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Showing posts with label Infectious Disease. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Infectious Disease. Show all posts
GoFundMe is now GoFuckMe. They royally screwed up announcing the operation was confiscating $10 million in donations to the trucker's convoy --- $10 million! --- and now here comes the inspectors.
The only thing that's changed is the polls, now scaring the living shit out of our authoritarian "knowledge working" pajama-clad overlords who haven't manned the front lines of our entire freakin' economy for the last two years. Dolts. All of them.
A wave of polls taken as the Omicron variant crested across much of the United States shows new signs that the public’s resolve to combat the coronavirus pandemic is waning.
The surveys depict an increasingly frustrated and pessimistic nation that is as worried by the specter of an endless pandemic as it is fearful of the disease. While a majority of voters remain concerned about the coronavirus, the balance of recent polling suggests that the desire to return to normalcy has approached or even overtaken alarm about the virus itself.
A recent Yahoo News/YouGov survey found that 46 percent of respondents thought Americans should “learn to live with” the pandemic “and get back to normal,” while just 43 percent thought “we need to do more to vaccinate, wear masks and test.”
A Republican firm, Echelon Insights, had similar findings, reporting that 55 percent of voters thought Covid-19 should be “treated as an endemic disease that will never fully go away,” like the flu, while 38 percent said it should be “treated as a public health emergency.”
The results are especially striking at a time when coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and even deaths are near record highs. Indeed, the same polls showed that the public’s concern about the virus increased during the Omicron wave. But in a telling indication of the public’s attitudes toward the pandemic, greater worry about the virus has not translated to greater support for measures to stop its spread.
Instead, fears of the virus apparently have been outweighed by mounting frustration with the inconveniences of a pandemic that has stretched into its second year. Three-quarters of adults described themselves as tired or frustrated with the pandemic in a recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey.
Fully 70 percent of Americans agreed with the statement that “it’s time we accept Covid is here to stay and we just need to get on with our lives” in a recent poll by Monmouth University. That survey found that support for vaccine mandates has dropped to just 43 percent from 53 percent in September, while support for masking and social distancing guidelines dropped to 52 percent from 63 percent over the same period.
The findings come at a possible turning point in the pandemic, as several Democratic governors announced intentions to ease some mask mandates over the next month. The growing frustration with pandemic restrictions may help explain some of those early announcements — even as cases reach record levels.
The polls create a delicate challenge for the Biden administration, which never regained its political standing since the rise of the Delta variant dashed last summer’s hopes of a return to normalcy. The growing unease with the pandemic seems to have added to the president’s political woes, and may help explain why the public disapproves of Mr. Biden’s handling of the coronavirus for the first time...
Newsom's lifting California's indoor mask mandate next week, along with now-quivering Democrat governor's around the country trying to innoculate themselves as voters' wrath this November.
Tierra Pearson suspected the winter months would mean a sharp surge in coronavirus cases. So the Chicago mother made sure she and her two sons — seventh- and 10th-graders — were fully vaccinated.
“We were going to be prepared,” she recalled.
But as she kept the TV news on around the clock over much of the last two weeks, watching in dismay as leaders of the Chicago Teachers Union and Mayor Lori Lightfoot battled over safety precautions and schools reopening, Pearson felt far from prepared. She felt helpless.
“We as parents were totally left out of the conversation,” she said. “We had no voice about our schools, and that was truly a shame.”
As the Omicron variant continues to propel a massive surge in infections that has hit many educators and school staff, parents across the nation are faced with painful deja vu: toggling between virtual and in-person schooling and trying to keep up with constantly evolving district policies.
This week the Biden administration announced that it is planning to make 10 million COVID-19 test kits available each month for schools as part of its push to keep classrooms open during this wave of infections — a critical step considering that vaccination rates are lower among children.
Registered nurse Rafael Sanchez, left, evaluates COVID-19 patient.
Overall, 63% of Americans are fully vaccinated, but among children ages 12 to 17 the rate sits at 54% and among those 5 to 11, the rate drops to 17%. (In Vermont, 48% of that age group are vaccinated; in California, nearly 19%; and in Mississippi, 5%.)
But disruptions have occurred and at regular intervals.
On average, about 4% of schools across the country — 4,179 of 98,000 schools — dealt with COVID-19 disruptions such as closures this week, according to Burbio, a K-12 school opening tracker. That’s down slightly from 5,376 schools last week and a fraction of the peak that occurred around Labor Day 2020 when more than 60% of schools were closed, said Dennis Roche, Burbio’s co-founder.
Most of the closures were in the Northeast and Midwest, but some schools were starting to close in the West and South, Roche said. In Minneapolis, schools will go virtual for two weeks starting Friday because of a surge in Omicron cases among teachers. In Louisville, Ky., Jefferson County Public Schools shifted to remote learning because of COVID staffing shortages, while in the Portland, Ore., metro area, school districts moved to remote learning due to surges in cases and teachers being out sick.
Across the U.S., students are threatening boycotts and walkouts. The Oakland Unified School District faces such a strike unless it addresses a list of pandemic health and safety concerns. Students want the district to return to remote learning unless it provides KN95 masks for all kids and are calling for increased testing, among other demands. On Jan. 7, 12 district schools were forced to close after teachers staged a “sickout,” citing COVID worries. About 500 teachers were reported absent. And in New York, hundreds of students in recent days boycotted classes and staged walkouts over concerns about testing and called for remote learning to be implemented.
“We’re really in a pressure cooker situation right now, because American families are holding up the economy, we’re holding up the healthcare system and then we’re also expected to hold up the public education system,” said Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, a network of grass-roots parent groups. “A lot of families across this country are absolutely at their breaking point.”
For many parents who live paycheck to paycheck, taking a few days off when schools close can mean the difference between having groceries or not and making rent or not, Rodrigues said. Beyond the financial loss, many parents worried that their kids’ mental health and grades would deteriorate when schools switch to remote learning.
“When you close down schools over an abundance of caution, understand what you are asking of American families who are already at the brink,” she said.
This week the Clark County School District, which spans Las Vegas and is the nation’s fifth largest school system with more than 320,000 students, announced it was canceling classes for two days due to extreme staffing shortages.
Jessica Atlas, a 46-year-old single mother, was already frustrated with the school district for not planning activities for her son, Ashton, 9, while he quarantined this week after he caught the flu and she tested positive for the coronavirus.
“I feel like the bottom’s falling out,” Atlas said, noting that Ashton had not been sent home with any additional schoolwork.
“There should be a plan in place if you send kids home. But there’s no organization, no real leadership and no real plan to catch these babies failing all over the place.”
The district said there would be no remote learning on the canceled school days.
In Los Angeles, schools saw a massive 130,000-student drop in daily attendance when students returned from winter break this week, the latest pandemic hit to education.
In San Diego, severe staffing shortages led school leaders to warn families of the possibility of “COVID Impact Days” similar to heat or snow days. And in Culver City, district leaders announced that they would close all schools next week to give students and staff time to “recoup and recover.”
Educators across California are in triage mode working to keep campuses open and the state’s 6 million children in class as Omicron-fueled coronavirus cases surge. Save for some notable exceptions, they are managing to do so. But staff and students are strained in new and stressful ways as yet another intense pandemic chapter unfolds at schools.
Amid outbreaks and rocketing infections, districts have closed classrooms; some teachers are trying to figure out how to adjust their lesson plans with fewer than a third of students at their desks; and administrators and other district employees are scrambling to fill in for absent staff. Only two weeks into the spring semester, many are exhausted.
“I’m frustrated for my staff, I see the wear and tear on them, " said Craig Spratt, principal of Cerritos Elementary School in Cerritos. “They’re putting on the bravest of faces. They’re providing the best routine they can for their kids and I’m just doing whatever I can to relieve them of the extra burdens so they can focus on their kids. It’s a very stressful time right now.”
A few districts have delayed the start of the spring semester or closed schools amid the surge, including Montebello Unified and the small Mammoth Unified School District, where schools were ordered closed for three weeks.
The spike in school cases has been swift and dramatic. In Los Angeles County prior to Omicron, the rate of positive cases among students and staff was “extraordinarily low” at about 0.2%, said county Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer in a news briefing this week. Last week, it soared to nearly 15% — or more than 80,000 positive tests.
Health officials are investigating about two dozen school outbreaks — which were largely linked to school sports during the winter break. And Ferrer warned the surge would probably lead to more.
In L.A. Unified, average attendance through Thursday was about 67%, district officials said. All schools remained open for in-person learning and administrators left their offices to help to cover for teacher absences when substitutes could not be found.
San Pedro High School Principal Steve Gebhart said he felt the emptiness of his campus as he walked this week through the school’s quad and near the flagpole during lunch.
About 800 students out of a population of 2,650 were absent early in the week, and about 500 students were absent on Friday, he said.
Students have been hesitant to return amid overwhelming news of the coronavirus surge but started to come back as they saw that school “was safe and all the measures in place were working,” Gebhart said.
The school also had several teachers out each day but managed to cover them with certificated staff without having to combine classes, he said. Gebhart substituted in a health class Wednesday.
In San Diego, officials sent a message to families letting them know that because of the severe challenges facing schools, children would probably experience disruption during the next few weeks — whether it be a substitute, classwork in a study hall-type environment or “instructional time replaced by self-paced activities.”
“These are temporary measures required by the pandemic, and employing these strategies will allow San Diego Unified to keep classrooms open,” officials said.
As a last resort, district officials said they would work with local authorities to declare a “COVID Impact Day,” closing campuses for a day.
In Burbank, where students returned to campus on Jan. 3, attendance fell to about 75% and at least eight classrooms at five different elementary schools have had to close, said Supt. Matt Hill. The district has also leaned on office staff to fill in because of staffing shortfalls.
Districts need more flexibility and support from the state, Hill said. He wants to see the state start distributing coronavirus tests directly to families, rather than placing an additional burden on schools to hand them out. He also wants the state to provide testing clinics for districts so that hundreds of districts aren’t tasked with setting up their own.
In Culver City, district officials announced Friday that because of the spike in coronavirus cases, it would close all schools next week. The K-12 public school system, the first in the nation to issue a coronavirus student vaccination mandate, had recorded 587 student cases since Aug. 2020. Of those, 463 were reported in the last two weeks. The district has 7,100 students and 900 employees.
“Things accelerated too quickly,” Supt. Quoc Tran said. By taking a few days off, “everyone will get the chance to be distant from one another, recoup and recover and come back Monday.”
Students will be sent home with a coronavirus testing kit and they will need to show a negative test to return Jan. 24.
The surge has also led to labor strife, with teachers in San Francisco, Oakland and West Contra Costa staging actions to demand additional safety measures.
In Oakland, students also began circulating a petition echoing teachers’ safety demands. To date, it has been signed by more than 1,200 students. Ayleen Serrano, a petition organizer and a sophomore at MetWest High School, said she has felt the strain of the surge. All her classes are only half full, she said. One has only 7 students instead of 20.
“Even when there’s two or three kids missing it makes a big dent,” she said. “We also can’t learn anything because a lot of the kids, they’ll fall behind.”
Across the state, staffing shortages have led teachers and school officials to take extraordinary measures...
The word is at some schools says students who aren't sick have skipped the first two weeks of classes, and then there are all the real cases the Omicron. A *shit show* is how one teacher described things.
Federal courts considering the Biden administration’s vaccination mandates—including the Supreme Court at Friday’s oral argument—have focused on administrative-law issues. The decrees raise constitutional issues as well. But there’s a simpler reason the justices should stay these mandates: the rise of the Omicron variant.
It would be irrational, legally indefensible and contrary to the public interest for government to mandate vaccines absent any evidence that the vaccines are effective in stopping the spread of the pathogen they target. Yet that’s exactly what’s happening here.
Both mandates—from the Health and Human Services Department for healthcare workers and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for large employers in many other industries—were issued Nov. 5. At that time, the Delta variant represented almost all U.S. Covid-19 cases, and both agencies appropriately considered Delta at length and in detail, finding that the vaccines remained effective against it.
Those findings are now obsolete. As of Jan. 1, Omicron represented more than 95% of U.S. Covid cases, according to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Because some of Omicron’s 50 mutations are known to evade antibody protection, because more than 30 of those mutations are to the spike protein used as an immunogen by the existing vaccines, and because there have been mass Omicron outbreaks in heavily vaccinated populations, scientists are highly uncertain the existing vaccines can stop it from spreading. As the CDC put it on Dec. 20, “we don’t yet know . . . how well available vaccines and medications work against it.”
The Supreme Court held in Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905) that the right to refuse medical treatment could be overcome when society needs to curb the spread of a contagious epidemic. At Friday’s oral argument, all the justices acknowledged that the federal mandates rest on this rationale. But mandating a vaccine to stop the spread of a disease requires evidence that the vaccines will prevent infection or transmission (rather than efficacy against severe outcomes like hospitalization or death). As the World Health Organization puts it, “if mandatory vaccination is considered necessary to interrupt transmission chains and prevent harm to others, there should be sufficient evidence that the vaccine is efficacious in preventing serious infection and/or transmission.” For Omicron, there is as yet no such evidence.
The little data we have suggest the opposite. One preprint study found that after 30 days the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines no longer had any statistically significant positive effect against Omicron infection, and after 90 days, their effect went negative—i.e., vaccinated people were more susceptible to Omicron infection. Confirming this negative efficacy finding, data from Denmark and the Canadian province of Ontario indicate that vaccinated people have higher rates of Omicron infection than unvaccinated people.
Meantime, it has long been known that vaccinated people with breakthrough infections are highly contagious, and preliminary data from all over the world indicate that this is true of Omicron as well. As CDC Director Rochelle Walensky put it last summer, the viral load in the noses and throats of vaccinated people infected with Delta is “indistinguishable” from that of unvaccinated people, and “what [the vaccines] can’t do anymore is prevent transmission.”
There is some early evidence that boosters may reduce Omicron infections, but the effect appears to wane quickly, and we don’t know if repeated boosters would be an effective response to the surge of Omicron. That depends among other things on the severity of disease Omicron causes, another great unknown. According to the CDC, the overwhelming majority of symptomatic U.S. Omicron cases have been mild. The best policy might be to let Omicron run its course while protecting the most vulnerable, naturally immunizing the vast majority against Covid through infection by a relatively benign strain. As Sir Andrew Pollard, head of the U.K.’s Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, said in a recent interview, “We can’t vaccinate the planet every four or six months. It’s not sustainable or affordable.”
In any event, the vaccine mandates before the court don’t require boosters. They define “fully vaccinated” as two doses of Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech or one dose of Johnson & Johnson. Even if boosters would help, the mandates would leave tens or hundreds of thousands of unboosted employees on the job, who have zero or negative protection against Omicron infection, and who would be highly contagious if they become infected. In other words, there is no scientific basis for believing these mandates will curb the spread of the disease.
And the administration appears helpless to do anything about it.
People are saying it's "2020-2." It may even be worse than that. We're not going to lock down again, so everyone's in the atomic freak-out mode. It's not pretty.
Hundreds of first responders in Los Angeles are out sick or quarantined due to Covid-19. A hotel staffing company is flying housekeepers to Florida and Texas to fill in for absent staff. A medical laboratory in Denver doesn’t have enough staff to send people to nursing homes to take blood samples.
The first full week of 2022 was supposed to signal a return to work after the winter holidays. Instead, America called in sick. Employers have been hit by a global wave of Covid-19 illnesses and people missing work because they or their family or co-workers have been exposed to the fast-spreading Omicron variant. School closings and child-care issues are also keeping some workers at home.
“We have gotten to the point this week where there are a number of shifts that nobody can fill,” said Lena DeGloma, owner of Red Moon Wellness spa in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. Six of 25 employees were out Thursday, with two having just come back. Ms. DeGloma returned to work Thursday after quarantining for 10 days because she tested positive for Covid-19.
The recent surge in employee absences is the latest strain on public and private sectors already worn down by the pandemic, supply chain snarls, labor shortages and rising prices. Many employees are reporting mild symptoms as a result of Covid-19, employers say, but must still miss multiple days of work, leaving employers to grapple daily with the question of who will be in and who can’t make it.
An inability to get Covid-19 tests is also a challenge for some people figuring out whether they can work outside the home, travel and congregate with others.
The fresh disruption to the global labor market at the start of the third pandemic year is both familiar and foreign. In the U.S., the seven-day average of daily cases reported surpassed 500,000 for the first time since the 2020 pandemic declaration. Omicron infections are resulting in fewer hospitalizations than earlier variants but the volume of people testing positive or exposed is taking its toll on workplaces—which are already stretched by the tight U.S. labor market.
More than five million Americans could be stuck at home isolating over the coming days, according to Andrew Hunter, senior U.S. economist at Capital Economics. While more people have worked from home since the start of the pandemic, many jobs can’t be done remotely, and though the economic effects of the latest Covid-19 surge could be temporary, he wrote in a report Wednesday it could “deal a significant hit to the economy over the next month or two.”
U.S. health officials have shortened quarantine times for individuals who test positive and have no symptoms. And some employees might be able to work from home while sick. Still, staffing shortages disrupted some essential services this week, from airline flights to in-person learning. New York City’s public transit system operated some bus and subway routes at reduced frequency. A hospital in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., temporarily stopped taking new labor and delivery patients.
Los Angeles officials said Thursday they had adequate staffing for emergency services despite having more than 400 police officers and roughly 300 firefighters and emergency medical personnel who were sick or in quarantine.
“What is so difficult about this illness is you don’t know if you’ve got it until you take a test—and that takes time,” said Terry Bell, co-owner of Salon ILO in Washington, D.C.
Revenue fell by about 50% at Mr. Bell’s business during the pandemic, but no one got sick until mid-December, when the salon had to close for two weeks and cancel about 400 appointments. Fifteen of 18 staff members were diagnosed with Covid-19 following the annual holiday party. All 18 had been vaccinated, and only one hadn’t received a booster shot, said Mr. Bell, who tested negative.
The salon, in business for 41 years, reopened a few days before the New Year’s holiday. Then, this Tuesday, one hairdresser, who had been ill in December, called in to report a sore throat, forcing the salon to cancel another 45 or so appointments.
The hairdresser ended up testing negative, he said, and returned to work Thursday.
Greg Casten, a partner in four family-owned Washington restaurants, now begins his mornings with a health update from his management team. “Every day, there is at least one surprise,” said Mr. Casten, who estimates that, since mid-December, about 35% of his employees have called out because of Covid-19 or a Covid-19 exposure.
At one of Mr. Casten’s restaurants, Nick’s Riverside Grill, two of six employees are out. At Tony and Joe’s Seafood Place, managers waited tables and cleaned dishes this week because so many other staffers were ill or in quarantine.
Mr. Casten said he was relieved to close his restaurants on Monday in response to a winter snowstorm, a step he wouldn’t normally take. “I am strung out and tired,” he said. “We were very happy not to open because of the weather.”
At Rocky Mountain Labs, an independent clinical laboratory in Denver that began offering Covid-19 tests early in the pandemic, Omicron has brought a surge in demand for the tests at the same time that it has taken staff out of commission. Three of the lab’s nine employees were out sick with the virus this week, said co-owner Amy Hicks, and another just gave notice, citing burnout.
To fill all the requests for Covid-19 tests, Ms. Hicks and her husband, a physician and co-owner, have had to pull staff from their second location, a lab that does traditional pathology work. And they have had to reduce some services, such as sending phlebotomists to nursing homes to draw blood and bring the samples back for testing. “We’re so short-staffed we have to tell clients we can’t come out,” she said.
Dan Kesic, president of Chicago-based Hospitality Services Group, contracts with clients including hotels and resorts to provide housekeepers, servers and cooks. Mr. Kesic said at least 30% of the company’s more than 1,000 hourly workers are dealing with Covid-19 this week, either from infection or exposure.
“This week, it’s just like there’s no fix,” he said. ”As you fix something, something else breaks. There’s these expectations from people that you can’t meet.”
To fill the gap, Mr. Kesic said his company is subcontracting work in markets where clients are located, including Florida, Texas and Arizona, as well as paying bonuses to people who can even work up to two weeks on some jobs.
He said the company in recent weeks also paid to fly staff across the country, similar to traveling nurses, to fill hotel housekeeping or other roles. But Covid-19 is also upending those plans, with the recent spate of flight cancellations.
The Omicron variant has battered many businesses that until recently had been able to keep Covid-19 at bay through masking, vaccinations and other safeguards...
There's no rhyme or reason to the latest guidelines.
First it was ten days isolation after a positive test, then corporations complained, especially the airlines. Then the CDC said after five days, if you have no symptoms, you can go back to work. Now you have to have to be tested, or something?
Who knows? And who cares at this point? People are so over it. Done. The Biden administration's handling of the pandemic has been a complete joke.
I have some good news and some bad news, and they’re both the same.
Seven independent lab studies have found that while Omicron’s mutations make it exceptionally good at causing breakthrough cases even in people who have been vaccinated or previously infected, they also render it less able to effectively infect the lower lungs, a step associated with more serious illness. Plus, in country after country where Omicron has spread, epidemiological data shows that vaccines are still helping prevent severe disease or worse.
Why isn’t that unalloyed good news? Because it’s just luck that this highly transmissible variant appears to be less dangerous than other variants to those with prior immunity. If it had been more deadly — as Delta has been — the U.S. government’s haphazard and disorganized response would have put the whole country much more at risk. Even with this more moderate threat, the highest-ranking public health officials are making statements that seem more aimed at covering up or making excuses for ongoing failures, rather than leveling with the public.
Nowhere are these issues more apparent than on the confusing and zigzag messaging around rapid antigen tests and N95 masks, both of which are important weapons in our arsenal.
With a barrage of cases threatening vital services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced on Dec. 29 that people could return to work, masked, five days after they first learned they were infected, arguing that many people are infectious for only a short period. People could return to work even while still sick, as long as their symptoms were abating.
It’s not unreasonable to shorten quarantine for some, especially if they are vaccinated. Other countries have allowed infected people to isolate for a shorter time with the added precaution that they take rapid antigen tests to show they are negative two days in a row.
Why doesn’t the C.D.C. call for that added measure of safety? Its director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, has explained this by saying, “We know that after five days, people are much less likely to transmit the virus and that masking further reduces that risk.”
“Much less likely” isn’t zero, and the likelihood probably varies from person to person. All this means that some would continue to be infectious. So wouldn’t it be great if we could tell who was probably still infectious after five days, and took extra precautions, while allowing people who may be clearing the virus even faster than five days to stop isolating earlier?
Not according to our top officials.
“We opted not to have the rapid test for isolation because we actually don’t know how our rapid tests perform and how well they predict whether you’re transmissible during the end of disease,” Walensky said on Dec. 29. “The F.D.A. has not authorized them for that use.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the president’s chief medical adviser, argued the same, also on Dec. 29. Referring to antigen tests, he said, “If it’s positive, we don’t know what that means for transmissibility” and that these antigen tests aren’t as sensitive as P.C.R. tests.
Might the real reason be that rapid tests are hard to find and expensive here (while they are easily available and relatively cheap in other countries)?
Is it possible that rapid tests are a good way to see who is infectious and who can return to public life — and their lack of sensitivity to minute amounts of virus is actually a good thing? Let’s ask a brilliant scientist and public health advocate — Rochelle Walensky, circa 2020.
Walensky, who was then on the faculty of the Harvard Medical School and chief of the division of infectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital, was a co-author of a paper in September 2020 that declared that the “P.C.R.-based nasal swab your caregiver uses in the hospital does a great job determining if you are infected but it does a rotten job of zooming in on whether you are infectious.”
That’s right, the key question is who is infectious, who can pass on the virus, not whether someone is still harboring some small amount of virus, or even fragments of it. P.C.R. tests can detect such tiny amounts of the virus that they can “return positives for as many as 6-12 weeks,” she pointed out. That’s “long after a person has ceased to pose any real risk of transmission to others.” P.C.R. tests are a bit like being able to find a thief’s fingerprints after he’s left the house.
So what did 2020 Walensky recommend? “The antigen test is ideally suited to yield positive results precisely when the infected individual is maximally infectious,” she and her co-author concluded.
The reason is that antigen tests respond to the viral load in the sample without biologically amplifying the amount and being able to detect even viral fragments, as P.C.R. tests do. So a rapid test turns positive if a sample contains high levels of virus, not nonviable bits or minute amounts — and it’s high viral loads that correlate to higher infectiousness.
What about the objection that rapid antigen tests don’t always detect infections as well as P.C.R. tests can?
The 2020 Walensky wrote that the F.D.A. shouldn’t worry about “false negatives” on rapid tests because “those are true negatives for disease transmission” — meaning that people are unlikely to spread the virus even if they have a bit of virus lingering. In other words, the fact that rapid tests are less likely to turn positive if the viral load isn’t high is a benefit, not a problem.
Rapid tests do have their own considerations. Since you can become infectious even a day or two after getting a negative result on a rapid test, the Walensky of September 2020 noted that rapid tests are most useful if they are used frequently. A paper she co-wrote in July 2020 found that if a test was used every two days it would allow for safely reopening colleges.
The brilliant explanations of Walensky in 2020 leave me at a loss to explain why President Biden said on Dec. 22 that “I wish I had thought about ordering half a billion” rapid tests two months ago. Indeed, why didn’t officials do so two months ago, or 10 months ago?
The administration needs to do more to ramp up production of what should be one crucial tool in controlling the spread of the virus and allowing people to return to normal...
Universities are supposed to be bastions of critical thinking, reason and logic. But the Covid policies they have adopted—policies that have derailed two years of students’ education and threaten to upend the upcoming spring semester—have exposed them as nonsensical, anti-scientific and often downright cruel.
Some of America’s most prestigious universities are leading the charge.
At Georgetown University, fully vaccinated students are randomly tested for Covid every week. Using a PCR test, which can detect tiny amounts of dead virus, asymptomatic students who test positive are ordered to a room in a designated building where they spend 10 days in confinement. Food is dropped off once a day at the door.
I spoke to several students who were holed up. One of them told me she would sometimes call a friend to come and wave at her through the window, just to see a human face. Another told me that the experience in quarantine “totally changed” her feelings about the school. “Everyone’s just fed up at this point,” she said. “People walk around the library and yell at you if you drink a sip of water. And it was during finals.” She told me she is thinking about “transferring to an SEC school just to have an in-person experience.”
Given the fact that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recently changed the official quarantine period from 10 days to five, I reached out to Georgetown’s Chief Public Health Officer, Dr. Ranit Mishori. She told me that Georgetown is still using a 10-day quarantine.
Students are the lowest risk population on planet Earth. Over the last six months, the risk of a person in the broader age group (15-24) dying of Covid or dying with Covid (the CDC does not clearly distinguish), was 0.001%. All or nearly all of those deaths were in a very specific subgroup: unvaccinated people with a medical comorbidity. But despite Georgetown’s strict vaccination, masking, testing, and quarantine requirements, the university announced late last month that “all University events, including meetings with visitors, will need to be held virtually or outdoors,” among many other restrictions.
At Princeton University, fully vaccinated students are not allowed to leave the county unless they are on a sports team. They’re also testing all students twice a week, usurping the scarce testing supply from vulnerable communities so that low-risk, young people can use them.
At Cornell, masks are still the rule—and even recommended outdoors. “Masks must be worn indoors at all times, unless in a private, non-shared space (e.g., dorm room or office); we strongly recommend masking outdoors when physical distancing is not possible,” the school announced in mid-December.
At Amherst, students must double mask if they don’t use a KN95. In nearby Boston, at Emerson College, students are tested twice a week and have stay-in-room orders. The college instructs students to “only leave their residence halls or place of residence for testing, meals, medical appointments, necessary employment, or to get mail.” Seriously.
At these institutions of higher learning and thousands more, science is supposedly held in the highest esteem. So where is the scientific support for masking outdoors? Where is the scientific support for constantly testing fully vaccinated young people? Where is the support for the confinement of asymptomatic, young people who test positive for a virus to which they are already immune on a campus of other immune people?
The data simply do not justify any of it...
With California’s coronavirus surge worsening, the state has issued new recommendations for when people infected with the virus can end their isolation, guidance that is stricter than what was made earlier this week by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
California is now recommending that asymptomatic, coronavirus-infected people can exit isolation after the fifth day following a positive test, but only if they get a negative test result.
By contrast, the CDC’s recommendations don’t ask for a follow-up negative test; the CDC only recommends that those ending isolation continue wearing a mask around other people for five additional days.
Dr. Robert Wachter, chair of the UC San Francisco Department of Medicine, praised California’s stricter guidelines. “Kudos,” Wachter wrote. “Safer than [CDC’s] version.”
Los Angeles County on Thursday reported more than 20,000 new cases, fueled in part by the highly transmissible Omicron variant.
Overall, California’s reported average daily coronavirus caseload has more than quadrupled in the last two weeks — an astonishing rise that has pushed infection levels significantly higher than during the summer surge linked to the Delta variant.
“The risk for virus transmission has never been higher in our county,” Los Angeles County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said Thursday.
The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health endorsed California’s new isolation recommendations and will codify them in its latest local mandatory health order.
The new California recommendations still largely mirror the CDC’s guidelines. Both shorten the minimum time recommended for isolation from 10 days to five for asymptomatic people.
Both the CDC and California also suggest the quarantine of people who are not up-to-date on their booster shots if they have been exposed to someone who tests positive for the coronavirus.
Officials recommend calling 911 if you have difficulty breathing, chest pain or pressure on the chest; bluish lips or face; are confused or hard to wake; or have other emergency symptoms.
The Omicron variant is believed to be two to four times as contagious as the previously dominant Delta. People who are eligible for booster shots but haven’t yet received them are at increased risk for infection.
“Data from South Africa and the United Kingdom demonstrate that vaccine effectiveness against infection for two doses of an mRNA vaccine is approximately 35%. A COVID-19 vaccine booster dose restores vaccine effectiveness against infection to 75%,” the CDC said in a statement.
Here’s a summary of California’s new guidelines to exit isolation...
As President Joe Biden heads into the end of the year, he’s facing a sour reality: The number of Americans who approve of his performance has hit a new low. Just 41 percent of Americans approve of the job he has been doing as president, according to a new PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll. Support among independents alone dropped eight points in a week.
Overall, more than half – 55 percent – of Americans disapprove of Biden’s performance, including 44 percent who strongly disapprove. His disapproval ratings have jumped 20 points since he took office, reaching a record high this month. The number who strongly disapprove jumped 6 points since a Marist poll conducted just one week earlier...
Yeah, one of those postponed is Seahawks at Rams, to which I've got tickets.
It's not too easy organizing a game day at the stadium for the weekend before Christmas. For one thing, this last week was finals week. My oldest still has a term paper to get done by Monday and I gave my last final yesterday. Now I've got a bit more grading to do, then I'm done.
But no, the NFL has to implement protocols and yesterday 29 PLAYERS were listed on the covid inacatives, including Odell Beckham Jr., man!
The game's now Tuesday at 4:00pm, and he's expected to play, but what a pain, sheesh.
The NFL eliminated weekly Covid-19 testing for vaccinated players who are asymptomatic, according to new protocols agreed upon by the league and the players’ union, a move that reverses its past pandemic practice in a bid to keep players from being sidelined while not feeling sick.
The idea of decreasing, not increasing, testing arose as the league suffered through a brutal round of Covid outbreaks. More than 100 players tested positive this week, and the league on Friday postponed three games, to Monday and Tuesday, hoping that decimated team rosters can be stabilized.
“We’re entering a very different phase of this pandemic and in some way battling a very new disease,” Dr. Allen Sills, the NFL’s chief medical officer, said after the new rules were agreed upon. “We’re trying to test smarter and test in a more strategic fashion.”
The move away from testing is a high-profile and potentially divisive shift for the NFL. Earlier in the pandemic, it was envied for testing employees daily in order to keep playing. It now risks a new wrath by reducing its testing to continue playing in the era of vaccines.
Yet as the rapid spread of the Omicron variant takes hold, it could provide a more nuanced option for life going ahead that acknowledges the public’s waning appetite for lengthy quarantines and cancellations at a time when most people have the option of protecting themselves from illness with shots.
“We can’t apply 2020 solutions to the 2021 problems that we’re having,” NFL chief medical officer Dr. Allen Sills said earlier in the week. “We’re often at the tip of the spear in seeing some of these changes before they show up in other elements of society because we do have so many tools at our disposal.”
Under the new protocols, unvaccinated players are still tested daily and anyone who is symptomatic is subject to a test, with players and staff now subject to “enhanced symptom screening.” Vaccinated players will also be subject to targeted spot testing and could be made to take a test if they are deemed a high-risk contact of someone who is positive.
The agreement between the NFL and NFL Players association also paved the way for players to opt out of the rest of the season, with just a few weeks and the playoffs remaining. Players deemed higher risk, based on a number of medical factors, have until Monday to opt out and they would not be paid for the remainder of the season.
The NFL’s possible move raises the question of whether it could be an acceptable compromise to let fully vaccinated asymptomatic people play or party on—as long as it’s only with other fully vaccinated people who face low risks from the virus. .
In a league where almost 95% of players and 100% of staff are vaccinated, the problem isn’t individuals getting sick. It’s players getting removed from action when they test positive despite feeling completely healthy.
Sills noted that while the Omicron variant has rapidly spread, the league is also seeing more cases with little-to-no symptoms. Two-thirds of the players who have tested positive this week are asymptomatic, Sills said. The other third, he said, are suffering very mild symptoms.
Yet under the current protocols, all individuals who test positive have to isolate.
That has led the league to wonder: Is it over-testing? The question has been at the heart of negotiations between the NFL and the NFL Players Association this week as the surge in Covid-19 cases rocked both the country and the sport.
The league took a small step in that direction on Thursday when it announced that some fully vaccinated players who tested positive, but had relatively little virus in their samples, would be allowed back onto the field. The thinking is that their positive test didn’t necessarily mean they were infectious, and that the risk they posed to other vaccinated players was very low. Ignoring the possibility of positive tests altogether would be an extension of that thinking.
It’s an idea that drew support from George Rutherford, professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco—who emphasized that his backing was contingent on near-100% boosted vaccination rates.
“If everybody’s fully vaccinated [including a booster], I could certainly understand how you could get away without testing,” he said. “I think you might be able to tolerate a slightly less aggressive disease control approach.”
A significant concern with this strategy may be treating individuals who have not received a booster shot the same as those who have. Early research into Omicron has also shown that people who aren’t boosted have a lower level of protection against the new variant.
The NFL’s own antibody study on staff members showed the waning immunity from the standard shot regimen while also showing that antibody levels were far higher—and lasted longer—in people who have gotten boosted. A recent memo from the league also required eligible staff to get booster shots, though it stopped short of requiring that for players.
“Boosters are the best way to restore that immunity,” Sills said Saturday.
The same question has reverberated around other sports leagues. A surge of cases across the NBA compelled the league to update its testing protocols for the two weeks after Christmas. Under the new guidance, boosted players aren’t subject to the daily testing required of fully vaccinated players, though there may be exceptions for teams battling potential outbreaks.
The idea for scaling back testing has met some pushback. Before the season—and before Covid-19 was raging inside locker rooms—the NFLPA had pushed for daily testing. That’s why the discussions between the league and its union have ranged from increasing testing to doing it in a more targeted manner.
Daily testing was a critical tool as the NFL navigated its first pandemic season in 2020. It allowed the league to quickly remove positive personnel and—along with various social distancing, masking and contact tracing measures—thwart the spread of the virus inside clubs.
That changed in 2021 to account for the widespread availability of safe vaccines that large clinical trials showed were effective at preventing serious illness due to the virus. Under the current rules, the small number of unvaccinated players are tested daily while vaccinated players are tested once a week, though that can increase in outbreak scenarios.
The new testing cadence wasn’t problematic as the league coasted through most of its season. That changed this week when the Los Angeles Rams, Cleveland Browns and Washington Football team experienced outbreaks that led to the first game postponements of the season...
