibodies against omicron 8-fold, while the original booster only increased antibody levels around 4.4-fold.

The vaccine maker is angling to have this bivalent shot—dubbed mRNA-1273.214—be the go-to booster for seasonal shots this fall. The company will be submitting its data to the Food and Drug Administration in the coming weeks and says it hopes to have the bivalent booster available by late summer, if not early fall.

Moderna says this dose is the second bivalent design that can outcompete its current booster. In April, the company reported data that a bivalent booster targeting the ancestral strain and the beta variant (booster mRNA-1273.211) could also outperform the current booster. That data solidified the company's track to focus on bivalent boosters moving forward.

"We are thrilled to share the preliminary data analysis on mRNA-1273.214," Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said in a statement on Wednesday. "Looking at these data alongside the durability we saw with our first bivalent booster candidate, mRNA-1273.211, we anticipate more durable protection against variants of concern with mRNA-1273.214, making it our lead candidate for a fall 2022 booster."

I have been eagerly awaiting this development. I expect Pfizer’s version won’t be too far behind.

[AnBr]

[Bact PhD]

Florida Men strike again!! Let’s hear it for being outliers! WOO-HOO!!!

www.gainesville.com/story/news/coronavirus/2022/06/16/ron-desantis-administration-doesnt-order-covid-19-vaccines-for-kids-under-5-in-florida/7644974001/

Gov. Ron DeSantis' administration has chosen not to pre-order thousands of COVID-19 vaccine doses for children under 5 from the federal government even though vaccines may be approved by federal regulators and become available nationwide as early as next week.

Florida is the only U.S. state to skip ordering advance shots that medical experts say have more benefits than risks at preventing young children from contracting the deadly coronavirus.

DeSantis on Thursday defended Florida’s choice against pre-ordering COVID-19 vaccines for children under the age of five.

“Our Department of Health has been very clear,” DeSantis said at a press conference in Miami. “The risks outweigh the benefits and we recommend against.”

[snip]

DeSantis said Floridians are still “free to choose,” but explained Florida will not use state resources to inoculate young children.

“There’s a surplus of this. Doctors can get it. Hospitals can get it. But there’s not going to be any state programs that are going to be trying to get COVID jabs to infants and toddlers and newborns. That’s not something we think is appropriate.”

[snip]

Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, who was appointed by DeSantis and leads the state health department, has long opposed coronavirus vaccination requirements. On Tuesday, he said he does not support vaccinating young children, according to the News Service of Florida.

“From what I have seen, there is just insufficient data to inform benefits and risk in children,” he said.

[goldenvalley]

Jun 17, 2022 0:06:12 GMT Bact PhD said:

Florida Men strike again!! Let’s hear it for being outliers! WOO-HOO!!!

www.gainesville.com/story/news/coronavirus/2022/06/16/ron-desantis-administration-doesnt-order-covid-19-vaccines-for-kids-under-5-in-florida/7644974001/

Gov. Ron DeSantis' administration has chosen not to pre-order thousands of COVID-19 vaccine doses for children under 5 from the federal government even though vaccines may be approved by federal regulators and become available nationwide as early as next week.

Florida is the only U.S. state to skip ordering advance shots that medical experts say have more benefits than risks at preventing young children from contracting the deadly coronavirus.

DeSantis on Thursday defended Florida’s choice against pre-ordering COVID-19 vaccines for children under the age of five.

“Our Department of Health has been very clear,” DeSantis said at a press conference in Miami. “The risks outweigh the benefits and we recommend against.”

[snip]

DeSantis said Floridians are still “free to choose,” but explained Florida will not use state resources to inoculate young children.

“There’s a surplus of this. Doctors can get it. Hospitals can get it. But there’s not going to be any state programs that are going to be trying to get COVID jabs to infants and toddlers and newborns. That’s not something we think is appropriate.”

[snip]

Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, who was appointed by DeSantis and leads the state health department, has long opposed coronavirus vaccination requirements. On Tuesday, he said he does not support vaccinating young children, according to the News Service of Florida.

“From what I have seen, there is just insufficient data to inform benefits and risk in children,” he said.

Wow!  I think he's trying to cull the herd.  

[pnwguy]

Jun 17, 2022 0:06:12 GMT Bact PhD said:

Florida Men strike again!! Let’s hear it for being outliers! WOO-HOO!!!

“The risks outweigh the benefits and we recommend against.”

So Dr. Bact, what are actual risks of such a vaccine in this age group?  Is there anything of note or just DeSatanist fear-mongering MAGAVomit?

[AnBr]

Jun 17, 2022 18:32:24 GMT goldenvalley said:

Wow!  I think he's trying to cull the herd.  

Let's hope that the cull ends up being mostly his base.

[Bact PhD]

Jun 17, 2022 19:37:06 GMT pnwguy said:

Jun 17, 2022 0:06:12 GMT Bact PhD said:

Florida Men strike again!! Let’s hear it for being outliers! WOO-HOO!!!

So Dr. Bact, what are actual risks of such a vaccine in this age group?  Is there anything of note or just DeSatanist fear-mongering MAGAVomit?

Disclaimer: Obviously, I do not have access to the full complement of data the FDA used to come to its recommendation.

PubMed is my friend. I came across a relatively recent review of the literature surrounding the vax:

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8569292/

It speaks to the risks & benefits to numerous sub-populations, not just pediatric. It had nothing to indicate any greater risk to the pediatric crowd versus any other group.

So, yeah, the latter. Remember, Supreme Emperor and His Minion have been pooh-poohing the vax (and pushing sometimes questionable cures) all along — anything to “own the libs,” right?

[LFC]

Jun 17, 2022 21:47:01 GMT Bact PhD said:

So, yeah, the latter. Remember, Supreme Emperor and His Minion have been pooh-poohing the vax (and pushing sometimes questionable cures) all along — anything to “own the libs,” right?

And of course his surgeon general is an anti-vaxxer and general absolute nutjob so you couldn't expect better.

[LFC]

Dr Deborah Birx is testifying before a House panel. She should have told us these thing long ago.

Deborah Birx, who was tapped to coordinate the Trump administration’s coronavirus response in February 2020 but quickly lost favor with the president, on Thursday painted a picture of wide-ranging dysfunction that she said misled the public and state officials, hampered coronavirus testing and contributed to unnecessary deaths from the virus.

“People were communicating with the president dangerous ideas … on a daily basis,” such as encouraging former president Donald Trump to advocate for unproven treatments, including hydroxychloroquine, or providing him with misleading data about the virus, Birx told the House select subcommittee on the coronavirus crisis.

Asked about Trump’s repeated claims in 2020 that the virus would simply disappear, Birx implied that the president wrongly believed that if enough Americans were infected, the pandemic would go away.

“I think there were individuals communicating with the White House … who believed that if you infected enough people that you would have herd immunity. There was no evidence [of that] — in fact, there was evidence to the contrary,” Birx testified.

Birx also criticized Scott Atlas, a senior fellow in health-care policy at Stanford University who joined the administration in July 2020 and won Trump’s favor by saying that many infections were inevitable and encouraging a less robust government response. Atlas’s private advice and public comments broke from the recommendations made by Birx and fellow pandemic experts such as Anthony S. Fauci, the government’s top infectious-disease expert.

“It certainly destroyed any cohesion in the response,” Birx said, adding that Atlas and other officials presented data to the president that she believed painted a rosier view of the pandemic than was warranted.

“When you no longer agree on what is actually happening in the country and what needs to be done … then you lose the ability to execute in the maximum efficient and effective way,” Birx said.

Birx also recounted an Oval Office meeting with Atlas and Trump in August 2020 during which the officials discussed a summer surge in coronavirus cases.

“Dr. Atlas took that opportunity to make the point that it didn’t matter what you did, each of these surges would be identical. It didn’t matter if you tested. In fact, testing young people … and asking them to isolate while they were infectious was an infringement of their rights, and it was equivalent to a lockdown,” Birx testified. “These kinds of thoughts, particularly in any infectious disease, are dangerous.”

Birx told the panel’s investigators last year that the looming 2020 election distracted Trump officials from the pandemic, and that more than 130,000 American lives could have been saved with swifter action and better coordinated public health messages after the virus’s first wave.

“We have learned and will remember how politics was prioritized over science,” Rep. James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.), who chairs the panel, said Thursday.

Atlas did not respond to requests for comment. Atlas, who had no expertise in fighting pandemics, has blamed Birx for “harmful lockdowns” in early 2020 that he said caused widespread harm to children and the elderly.

[goldenvalley]

Jun 24, 2022 14:32:59 GMT LFC said:

Dr Deborah Birx is testifying before a House panel. She should have told us these thing long ago.

Deborah Birx, who was tapped to coordinate the Trump administration’s coronavirus response in February 2020 but quickly lost favor with the president, on Thursday painted a picture of wide-ranging dysfunction that she said misled the public and state officials, hampered coronavirus testing and contributed to unnecessary deaths from the virus.

“People were communicating with the president dangerous ideas … on a daily basis,” such as encouraging former president Donald Trump to advocate for unproven treatments, including hydroxychloroquine, or providing him with misleading data about the virus, Birx told the House select subcommittee on the coronavirus crisis.

Asked about Trump’s repeated claims in 2020 that the virus would simply disappear, Birx implied that the president wrongly believed that if enough Americans were infected, the pandemic would go away.

“I think there were individuals communicating with the White House … who believed that if you infected enough people that you would have herd immunity. There was no evidence [of that] — in fact, there was evidence to the contrary,” Birx testified.

Birx also criticized Scott Atlas, a senior fellow in health-care policy at Stanford University who joined the administration in July 2020 and won Trump’s favor by saying that many infections were inevitable and encouraging a less robust government response. Atlas’s private advice and public comments broke from the recommendations made by Birx and fellow pandemic experts such as Anthony S. Fauci, the government’s top infectious-disease expert.

“It certainly destroyed any cohesion in the response,” Birx said, adding that Atlas and other officials presented data to the president that she believed painted a rosier view of the pandemic than was warranted.

“When you no longer agree on what is actually happening in the country and what needs to be done … then you lose the ability to execute in the maximum efficient and effective way,” Birx said.

Birx also recounted an Oval Office meeting with Atlas and Trump in August 2020 during which the officials discussed a summer surge in coronavirus cases.

“Dr. Atlas took that opportunity to make the point that it didn’t matter what you did, each of these surges would be identical. It didn’t matter if you tested. In fact, testing young people … and asking them to isolate while they were infectious was an infringement of their rights, and it was equivalent to a lockdown,” Birx testified. “These kinds of thoughts, particularly in any infectious disease, are dangerous.”

Birx told the panel’s investigators last year that the looming 2020 election distracted Trump officials from the pandemic, and that more than 130,000 American lives could have been saved with swifter action and better coordinated public health messages after the virus’s first wave.

“We have learned and will remember how politics was prioritized over science,” Rep. James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.), who chairs the panel, said Thursday.

Atlas did not respond to requests for comment. Atlas, who had no expertise in fighting pandemics, has blamed Birx for “harmful lockdowns” in early 2020 that he said caused widespread harm to children and the elderly.

I hope we redefine loyalty...a president, any president, who is lying and clearly putting the public at risk does not desire loyalty.  Spare me the military commander in chief must be respected crap Dr Birx.

[LFC]

It sounds like repeated reinfections can have a cumulative effect.

The more times you catch COVID, the sicker you’re likely to get with each reinfection. That’s the worrying conclusion of a new study drawing on data from the U.S. Veterans Administration.

Scientists stressed they need more data before they can say for sure whether, and why, COVID might get worse the second, third, or fourth time around. But with more and more people getting reinfected as the pandemic lurches toward its fourth year, the study hints at some of the possible long-term risks.

To get a handle on the health impact of reinfection, re-reinfection and even re-re-reinfection, three researchers—Ziyad Al-Aly from the Washington University School of Medicine plus Benjamin Bowe and Yan Xie, both from the V.A. St. Louis Health Care System—scrutinized the health records of 5.7 million American veterans.

Some 260,000 had caught COVID just once, and 40,000 had been reinfected at least one more time. The control group included 5.4 million people who never got COVID at all. Al-Aly, Bowe and Xie tracked health outcomes over a six-month period and came to a startling conclusion. “We show that, compared to people with first infection, reinfection contributes additional risks,” they wrote in their study, which hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet but is under consideration for publication in Nature.

Every time you catch COVID, your chance of getting really sick with something—likely COVID-related—seems to go up, Al-Aly, Bowe and Xie found. The risk of cardiovascular disorders, problems with blood-clotting, diabetes, fatigue, gastrointestinal and kidney disorders, mental health problems, musculoskeletal disorders and neurologic damage all increase with reinfection—this despite the antibodies that should result from repeat infections.

All of the conditions are directly associated with COVID or have been shown to get worse with COVID. “The constellation of findings show that reinfection adds non-trivial risks,” the researchers warned.

[LFC]

Good to know.

After an intense, detailed investigation, North Korea has determined what sparked an explosive outbreak of COVID-19 that has led to over 4.7 million "fevers" within its borders since late April. The culprit: "alien things" blown into the country from the South.

According to a report from the official KCNA news agency, North Korea's outbreak began in early April when an 18-year-old soldier and a five-year-old kindergartener made contact with "alien things in a hill" in the area of Ipho-ri in Kumgang County, which is in the country's southeastern corner near the border. The two later tested positive for the novel coronavirus, and epidemiological analyses found that those cases were solely behind the country-wide outbreak; the two infections link to greater spread in Kumgang and, from there, into the rest of North Korea.

"It was also ascertained," the report reads, "that the fever cases reported in all areas and units of the country except the Ipho-ri area till mid-April, were due to other diseases." The report did not include any information about how officials came to that conclusion.

The report also does not provide any hints about the identity of the "alien things" that allegedly triggered the country's epidemic. But outside experts on the secretive, authoritarian country suggest that the report is merely an attempt to shift blame for the outbreak and invoke fear and hatred of South Korea. For decades, activists and North Korean defectors in South Korea have launched balloons loaded with leaflets, aid, and other items over the border.

North Korean officials have now issued guidance "stressing the need to vigilantly deal with alien things coming by wind and other climate phenomena and balloons in the areas along the demarcation line and borders."

[LFC]

Another awful side effect of the pandemic is drug resistant germs due to the enormous number of hospitalizations. Thanks, Trump.

New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention highlights one of the many consequences of the covid-19 pandemic in the United States: a disturbing rise in drug-resistant superbug infections. The first year of the pandemic saw the number of resistant infections and deaths in hospitals once again climb, reversing what had been a promising downward trend. Pandemic-related gaps in data collection have also made it harder to track the spread of superbugs in our communities, such as gonorrhea.

The CDC’s special report is the first by the agency since 2019 to gauge the toll and threat of drug-resistant infections in the country. In 2020, the report found, there was at least a 15% increase from the previous year in both hospital-acquired resistant infections and deaths. But the rise was even higher for certain infections, such as a 78% jump in cases caused by Carbapenem-resistant Acinetobacter. Overall, the rate of new cases rose in four out of six major types of infections. And more than 29,000 Americans died from healthcare-related drug-resistant germs that year, with nearly 40% of these fatal infections caught at a hospital.

Even these numbers are underselling the problem, though, since the CDC was unable to gather reliable data on half of the 18 superbugs that it’s most intently tracking, which are often spreading outside of hospitals and other health-care settings. These infections include Clostridioides difficile (C. diff), Campylobacter, nontyphoidal Salmonella, and gonorrhea, one of the most common STIs in the U.S. Other data has shown that cases of gonorrhea, resistant or not, have been climbing in recent years.

“This report really confirms what earlier studies and data had suggested has been happening during the pandemic. But I think what was especially eye-opening was the magnitude of the increases,” David Hyun, director of The Pew Charitable Trusts’ antibiotic resistance project, told Gizmodo by phone.

The report points to several reasons why we’ve lost ground against these infections, which aren’t limited to the U.S.

[LFC]

EDIT: Broadened the subject to include Monkeypox and other diseases that could create a pandemic.

First up, WHO declared monkeypox a global health emergency.

WHO Declares Monkeypox Global Health Emergency

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the World Health Organization director general, announced that the monkeypox outbreak was a “public health emergency of international concern” on Saturday.

• Only two other diseases are currently designated by WHO as global health emergencies: COVID-19 and polio.

• Tens of thousands of people have been infected over just several weeks.

• Almost all monkeypox infections outside of Africa are concentrated among men who have sex with men.

• Essential explainer: “Monkeypox is the latest global health emergency. Here’s what to know.” – The Washington Post

[LFC]

This will become more and more common as the South warms.

A bacteria endemic to tropical areas that causes life-threatening infection has just been detected within the soil and waters of the continental U.S. for the first time. On Wednesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that they recently isolated Burkholderia pseudomallei bacteria in southern Mississippi. At least two local cases of the serious infection it causes, known as melioidosis, have been traced back to the bacteria found there as well, though both victims have since recovered.

The discovery was announced in a health advisory released to doctors Wednesday afternoon by the CDC.

CDC and local health officials had been conducting an investigation into the two cases, one documented in July 2020 and the other in May 2022. Both patients had no recent travel history to endemic areas, but did live fairly close to one another in the Gulf Coast region of Mississippi. With the patients’ permission, health officials were allowed to sample the soil and water near their properties. In three samples that were collected from the 2020 patient’s home in June 2022, the investigators found B. pseudomallei. Further testing showed that the bacteria found in the environment had a clear genetic resemblance to the bacteria found in both patients, and that none of the samples looked quite like the strains found in other areas of the world. The patients were hospitalized and developed sepsis, but did eventually beat back the infection.

Given the overwhelming evidence, the CDC said in its advisory, “the bacteria in the environment was the likely source of infection for both patients and has been present in the area since at least 2020.”

[LFC]

There's one born every minute. This is what happens when you rush to shell out cash for miracle machines without doing so much as 5 minutes of Google due diligence.

In August 2020, with COVID-19 outbreaks proliferating and back to school plans shifting, U.S. tech vendors popped up, promising a solution. They were selling thermal imaging cameras and scanners that they said could screen large groups of students for virus-related fevers in real time. The catch: they didn’t work.

The Daily Beast has found over 200 school districts nationwide that were persuaded to buy these devices between 2020-21 by a number of companies, spending a combined total of more than $11 million. Internal emails obtained through public record requests show how districts were sold technology by an industry which experts compare to the “wild west,” and how now in many instances, the scanners sit dormant in schools, gathering dust.

In the first two years of the pandemic, Congress passed three COVID relief packages totaling $190 billion in aid for education systems. But schools were given little guidance on how to effectively use the money to keep their students safe. Instead, they frantically bought up whatever technology they were told could keep their doors open.

“Districts were really in the dark about what to do,” said Marguerite Roza, director of Edunomics Lab, a research center at Georgetown University. “They were just on the phone, trying to buy buy buy.”

Companies came out of the woodwork, ready to make a pandemic profit. X.Labs, run by a former fugitive and fraudster wanted in South Africa, and SafeCheck USA, started by two Miami real estate brothers who describe themselves as “power agents,” convinced schools to spend millions of federal funds on devices.

They were far from the only vendors drumming up business. The Gananda Central School District in upstate New York was one of many that bought the COVID sales pitch. Superintendent Shawn Van Scoy told The Daily Beast that in a moment of crisis, the district was desperate to solve a problem. In August 2020, the state had introduced mandatory daily temperature testing to catch fevers associated with the virus. But the district had just three nurses for nearly 1,000 students to perform the job.

[snip]

The devices appeared to be successful, as long as you hadn’t caught too much sun in the playground or weren’t carrying your morning coffee.

“A few false alarms each day…” wrote Van Scoy on Oct. 13, 2020, in emails, “mostly people coming in after being outside in direct sunlight or carrying hot coffee.”

The trajectory did not improve. Van Scoy said that in the last school year, the devices only detected two fevers, and he can’t recall if they were virus-related. And while a high temperature is a common symptom of COVID-19, you can be infected without one, especially in the first few days. Gananda finally gave up using the scanners in May, as the warmer weather started to cause even more faulty results.

And where did these magic machines come from? China!

Hikvision, a company half-owned by the Chinese state, has been widely condemned for supplying cameras for an intelligence program aimed at tracking and detaining the Uyghur population in China. In May of this year, it was reported that the U.S. was moving towards imposing sanctions on Hikvision for human rights abuses, which would be the first of its kind on a Chinese company. The company—along with surveillance manufacturer Dahua, another partly Chinese state-owned surveillance manufacturer whose thermal cameras are in U.S. schools—was banned from use by U.S. federal agencies in 2018 and blacklisted by the Department of Commerce in 2019.

Read on. It gets worse.

[goldenvalley]

The next hurdle to Covid vaccination is original antigenic sin.  

In the beginning, when the coronavirus was new, the quest for a vaccine was simple. Everyone started out susceptible to the virus. Shots brought spectacular protection.

But the next chapters of life with the virus — and the choice of booster shots for the fall and beyond — will be complicated by the layers of immunity that now ripple through the population, laid down by past infections and vaccinations.
When it comes to viral infections, past is prologue: The version of a virus to which we’re first exposed can dictate how we respond to later variants and, maybe, how well vaccines work.

It’s a phenomenon known by the forbidding name of original antigenic sin, and, in the case of the coronavirus, it prompts a constellation of questions. Are our immune systems stuck still revving up defenses against a version of the virus that has vanished? Will updated booster shots that are designed to thwart variants be much better than the original vaccine? How often will we be reinfected? Is there a better way to broaden immunity?

And while we are grappling with a new virus and its variations apparently we are doomed to grapple with old viruses like polio and measles that unvaccinated people bring into the population.  We humans are a stupid mess.

[LFC]

This is a look into the shitshow of a red state's COVID crisis handling and political meddling, this example in Montana. It's a horrific read.

St. Peter’s doctors and nurses signed a letter on Sept. 1 pleading with Montanans to get vaccinated. One of them was Charlotte Skinner, a nurse and a mother of two who works in the St. Peter’s emergency room and is an officer in the hospital’s nurses union. Earlier in the pandemic, Skinner had volunteered to appear at a press conference with Bullock, where she delivered an impassioned speech calling for an end to “partisan bickering” and urging the state to “embrace science.”

Afterward, a friend warned Skinner not to look at her Facebook messages. She peeked in to find “shocking stuff,” she recalled, including one commenter who “said he wanted to scalp me and my family.”

Vaccines remained a flashpoint even among staffers, about a quarter of whom declined to get one. Skinner said word spread quickly nationwide that Montana was a state where unvaccinated medical workers could work with legal protections. Perhaps unintentionally, she said, it became a “recruiting tool.”

By early September, COVID-19 hospitalizations were climbing quickly. Hospitals in Billings and Missoula warned they were overloaded. Non-COVID-19 patients were competing with COVID-19 patients for resources. The critical care units at St. Peter’s were at 100% capacity.

At St. Peter’s request, Gianforte sent National Guard troops to help, detailing 10 guard members to the 99-bed hospital. Among their tasks was helping exhausted nurses flip struggling COVID-19 patients onto their stomachs so they could breathe more easily. Staff scrambled to deliver ICU-level care in other units as beds dwindled.

By then, despite his state’s unfolding calamity, Gianforte had said on Twitter that Montana would take the vaccine fight national by challenging what he called Biden’s “unlawful and un-American” vaccine mandate.

St. Peter’s was so crowded that nurses had little time to spend with patients, even in the ICU. “Turn. Make sure the vents are on. Go on to the next person,” as Byrd described it.

To handle surges, Montana’s state health agency had revised its guidance on when a hospital should declare “crisis standards of care,” a designation that protects overwhelmed facilities from liability when they can no longer offer normal services and must consider rationing care.

A state official announced the directives on Sept. 15, saying he hoped hospitals would never have to use them.

One day later, St. Peter’s president and chief medical officer, Shelly Harkins, called a video press conference. The hospital was already meeting all of the criteria — long emergency room wait times, scarce equipment and medications, and no vacant beds, including in its eight-bed ICU.

A former Air Force physician, Harkins joined the hospital in 2017 after running a health system in Indiana. Harkins had a light-hearted side. She had played keyboard in a band called Leather Moose. But now, Harkins delivered the blunt reality.

COVID-19 patients filled every available bed, and St. Peter’s was running out of medication to treat them. The hospital was splitting up doses of some medications between patients and using seven times its normal amount of propofol, a sedative that can help ease the agony of the terminally ill.

Harkins was invoking “crisis standards of care,” she said. She was clear about what patients and their families could expect to see. “We are giving our staff permission to not do it all. The hardest thing they will do in their careers is not giving the care they are used to giving, but they simply can’t.”

“JEEZ!” someone in the background exclaimed.

Crisis standards would impact not just COVID-19 patients but anyone needing care. Some decisions would require a kind of battlefield triage, applying standards that had been crafted by a national advisory board in 2009 after the H1N1, or swine flu, epidemic. The guiding principle would be to try to save the greatest number of lives. That could mean giving a scarce resource, like an ICU bed or a ventilator, to a person thought to be most likely to survive.

The prospect of rationing health care has long terrified Americans. Republicans used it as a pillar of an early fear-mongering campaign against President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, when Sarah Palin and then others falsely claimed the legislation would create “death panels.”

Harkins’ work in family medicine and palliative care had prepared her to be direct but reassuring. “We are still very much here to provide care to our community, and we are doing absolutely all we can to keep all services open,” she added during the announcement. “True emergencies will always receive priority.”

But the strain on St. Peter’s staff of 1,700 was escalating. Instead of monitoring one or two desperately ill COVID-19 patients, nurses were caring for five or six.

[AnBr]

www.propublica.org/article/montana-covid-response-pushed-hospital-to-brink?utm_source=pocket-newtab

[LFC]

"Hard-line scientists", much like "elites", is now a right-wing epithet. The articles referred to are about studies on mask effectiveness and, as you can imagine, the wingnuts were NOT happy about that.

Trisha Greenhalgh #IStandWithUkraine 🇺🇦
@trishgreenhalgh

Our BMJ articles this week were *so good* that a right-wing newspaper ran a prominent article saying they should never have been commissioned and calling us "hard-line scientists"🙄. I reckon that's something between pink and yellow ⬇️. Trolls, there's more to come. Deal with it.

[LFC]

More on long COVID. We could end up with a population that dies sooner and has a collective reduction in its ability to think. Hmmmm. It's starting to sound more and more like COVID was a right-wing radical Republican plot. After all, these are their people!

All over the world, the rates of death and hospitalization from COVID keep dropping. But our successful mitigation of the worst outcomes of the 33-month-old pandemic belie a growing crisis.

More and more people are surviving COVID and staying out of the hospital, but more and more people are also living with long-term symptoms of COVID. Fatigue. Heart problems. Stomach problems. Lung problems. Confusion. Symptoms that can last for months or even a year or more after the infection clears.

As many as 21 percent of Americans who caught the SARS-CoV-2 virus this summer ended up suffering from long COVID starting four weeks after infection, according to a new study from City University of New York.

That’s up from 19 percent in figures the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in June.

Compare those numbers to the recent rates of death and hospitalization from COVID in the U.S.—three percent and .3 percent, respectively. Long COVID is by far the likeliest serious outcome from any novel-coronavirus infection. And possibly getting likelier.

The CUNY study, which is not yet peer-reviewed, focused on American adults, but the results have implications for the whole world. Globally, long-term symptoms are partially replacing COVID deaths. After all, more COVID survivors means more people at risk of long-term symptoms. And long COVID is cumulative—people get sick and stay sick for a while.

“Despite an increased level of protection against long COVID from vaccination, it may be that the total number of people with long COVID in the U.S. is increasing,” epidemiologist Denis Nash, the CUNY study’s lead author, told The Daily Beast. That is, every day more people catch long COVID than recover from long COVID.

But understanding long COVID, to say nothing of preventing it, isn’t a priority in the global epidemiological establishment. That needs to change, Nash said. “I believe it is long past time to be focusing on long COVID in addition to preventing hospitalizations and deaths.”

[pnwguy]

Sept 19, 2022 19:57:45 GMT LFC said:

More on long COVID. We could end up with a population that dies sooner and has a collective reduction in its ability to think. Hmmmm. It's starting to sound more and more like COVID was a right-wing radical Republican plot. After all, these are their people!

All over the world, the rates of death and hospitalization from COVID keep dropping. But our successful mitigation of the worst outcomes of the 33-month-old pandemic belie a growing crisis.

More and more people are surviving COVID and staying out of the hospital, but more and more people are also living with long-term symptoms of COVID. Fatigue. Heart problems. Stomach problems. Lung problems. Confusion. Symptoms that can last for months or even a year or more after the infection clears.

As many as 21 percent of Americans who caught the SARS-CoV-2 virus this summer ended up suffering from long COVID starting four weeks after infection, according to a new study from City University of New York.

That’s up from 19 percent in figures the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in June.

Compare those numbers to the recent rates of death and hospitalization from COVID in the U.S.—three percent and .3 percent, respectively. Long COVID is by far the likeliest serious outcome from any novel-coronavirus infection. And possibly getting likelier.

The CUNY study, which is not yet peer-reviewed, focused on American adults, but the results have implications for the whole world. Globally, long-term symptoms are partially replacing COVID deaths. After all, more COVID survivors means more people at risk of long-term symptoms. And long COVID is cumulative—people get sick and stay sick for a while.

“Despite an increased level of protection against long COVID from vaccination, it may be that the total number of people with long COVID in the U.S. is increasing,” epidemiologist Denis Nash, the CUNY study’s lead author, told The Daily Beast. That is, every day more people catch long COVID than recover from long COVID.

But understanding long COVID, to say nothing of preventing it, isn’t a priority in the global epidemiological establishment. That needs to change, Nash said. “I believe it is long past time to be focusing on long COVID in addition to preventing hospitalizations and deaths.”

This weekend I was with a retired nurse friend who keeps her license current so she takes CEC classes every two years.  What she has learned in a Covid class this month is how much "hidden" damage to other organ systems may show up in subsequent years from a Covid infection.  It doesn't get much press coverage.

[LFC]

Well that clears things up. The American right really is a bottomless pit of loons, morons, grifters, idiots, paranoids, and "Christians" which kind includes the whole bunch in a wrapper of God(tm).

[Bact PhD]

”graphene oxide”?!?? I must admit, I hadn’t heard THAT one! But if it’s 98-99% graphene oxide, where are the microchips, fetal cells, and mercury?