CORONA Main Coronavirus thread

[marsh]

[COMMENT: Could be why California's case numbers are so good and "flattening the curve."]

California’s coronavirus testing backlog is a vast 64% unprocessed

The coronavirus testing backlog in California remains at a staggering 59,500 — far more...

www.sfchronicle.com

California’s coronavirus testing backlog is a vast 64% unprocessed

Catherine Ho April 2, 2020 Updated: April 2, 2020 9:54 p.m.

1of2A medical professional administers a coronavirus (COVID-19) test during a drive-thru testing station on March 26, 2020 in Daly City, California. New coronavirus testing stations are opening up each day in the San Francisco Bay Area.Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

2of2Medical professionals administer a coronavirus (COVID-19) test during a drive-thru testing station on March 26, 2020 in Daly City, California. New coronavirus testing stations are opening up each day in the San Francisco Bay Area.Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The coronavirus testing backlog in California remains at a staggering 59,500 — far more than other states publicly reporting numbers for pending test results — but Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday promised a “best in class” solution will be announced soon by a newly formed state testing task force.

California has struggled with test shortages that have prevented many people from getting tested at all, as well as slow processing times that have forced many doctors and patients to wait up to 10 days for results. The state ranks 39th out of 50 states and the District of Columbia in per capita testing, according to a Vox analysis of state testing data collected by the Covid Tracking Project.

About 92,500 tests had been conducted in California as of Wednesday, according to the state Department of Public Health. Roughly 33,000 results have been received and 59,500 are pending — 64%. Although only four other states report their backlogs — Florida, New Hampshire, Hawaii and Nebraska — the next worst on the list, Florida, has only 1,280 pending results, or 1.6% of tests conducted.

Delayed test results hamper doctors’ ability to make quick decisions about whether to isolate sick patients, and hinder public health officials’ ability to fully understand the extent of spread in real time.

The introduction this week of rapid-response coronavirus tests, including as a 45-minute test made by the Sunnyvale company Cepheid and a five-minute test by Abbott, may help ease the testing backlog. But Newsom said these tests won’t be widely available enough to make an immediate dent in the state’s testing backlog. California received only about 100 of the five-minute Abbott tests — a quantity the governor described as “insignificant.”

Part of the backlog appears to be tied to one major commercial lab, Quest Diagnostics, which is struggling to process an influx of tests quickly. The company said Wednesday it has 12 labs with 115,000 tests pending — including tests from around the country. Quest declined to say how many of those are California tests. And the state Department of Public Health declined to say how many of California’s 59,500 pending tests are held up at Quest.

The inability to do widespread testing is partly because of a worldwide shortage in supplies needed to collect samples and process the tests, including chemical reagents, swabs, extraction kits and protective gear for doctors who are collecting samples from sick patients.

But it remains unclear why California is near the bottom in overall testing, when compared with other states.

Without quick, widespread testing — and a far smaller backlog — health officials are unlikely to lift the state’s shelter-in-place restrictions.

Reopening workplaces and other institutions means cases are likely to tick up again, and health officials will need rapid testing to identify infected individuals and trace their contacts to avoid a second spread of the virus.

“We need to monitor trends so we know the next time (cases are) going up (and if) we need to shut things down again,” said Dr. Cyrus Shahpar, an epidemiologist who previously oversaw the global rapid response team at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “The strategy will be containment. That requires massive testing, like South Korea. So we can’t release things until we have those things in place.”

Newsom said his upcoming announcement will address both diagnostic and serology tests. The latter detects the presence of antibodies in blood, which indicate whether a person has ever been infected with the virus.

“We have a new task force on tests and will provide some good news about our capacity to substantially increase our tests in the state of California,” Newsom said. “We have a remarkable collection of individuals now advising us to get to the next level, which could be best in class from an international perspective, not just a national perspective in terms of improving the time to diagnostics and ability to get more samples.”

 

[bev]

OMEN Part 2



Maybe it was meaningless. Seems less so today, though. Make of it what you will. I mean, look, the wind was not something magical — it was from Hurricane Erin, far offshore, though it just happened to start blowing at that precise time, and to stop very close to the time that the ritual reading of the names stopped. And my friend, who was visibly distressed when I arrived at her apartment, had either just that afternoon noticed a dramatic tear in a flag that had been ripped for some time, or that flag had somehow fallen apart that morning, even though it was under glass in a sealed frame.

Like I said, make of it what you will. We will never really know if it was a coincidence, or a meaningful coincidence. No question, though, but that the United States has not had a good 21st century — and it just got unimaginably worse.

Question to the room: have you ever had precognition of the future, or witnessed something you consider to have been a portent, a sign of things to come? If so, tell the story.

I would request that such posts be in a different thread, please.

 

[Trivium Pursuit]

If a coronavirus is 160 nm in size do you really think a N95-100 are really going to stop there transfer. It might make you feel good but you're just pissing in the wind.

My understanding is that, while the virus particle is in fact that small in size, when encountered in public it typically is attached to a globule of saliva or something that is much larger and that the mask blocks the total aggregate of which the virus is a part.

 

[marsh]

Shelter reports first SF homeless person to test positive for coronavirus as city seeks contacts

The individual was taken to a hotel and listed in good condition, health officials said....

www.sfchronicle.com

Shelter reports first SF homeless person to test positive for coronavirus as city seeks contacts
Kevin Fagan and Alejandro Serrano April 2, 2020 Updated: April 2, 2020 11:09 p.m.

1of6Exterior views of the Division Circle Navigation Center in Oakland, Calif, on Thursday, April 11, 2019. Supervisor Matt Haney plans to introduce an ordinance next week that would require San Francisco to build a Navigation Center in every district.Photo: Michael Short / Special to The Chronicle

2of6Exterior views of the Division Circle Navigation Center in Oakland, Calif, on Thursday, April 11, 2019. Supervisor Matt Haney plans to introduce an ordinance next week that would require San Francisco to build a Navigation Center in every district.Photo: Michael Short / Special to The Chronicle

3of6Mayor London Breed and Vallejo Mayor Bob Sampayan meet with Paul Forbes, who is staying at the Division Circle Navigation Center in the Mission District. The center added 60 new beds on Monday, Sept. 16, 2019.Photo: SF Chronicle Reporter Kevin Fagan

The first homeless person to test positive for the coronavirus in San Francisco was living in a city shelter, officials announced Thursday, setting off a race to trace everyone the individual has recently interacted with, as officials tried to contain a potential outbreak among the city’s most vulnerable residents.

Health officials said they isolated the person — who was at the Division Circle Navigation Center — in a hotel room, where they were described as being in “good condition.” Officials said it was unclear where or how the person got the coronavirus.

Recent counts from state and federal sources have fewer than a dozen total homeless COVID-19 cases in California and fewer than 300 nationwide.

City officials said the shelter remains open, and that masks have been provided to all of the center’s residents and staff, with instructions to wear them at all times. Health officials are trying to trace every person the infected individual contacted in and outside of the shelter. The gender and age of the individual was not disclosed.

A doctor and health workers were also deployed to the shelter to conduct symptom and temperature screenings for all residents and staff, while a cleaning crew was being dispatched to disinfect the facility, which is located at 224 South Van Ness Ave. and houses about 180 people.

Health officials said any residents with symptoms will be tested and quarantined at hotel rooms. Other shelter residents will be moved out of the shelter to hotels “based on their risk of exposure and risk of disease,” which includes vulnerable people over 60 or with underlying conditions, they said.

Abigail Stewart-Kahn, interim director of the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, said the city had planned for weeks in anticipation of the first coronavirus patient at a homeless shelter.

“The well being of our homeless neighbors is our top priority, and we will continue to work in partnership with our nonprofit service providers, (Department of Public Health) and the entire city to aggressively contain the virus and protect our community,” Stewart-Kahn said in a statement. “To the Division Circle Navigation Center community, I am here for you, HSH and DPH are here for you as is the entire city.”

Jennifer Friedenbach, director of the Coalition on Homelessness, called the development “very, very frustrating and scary.” Advocates for the homeless have urged city officials for weeks to move people from group living situations like shelters to hotel rooms, where they can quarantine if they must.

“This has been our fear. We are really scared,” Friedenbach said. “The folks who live at that Navigation Center are very vulnerable ... this was exactly why we had been pushing them to stop the practice of having them sleep one on top of the other.”

City homeless officials said they have been racing to set up overflow accommodations so they can cut the 2,000-person population in San Francisco shelters by about half. That would allow them to increase the physical distancing between beds to the recommended 6 feet, instead of the current 3 feet or less.

Trent Rhorer, director of San Francisco’s Human Services Agency who is in charge of emergency housing, said officials hopes to meet that goal next week.

The huge Moscone West convention center will be open as an overflow shelter to take transfers by Friday, he said, and it will have 394 beds. Two other sites “are in negotiation,” he said, and if they come online, they will bring the total to 850 beds.

The city is also planning to move vulnerable homeless people who are 60 years or older, or have underlying conditions, into hotels rooms.

Rhorer said he expected to have 2,000 rooms in 10 hotels available by Friday evening, but those will not just be for homeless quarantines. They will also house health care workers needing respite and the most vulnerable among 19,000 people living in SRO hotels and permanent supportive housing. Those types of housing often have shared kitchens and other common spaces, making isolation difficult.

Housing homeless people in hotel rooms requires extra staffing for case management and counseling, he said. Many chronically homeless people have mental or substance abuse issues, “and you can’t just give them a room and say, ‘here you go,’” he said. “They need help while they’re inside.”

Also Thursday, five city supervisors, including Hillary Ronen, whose district includes the Division Circle shelter, issued a statement saying they intend to introduce an emergency ordinance on Tuesday requiring “that at least 1,000 rooms be used for unhoused people currently in congregate settings like shelters.

“We cannot wait any longer,” they wrote. “We will mandate that the city lease an estimated 14,000 hotel rooms by the time the coronavirus is expected to reach peak infection on April 28.”

Ronen and several other supervisors held a news conference at the shelter Thursday afternoon to emphasize the urgency of their demand.

“We have the hotel rooms, we have the money, we have the staffing, why wouldn’t we do this?” Ronen said. “Why wouldn’t we do this right now and save thousands of lives?”

City planners have set a target of renting 4,500 hotel rooms during the crisis, with 1,000 of those set aside for health workers so they may rest and isolate themselves from their families.

Randy Quezada, spokesman for the city’s Emergency Operations Center, said the plan for now is to stick to that target, with the specific parameters regarding homeless.

“The city’s strategy is led by scientists and health experts, and for homeless people that means housing only the most vulnerable, those who need to isolate but can’t and those who have coronavirus. If the guidance we’re getting from science changes we can adapt, for but now that is the strategy. Science has to lead the way we make these decisions.”

National guidelines from the Centers for Disease and Control and Prevention advise that homeless people who don’t show signs of COVID-19 or who aren’t in a vulnerable category should remain in homeless camps, but be encouraged to keep 6 feet of space between them and supplied with sanitary gear. All counties in the Bay Area have been using those guidelines.

Rhorer estimated that securing and maintaining 14,000 hotel rooms could cost around $60 million a month in rent and staffing — at a time when the city is facing a huge budget deficit because of costs associated with the pandemic.

“A lot of the homeless on the street are not able to self-care in hotel rooms, and it’s potentially dangerous for them to be placed in there without support,” he said. “So they need staffing.”

 

[parsonswife]

Sorry if this has been covered
Just saw on Drudge Dr Brix saying to not go to grocery store/ pharmacy For next two weeks.

 

[Intestinal Fortitude]

Wars on the Brink (current focus coronavirus)

@WarsontheBrink
·
17h

JUST IN: 581 new cases of #Coronavirus and 9 new deaths in Russia Total reaches 4,731 confirmed cases and 43 deaths

 

[danielboon]

Coronavirus Poll: 9 in 10 Children Report ‘Happiness' Staying Home

A gallup poll shows a large majority of children report experiencing “enjoyment” and “happiness” staying at home with their family.

www.breitbart.com

Coronavirus Poll: 9 in 10 Children Experiencing ‘Enjoyment,’ ‘Happiness’ at Home with Family

50

file/Getty ImagesPENNY STARR4 Apr 202051

Children may be benefiting from the stay-at-home orders many states have in place during the coronavirus outbreak in the United States. According to a Gallup poll, a large majority of children report “enjoyment” and “happiness” while spending their days with their families.

Gallup reported on its survey of 1,039 U.S. adults who are parents of children under the age of 18:



Gallup noted that parents also reported feeling enjoyment or happiness but not as much as their children. But children also were more likely than their parents to be bored.

The Gallup poll was conducted March 24-27 of adults who are members of the Gallup Panel using random sampling.

The methodology portion of the poll said:

“For results based on any individual sample, the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 6 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level. Margins of error for subgroups are higher.”

Luke 1:17

 

[marsh]

Bay Area nursing homes struggle to slow coronavirus spread

Even as hopes rise that the Bay Area is beginning to flatten the curve, significant risks...

www.sfchronicle.com

Bay Area nursing homes struggle to slow coronavirus spread

Ron Kroichick April 4, 2020 Updated: April 4, 2020 5:53 p.m.

1of4Signage outside the Laguna Honda Hospital entrance states that visitors are not allowed in.Photo: Jana Asenbrennerova / Special to The Chronicle

2of4Dr. Chris Farnitano, Contra Costa County’s health officer, said at a news conference Friday that 27 people at Orinda Care Center, including elderly patients, have tested positive for coronavirus.Photo: Courtesy of Contra Costa County

3of4More than two dozen people have tested positive for coronavirus at the Orinda Care Center.Photo: Yalonda M. James / The Chronicle

News broke Friday that 27 people at an Orinda nursing home had tested positive for the coronavirus. One day later, the total at San Francisco’s Laguna Honda Hospital climbed to 14.

By now, it’s clear nursing homes are a treacherous frontier in the effort to slow the virus.

“You can blow up all the numbers in a heartbeat if you had a big outbreak at a nursing home,” said George Rutherford, a professor of epidemiology at UCSF, “and (Orinda) is a big outbreak.”

Twenty-four of the 45 residents at Orinda Care Center tested positive, with two of them hospitalized, said Karl Fischer, a spokesman for Contra Costa County Health Services. Three staff members also tested positive.

All residents and employees at the facility have been tested, Fischer said. He characterized the total number of tests as between 70 and 80.

The issue clearly has the attention of Gov. Gavin Newsom. At a news conference Saturday, he said stamping out the coronavirus at nursing homes was a top priority.

“We are seeing hot spots,” Newsom said, mentioning facilities in San Diego and San Bernardino as well as Orinda. “Some of these facilities where two-thirds of the patients are testing positive — people (are) losing their lives, people (are) losing their loved ones.

“This is a focus, disproportionate to so many others.”

The state also is working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to help with contact tracing and other technical issues, Newsom said.

The nursing home in San Bernardino County Newsom mentioned reported 57 cases and two deaths this past week. Public health officials long have feared a similarly devastating outbreak at Laguna Honda, a 780-bed, city-run facility.

Laguna Honda reported two new cases Saturday, bringing its total to 14, according to the city’s Department of Emergency Management. Eleven of the confirmed cases are staff members and three are residents.

Ninety-four patients at Laguna Hospital have been tested, as have 278 staff members.

Rutherford, the UCSF professor, traced the increased focus on nursing homes to what happened the past two months at the Life Care Center in Kirkland, Wash. That facility was linked to 37 coronavirus deaths.

In mid-March, Bay Area county health officials ordered nursing homes to ban visitors, cancel group gatherings and follow strict health protocols.

Rutherford is among those advising Grant Colfax, San Francisco’s public health director.

Laguna Honda is “way high up on the agenda,” Rutherford said.

Six patients at the San Francisco VA Medical Center also have tested positive for the coronavirus. That includes two in-patients and four out-patients, according to the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs.

The virus has struck a number of other facilities.

As of Friday, 2,184 veterans across the country have tested positive for the virus and 78 have died. The California Department of Veterans Affairs announced Saturday that one resident at its facility in West Los Angeles had tested positive; two employees at the VA facility in Redding also tested positive last week.

In the Bay Area, the concerns extend beyond Laguna Honda and Orinda. For example, five residents tested positive at Atria Burlingame, an assisted-living facility. Two of the five died, Mike Gentry, senior vice president of care, confirmed in an email.

A report last month by ABC/Channel 7 indicated there were 13 confirmed cases at Pacifica Nursing & Rehab Center; the facility would not provide numbers when asked Saturday. Also, on Friday, officials announced that the Canyon Springs Post-Acute Care facility in San Jose had 11 infections, including seven residents and four staff members.

Santa Clara County officials subsequently announced they are providing assistance to long-term care facilities, including Canyon Springs, in an effort to reduce the spread of COVID-19. The county has supplied personal protective equipment to Canyon Springs at the facility’s request.

In addition, the county will provide coronavirus-related support to all local nursing homes, skilled nursing facilities and assisted-living facilities in the count. That support will include assessments of infection prevention; daily monitoring of facilties with suspected or confirmed cases; regularly updated guidance about new requirements and resources; and technical assistance for infection control.

 

[PanBear]

Me, pretending this is a “challenge” and not just my normal everyday behavior...
#stayhomechallenge

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1239724895333949441

View: https://twitter.com/middlechild62/status/1239724895333949441

 

[Tarryn]

"What is really fascinating, however, is that while this thread was dismissed and censored as utter nonsense just two months ago (and got many banned for even daring to mention it), none other than David Ignatius, The Washington Post's favorite establishment columnist, is now questioning China's narrative and raising his own doubts as to the origin of the virus, writing that ...as China dished wild, irresponsible allegations of its own."

You CANNOT ACCESS this link--the stupid paper puts up an ad over it requiring a $29 subscription to get access.. Does anyone here HAVE access, that could copy / paste the article mentioned?

I was able to archive the link and read thecarchived version. Most of the articles behind a paywall, you can archive using archive.is or the way back machine.
Archive link
How did covid-19 begin? Its initial origin story is shaky. - The Wash…

Article text
How did covid-19 begin? Its initial origin story is shaky.

A woman has her temperature checked Thursday by a volunteer at the entrance to a neighborhood in Wuhan, China. (Hector Retamal/Afp Via Getty Images)

By
David Ignatius
Columnist
April 2, 2020 at 10:56 p.m. UTC
The story of how the novel coronavirus emerged in Wuhan, China, has produced a nasty propaganda battle between the United States and China. The two sides have traded some of the sharpest charges made between two nations since the Soviet Union in 1985 falsely accused the CIA of manufacturing AIDS.
U.S. intelligence officials don’t think the pandemic was caused by deliberate wrongdoing. The outbreak that has now swept the world instead began with a simpler story, albeit one with tragic consequences: The prime suspect is “natural” transmission from bats to humans, perhaps through unsanitary markets. But scientists don’t rule out that an accident at a research laboratory in Wuhan might have spread a deadly bat virus that had been collected for scientific study.
“Good science, bad safety” is how Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) put this theory in a Feb. 16 tweet. He ranked such a breach (or natural transmission) as more likely than two extreme possibilities: an accidental leak of an “engineered bioweapon” or a “deliberate release.” Cotton’s earlier loose talk about bioweapons set off a furor, back when he first raised it in late January and called the outbreak “worse than Chernobyl.”
AD


[Full coverage of the coronavirus pandemic]
President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo added to the bile last month by describing the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus” and the “Wuhan virus,” respectively.
China dished wild, irresponsible allegations of its own. On March 12, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lijian Zhao charged in a tweet: “It might be [the] US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan.” He retweeted an article that claimed, without evidence, that U.S. troops might have spread the virus when they attended the World Military Games in Wuhan in October 2019.
China retreated on March 22, when Ambassador to the United States Cui Tiankai told “Axios on HBO” that such rumors were “crazy” on both sides. A State Department spokesman said Cui’s comment was “welcome,” and Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged in a March 27 phone call to “focus on cooperative behavior,” a senior administration official told me.
AD



What went wrong with coronavirus testing in the U.S. | The Fact Checker


Testing for the novel coronavirus is a crucial part of slowing the spread of the disease. Here’s how the U.S. failed to provide tests that worked quickly. (Sarah Cahlan, Meg Kelly, Elyse Samuels/The Washington Post)
To be clear: U.S. intelligence officials think there’s no evidence whatsoever that the coronavirus was created in a laboratory as a potential bioweapon. Solid scientific research demonstrates that the virus wasn’t engineered by humans and that it originated in bats.
But how did the outbreak occur? Solving this medical mystery is important to prevent future pandemics. What’s increasingly clear is that the initial “origin story” — that the virus was spread by people who ate contaminated animals at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan — is shaky.
Scientists have identified the culprit as a bat coronavirus, through genetic sequencing; bats weren’t sold at the seafood market, although that market or others could have sold animals that had contact with bats. The Lancet noted in a January study that the first covid-19 case in Wuhan had no connection to the seafood market.
AD


There’s a competing theory — of an accidental lab release of bat coronavirus — that scientists have been puzzling about for weeks. Less than 300 yards from the seafood market is the Wuhan branch of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Researchers from that facility and the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology have posted articles about collecting bat coronaviruses from around China, for study to prevent future illness. Did one of those samples leak, or was hazardous waste deposited in a place where it could spread?
Richard Ebright, a Rutgers microbiologist and biosafety expert, told me in an email that “the first human infection could have occurred as a natural accident,” with the virus passing from bat to human, possibly through another animal. But Ebright cautioned that it “also could have occurred as a laboratory accident, with, for example, an accidental infection of a laboratory worker.” He noted that bat coronaviruses were studied in Wuhan at Biosafety Level 2, “which provides only minimal protection,” compared with the top BSL-4.
Ebright described a December video from the Wuhan CDC that shows staffers “collecting bat coronaviruses with inadequate [personal protective equipment] and unsafe operational practices.” Separately, I reviewed two Chinese articles, from 2017 and 2019, describing the heroics of Wuhan CDC researcher Tian Junhua, who while capturing bats in a cave “forgot to take protective measures” so that “bat urine dripped from the top of his head like raindrops.”
AD


[The Opinions section is looking for stories of how the coronavirus has affected people of all walks of life. Write to us.]
And then there’s the Chinese study that was curiously withdrawn. In February, a site called ResearchGate published a brief article by Botao Xiao and Lei Xiao from Guangzhou’s South China University of Technology. “In addition to origins of natural recombination and intermediate host, the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan. Safety level may need to be reinforced in high risk biohazardous laboratories,” the article concluded. Botao Xiao told the Wall Street Journal in February that he had withdrawn the paper because it “was not supported by direct proofs.”
Accidents happen, human or laboratory. Solving the mystery of how covid-19 began isn’t a blame game, but a chance for China and the United States to cooperate in a crisis, and prevent a future one.

 

[marsh]

Coronavirus ethics: Which patients get ventilators, and how will California hospitals decide?

Coronavirus ethics: Which patients get ventilators, and how will California hospitals decide?

Carolyn Said April 4, 2020 Updated: April 4, 2020 1:13 p.m.

Bloom Energy staffers work at a testing station for ventilators in Sunnyvale in March.

Coronavirus cases could surge in California — as they did in China, Italy and now New York. Hospitals overwhelmed with patients desperately sick with COVID-19 would have to choose who gets limited resources such as ICU beds or ventilators.

“All of us in the critical care community knew it was possible that some day we would not be able to provide critical care to all who would benefit from it, but none of us have had to grapple with that on a day-to-day, hour-to-hour basis before,” said Dr. Scott Halpern, professor of medicine, epidemiology and medical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania. “The consequences of the decisions we are likely going to have to make during this pandemic will be stark.”

Those decisions literally would be a matter of life and death.

COVID-19 attacks the upper respiratory system, leaving some patients gasping for breath. About 6% get critically ill and need ICU care. For many of those, being intubated and placed on a ventilator is their best hope. But if there are too many cases at once, hospitals will not have enough ventilators.
“Rationing of care is something that we don’t usually talk about; this is the first time many are hearing about it,” said Melis Alkin, a clinical psychologist specializing in bioethics who works with Pasadena’s Headington Institute, which provides therapy and training to first responders. “If I go to the hospital, will I be able to get care? That is a legitimate fear and people want transparency.”

For medical professionals risking their own health to tend to patients, the prospect of not having enough resources to save lives is wrenching.

When Dr. Andra Blomkalns, chair of the Stanford Department of Emergency Medicine, saw New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo warn Thursday that the state could exhaust its ventilator supply in six days, “I refused to believe it,” she said. “I was in denial. That can’t possibly happen here in the United States and I won’t let my brain go there.”

Triage — the selection of patients and the assignment of care by some kind of priority — is a system that typically is applied on battlefields or in disaster zones.

As the coronavirus evolves into a slow-moving disaster, triage will be necessary.

In California each hospital or medical system devises its own triage plan, following broad guidelines from the Department of Public Health. Hospitals are now updating their ethics policies, creating triage teams — and most importantly, urgently seeking more ventilators so their choices might be less brutal.

The state guidelines seek to prevent discrimination on age, race, ability to pay or other factors. Already disability rights groups and others have said they fear people with intellectual disabilities might get less consideration for life-saving measures under policies in Alabama and Washington, for instance.

Halpern and Dr. Douglas White, chair of ethics in critical care medicine at the University of Pittsburgh, have created a framework called “A model hospital policy for allocating scarce critical care resources” that many institutions nationwide and in California are using as a base for crafting their own policies.

The goal is “to do the greatest good for the greatest number,” Halpern said. “We want to save the most lives but also save the most life-years — we want people to live longer after hospitalization.”

The model, developed with community members, ethicists, physicians and experts in disaster medicine, uses a point system to assess patients’ likelihood of survival. Some of its considerations resemble those already used to allocate transplant organs.

It calls for triage teams of a doctor, nurse and database manager to allocate resources, thus avoiding doctors having to make bedside decisions on the fly.

“It’s an incredibly emotionally difficult decision if you are taking care of a patient to also think about ‘Do I give this resource to someone else?’” White said. “Triage officers will be more objective, consistent and better understand the rules for making these decisions.”

But lengthy deliberations won’t always be possible, especially in the ER.

“If someone rolls in through the ambulance bay and they’re blue, the decision (to intubate) needs to be made within minutes if not seconds,” Stanford’s Blomkalns said. “We’re not going to sit around a dying person and send something to committee.”

She’s thankful that Stanford has an adequate supply of ventilators and is working to find more. If ventilators do become scarce, other breathing treatments such as extra oxygen probably will be tried first, she said.

Alex Hawks, a biomedical technician with Cure Biomedical, tests ventilators at Bloom Energy in Sunnyvale in March. One question medical ethicists must face is what to do if there aren’t enough ventilators to go around, as hospitals become deluged with COVID-19 patients. Photo: Beth LaBerge / Associated Press

Ventilators aren’t the only resource likely to be scarce. Respiratory therapists to monitor their use also are crucial.

“Ventilators don’t run themselves,” White said. “These are complex machines that need to be managed minute to minute for really sick patients.”

Even standard procedures such as CPR could become an issue, especially with the lack of personal protective equipment.

Who gets a ventilator?

In deciding which patients get access to potentially life-saving interventions such as ventilators and ICU beds, these are the “resource allocation” criteria California recommends and those it suggests avoiding.

Appropriate criteria​	Inappropriate criteria​
Likelihood of survival​	Ability to pay​
Change in quality of life​	Provider’s perception of social worth​
Duration of benefit​	Patient contribution to disease​
Urgency of need​	Past use of resources​
Amount of resources required​	​

Source: California Department of Public Health, “Standards and Guidelines for Healthcare Surge During Emergencies, Volume 1”

“CPR puts health care workers at uniquely high risk,” Halpern said. “Providing CPR to one (COVID-19) patient could likely lead to a whole team having to quarantine for two weeks, taking them out of the clinical workforce. It’s not fair to do something for one person that potentially sacrifices the well-being of many other people if those clinicians are not available to care for them.”

Another ethical issue hospitals are confronting involves restricting visits to infected patients.

“That’s caused a lot of moral distress for health care providers,” said David Magnus, director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics. “For patients it’s very hard to be sick and alone in the hospital. And it makes it harder to have serious conversations with families about end-of-life issues if they’re not physically present.”

Even once the pandemic has passed, the trauma and grief of having had to make these grim choices may linger for many medical professionals, Alkin said.

“Moral distress is common in tragedies where you know the right thing to do but it is impossible to do because of certain restrictions,” she said. Health care professionals in China already have reported depression, anxiety and insomnia. “You could expect a lot of survivor guilt among medical professionals related to family members and colleagues who die,” she said.

Meanwhile, medical professionals are planning, preparing — and hoping.

“A lot of people are putting a lot of effort into doing everything they can to stop (the need for triage) from happening,” Magnus said. “But the reality is in some hot spots, the number of patients very quickly exceeds the institution’s resources to provide ventilator support for every patient who needs it.”

“We’re bracing for the storm that hasn’t arrived yet,” Blomkalns said. “We are holding our breath every day.”

 

[Squid]

Garbage barges in sealed body bags,weighted down and into the atlantic 50 miles off shore. Nuff said

Come on now, are you not aware that we have a new invention called reefer truck. The plan for mass casualty event has always included these to store bodies until they can be handled. We may be cremating them because of pathogen spread concerns but I don’t see us dumping them into the ocean.

 

[Doomer Doug]

The only reason we are still using reefer trucks is because we haven't lost physical control. My study of plagues is they either either away or they spiral into chaos. Right now New York city and state are dealing with 700 bodies a DAY. When they are dealing with 5000 a day, they will pile them on barges and dump them onto the ocean as fast as they can. Every one of the bodies in the reefer trucks can kill somebody handling them. Yep, New York city is on the verge of social collapse and dealing with toxic corpses will strike terror, just like it did in all the other plagues I read about. You are thinking modern, functional, in co trol and i am thinking chaos, medieval and hysterical people.

 

[Squid]

Ex CIA: U.S. 'Collateral Damage' of Chinese Lies About Severity of 'Xi's Chernobyl,' Coronavirus

The U.S. is "collateral damage" of Chinese communist officials' lies about the extent of the novel coronavirus outbreak within their country.

www.breitbart.com

Ex CIA: U.S. ‘Collateral Damage’ of Chinese Lies About Severity of ‘Xi’s Chernobyl,’ Coronavirus
1,601

Xie Huanchi/Xinhua via APEDWIN MORA4 Apr 2020230

The United States is the “collateral damage” of Chinese communist officials’ lies about the extent of the novel coronavirus outbreak within their country, a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) station chief told Breitbart News.
During the latest edition of the satellite radio show Breitbart News Saturday, Daniel Hoffman, a former Chief of Station with the CIA, told host Matt Boyle the deadly and highly contagious coronavirus that spilled over into the world from China is dictator Xi Jinping’s “Chernobyl.”

Hoffman declared:

Chernobyl refers to the 1980’s nuclear disaster in Russia attributed to negligence at the hands of Soviet officials who refused to acknowledge the spread of dangerous levels of radiation across Europe stemming from the meltdown of an atomic power plant in Ukraine.

“The Chinese are lying. They’ve lied right from the very beginning about the severity of this health crisis and they did it because they were afraid of their own people. Now, we were collateral damage in that,” Hoffman, who has a combined 30 years of distinguished government service in the CIA and other federal entities, told Breitbart News Saturday, echoing U.S. officials and the American intelligence community.

Hoffman went on to note that there is a role for the U.S. intelligence community to play in lifting the veil on what is taking place in China with the coronavirus.
“We need our intelligence community to mount a full-court press to determine how bad it is in China,” he said. “How fast it’s spreading. What they’re doing about it. This has implications for China’s own stability.”

Anonymous members of the U.S. intelligence community allegedly agree that Beijing has been hiding the severity of the viral outbreak in China, Bloomberg reported this week.

Several U.S. officials – including Vice President Mike Pence, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and members of the White House Coronavirus Task Force – have questioned the legitimacy of China’s official coronavirus death toll and infection rate.

Beijing has vehemently denied distorting the facts about coronavirus cases in China, calling the outbreak “the U.S. and Europe’s New Chernobyl” although the pandemic began within its borders.

However, several news reports show that Beijing hid the severity of the outbreak during the early stages of the epidemic in China, muzzling and jailing whistleblowers and critics in a move that U.S. officials say allowed the disease to gain a firm foothold across the world.

I agree China lied and people died.

But, how was I while working a full time job and checking some secondary sights and following leaked Youtube video’s smuggled out of China able to determine the massive lie in China in Wuhan by Christmas and by the end of the first week in January see it was not being contained and posed a real threat here. I also pointed out at least a couple of times that the reports of no impact to infants or children didn’t match images from China.

I and many others here could see the same thing but for some reason it seems Nobody in the US government could Figure This Same Thing out?

Are the career intelligence types at the Chinese desk so freakin incompetent they missed all of this, or is it staffed by CCP spies and plants, or was the information squelched by deep state managers and directors who are incompetent or worse hid the information from the President for other reasons.

I would seriously like to know. And at some point both the WHO believing CDC and the satellite gazing intel types need to identify and address the massive failures at all levels of the government.

And to you demo types, while the fires were sweeping to US shores you clowns were fiddling your bullstuff fake impeachment.

And many in the country want to hand this crapshow more power and more control! Are you insane?

 

[marsh]

I'm not sold on there being different "strains". There are different clades that have minor or insignificant antigenic shifts. Over time these may develop into different "strains" that people who were previously infected won't have immunity to.

I tend to think that the worse effects are seen because of the different health systems, population differences, etc.

The virologist, Dr. Angel Rasmussen, who was on Chris Martenson's Peak Prosperity episode today said there was no significant difference in the strains.

 

[marsh]

The Federal Reserve has been "buying" mortgage-backed securities from the banks for several months (hundreds of billions of dollars worth). Gee I wonder if they knew something ahead of time?

There was a theory that at the reset, the bankers would be able to take ownership of most of the residences and private property in the US because people would be unable to pay their mortgages (and property taxes.) That is not going to go down easy.

 

[marsh]

Action report. I just baked a surgical mask in a paper bag at 175ﾟ for 40 minutes. The bag did not burst into flame, and when I opened it just now, the mask did not smell funny.

Did it taste like chicken?

 

[Trivium Pursuit]

Did it taste like chicken?

I passed on that test; I figured they would just be empty calories.

 

[OldArcher]

Zerohedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

www.zerohedge.com

Half A Million Chinese People Entered America At The Height Of The COVID-19 Outbreak

Sat, 04/04/2020 - 17:05

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

Around half a million Chinese people, some of them infected with coronavirus, entered America from December to February at the height of the COVID-19 outbreak, new figures show.


The numbers, which were obtained from Commerce Department and U.S. Customs and Border Protection records, were compiled by ABC News.

They show that in the three month period when coronavirus was raging across China, 759,493 people entered the U.S. from China.

This number included 228,000 Americans who were returning home, meaning that roughly half a million were Chinese citizens or people living in China who were visiting the U.S. for tourism, business or to see family.

This number of people were pouring into the U.S. while the World Health Organization was simultaneously insisting that no country should enforce any kind of border controls to stop the spread of the virus.

President Donald Trump restricted travel from China from February 2nd onwards, but that was too little too late because the outbreak (which was subsequently covered up by China for two months) had started in Wuhan in November, according to Johns Hopkins University.

According to Dr. Vinayak Kumar, an internal medicine resident at the Mayo Clinic, out of the total figure arriving in the U.S. from China, “a large number might have been infected at the time of travel.”

The numbers illustrate “how globalized our world has become,” he added.
However, infectious disease specialist Dr. Simone Wildes suggested that the virus outbreak was the price of globalization and that Americans would just have to get used to it.

The data also shows that “From December, January and February on travelers entering the U.S. from eight of the hardest-hit countries: 343,402 arrived from Italy, 418,848 from Spain and about 1.9 million more came from Britain.”

As we document in the video below, while three quarters of a million people, some of them infected with coronavirus, were entering America, political leaders were telling Americans to go out and congregate in huge crowds, including at Chinese Lunar New Year parades.

Dare anyone call it WAR, and perhaps, TREASON? No? Well, think about it... The US has NEVER had a good or sane foreign policy. Ever. We've never honored treaties with allies, or anyone else that has acted in good faith... Again, think about it.

We're in trouble deep, folks. Our enemies see weakness, smell blood in the water. It may not be long, before they sense it is their time has come to strike at the one they see as the world's bully. They're wrong, but that won't stop them. One can only hope that they've misread our situation, our resolve, and our ability against all odds, to vanquish our enemies...

May God Help Us, and Preserve Us...

OA

 

[MinnesotaSmith]

New York: Jews At Brooklyn Hospital Will Enjoy Privileged Access to Ventilators Over Gentiles

Maimonides Medical Center, Brooklyn's largest hospital, is non-sectarian and supposed to serve all New Yorkers equally regardless of race. According to new reports, this is about to change. The potential ventilator shortage in COVID-19 ridden New York has led to hospitals across the city to...

www.unz.com

New York: Jews At Brooklyn Hospital Will Enjoy Privileged Access to Ventilators Over Gentiles
ERIC STRIKER • APRIL 3, 2020





"Maimonides Medical Center, Brooklyn’s largest hospital, is non-sectarian and supposed to serve all New Yorkers equally regardless of race. According to new reports, this is about to change.
The potential ventilator shortage in COVID-19 ridden New York has led to hospitals across the city to begin debating rationing health care for those who stop breathing or fall into cardiac arrest. While no official protocols are in place, it has been reported that doctors are already informally implementing do-not-resuscitate orders against the wishes of sick patients in order to more efficiently use ventilators.

At Maimonides, the Jews-only ambulance service Hatzalah has somehow gotten its hands on 50 ventilators and donated them to the Borough Park hospital. This donation comes with strings attached: Jews will get priority access, and in cases where an elderly Jewish patient is far gone and a young Gentile patient could be saved, the Jew must keep his ventilator indefinitely.

According to Hatzalah, it is against the Jewish religion to refuse patients care based on age or co-morbidities. This is by no means unique to Jews, as the Catholic Church and various other religious institutions believe the exact same thing. Once again, religion is being used to mask racial privilege.
The Jewish community’s behavior during this pandemic has been atrocious. A recent police raid on a warehouse belonging to Baruch Feldheim uncovered a massive stockpile of desperately needed medical supplies. Feldheim was selling struggling hospitals N95 masks at a 700% markup, revealing a callous willingness to profit from misery and death.

While right-wing pundits are comfortably spreading rumors that Chinese agents are spreading the virus across on purpose, and the FBI and Jewish leaders have promoted the hoax that racist white men are infecting Jews on purpose, neither side is keen to mention that in actuality it is Jews who have become overrepresented as vectors of COVID-19. According to Deborah Lipstadt, Jews are unwilling to follow state bans on large gatherings that endanger them and the people around them due to the “Holocaust.” Governor Phil Murphy of New Jersey has been forced to engage in mass arrests and ticketing to try and discourage the Jews of Lakewood, New Jersey from flagrantly violating his executive order forbiding large public gatherings.

Seeing how the supply of everything from ambulances to ventilators is being stressed by the sudden rush of patients, it would be in the interest of the citizens of New York for Governor Andrew Cuomo to take over Hatzalah and the stockpile of supplies in the hands of local Jewish gangsters to be utilized based on medical need, rather than race or profit."

 

[OldArcher]

The only reason we are still using reefer trucks is because we haven't lost physical control. My study of plagues is they either either away or they spiral into chaos. Right now New York city and state are dealing with 700 bodies a DAY. When they are dealing with 5000 a day, they will pile them on barges and dump them onto the ocean as fast as they can. Every one of the bodies in the reefer trucks can kill somebody handling them. Yep, New York city is on the verge of social collapse and dealing with toxic corpses will strike terror, just like it did in all the other plagues I read about. You are thinking modern, functional, in co trol and i am thinking chaos, medieval and hysterical people.

Instead of "Brave New World" after "Contagion," welcome to "Mad Max," "The Wild, Wild West," or "Caveman" without Racquel Welch...

OA

 

[Ragnarok]

see my post to Doomer Doug.............and remember the DAMocrats are TRYING to turn GA blue.....and we have the DAMN CDC headquartered here---hand-in-glove with Emory and in Decatur---which is probably about as liberal as the MOST liberal-infested part of NYC or California........

Don't care... He is an inept moron if he is just finding out NOW that the virus can be transferred asymptomatically.

Pick up a damned paper and hire a new intel staff for briefings.

That is just inexcusable at this point in the game.

Asymptomatic transmission’ is driving the coronavirus pandemic, experts say
'Asymptomatic transmission' is driving the coronavirus pandemic, experts say

 

[pops88]

Come on now, are you not aware that we have a new invention called reefer truck. The plan for mass casualty event has always included these to store bodies until they can be handled. We may be cremating them because of pathogen spread concerns but I don’t see us dumping them into the ocean.

Reefer truck?

 

[Ragnarok]

..hmm..would be just my luck- I hate to shop but live to dance. This kiddo will prove prescient, or be run outta town on a rail.. or both, as so many scientist are eh.

No proof coronavirus can be spread while shopping, says leading German virologist

Initial findings suggest virus may be less easily transmitted than thought

By Justin Huggler Berlin 2 April 2020 • 5:21pm
Premium

Social distancing indicators are seen on the floor of a supermarket in Berlin, Germany Credit: Jacobia Dahm/Bloomberg

There is no evidence that coronavirus can be spread by shopping or going to the hairdresser, a leading German virologist has said.
Professor Hendrik Streeck, leading the first comprehensive study of a town that suffered a major coronavirus outbreak, told German television his initial findings suggested the virus may not be as easily transmitted as previously thought.
Prof Streeck's team carried out an intensive search of the home of a family infected with the virus but found no trace of it on surfaces, he said.
"We did not find any live virus on any surface. Not on cellphones, not on taps, not on doorknobs," he told the Markus Lanz talk show on ZDF television. His team even examined the fur of the family's pet cat but found no trace of the virus.
The virologist said his initial findings challenged many of the assumptions behind current lockdown measures around the world.

"We talk a lot about speculation and models, but only one factor has to be wrong and then the whole thing collapses like a house of cards," Prof Streeck said.


There have been widespread calls in Germany for face masks to be made compulsory at supermarkets, but Prof Streeck said: "There are no proven infections while shopping or at the hairdresser." He stressed that he was not calling for lockdown measures to be lifted, but argued that not enough is yet known about the virus.
Prof Streeck has led the response to the coronavirus in one Germany's worst affected regions, North Rhine-Westphalia, and diagnosed thousands of patients.
He is leading a detailed study in Gangelt, a town in the Heinsberg district which saw the first major coronavirus outbreak in Germany.
Prof Streeck pointed to the country's first recorded case, a woman who travelled to Germany from China and infected colleagues at work, as evidence for his analysis. "This woman would have stayed in a hotel, eaten in the restaurant, but only infected her colleagues," he said. "So we know that eating in a restaurant or working in a hotel is not responsible for the infection.
"The virus spreads in other places: the party in Ischgl, the club in Berlin, the football game in Bergamo."
Ischgl, a ski resort in Austria known for its nightlife, is believed to have been a major centre of the European outbreak where the virus was spread by drinking games in which people shared glasses.
"We know it's not a smear infection that is transmitted by touching objects, but that close dancing and exuberant celebrations have led to infections," said Prof Streeck. "Now it is time to find the nuances in between."

photos & notes at source
posted for fair use

No proof coronavirus can be spread while shopping, says leading Germa…

archived 2 Apr 2020 20:39:55 UTC

archive.is

That has got to be the most asinine thing I have read in a while...

 

[Ragnarok]

Cousin went to PO near Elmira, NY. Postmaster said a lady had been earlier, crying because her daughter had gone on spring break, came home, came down sick, infected her grandmother, who had died... .

And how much did Grandma dote on and love that selfish bitch?

 

[OldArcher]

Sorry if this has been covered
Just saw on Drudge Dr Brix saying to not go to grocery store/ pharmacy For next two weeks.

Uh-huh... Chrome dome, ivory tower... IQ does NOT connote wisdom, of and by itself... No food or meds for two weeks, even supposing most people can't, don't, or won't be stocked up? Not bloody likely...

Where do they get these morons???

OA

 

[Doomer Doug]

It's called GWT, or generational wealth transfer, in this case from the grandmother to her murdering granddaughter, assuming she wasn't cut out of grannies will. The granddaughter should be indicted for negligent manslaughter. At the very least she should exiled from the family PERMANENTLY.

 

[marsh]

I am now getting some first-hand texts and calls from people I know. We are now getting names to go with the infections, and one report of a rapid crash death (went to work yesterday, and dead today). PA is headed for trouble.

Here's a favorite song from the 60s. I'm dedicating it to you, my friends. I was 5 years old when this album came out, but I remember liking this:

View: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_bdt3k_PliA

One of my SIL's co-workers has it. That is the first family confirmation I have had of knowing someone with the disease.

 

[Dozdoats]

A long and fairly brutal blog post with something to offend almost everyone … but what seems to me a far more objective look at the whole pandemic panorama than anything I have seen so far. YMMV of course. Too long to post it all, please see the link to continue reading if you wish. Brought over from WRSA ...
==============

Plan A for the coronavirus

As everyone can now see, the coronavirus is a test of every government.

medium.com

Plan A for the coronavirus

curtis.yarvin
Follow
Apr 4 · 28 min read


As everyone can now see, the coronavirus is a test of every government.

This test — which the US is failing — is already a tragedy. It has barely begun. In the next few months, you or someone you love will drown of a cough.

Since some of us are still not sure Covid-19 is a thing, how that’ll go down:

It first struck me how different it was when I saw my first coronavirus patient go bad. I was like, Holy shit, this is not the flu. Watching this relatively young guy, gasping for air, pink frothy secretions coming out of his tube and out of his mouth. The ventilator should have been doing the work of breathing but he was still gasping for air, moving his mouth, moving his body, struggling.
We had to restrain him. With all the coronavirus patients, we’ve had to restrain them. They really hyperventilate, really struggle to breathe. When you’re in that mindstate of struggling to breathe and delirious with fever, you don’t know when someone is trying to help you, so you’ll try to rip the breathing tube out because you feel it is choking you, but you are drowning.
When someone has an infection, I’m used to seeing the normal colors you’d associate with it: greens and yellows. The coronavirus patients with ARDS have been having a lot of secretions that are actually pink because they’re filled with blood cells that are leaking into their airways. They are essentially drowning in their own blood and fluids because their lungs are so full. So we’re constantly having to suction out the secretions every time we go into their rooms.

Yet most of us will live. It would be more than a shame if we chose not to learn from this test. It would be a crime. Though the guilty will not be punished, and should not be punished — it is already a crime.

If we fail to act on what we learn — this too is a crime. If we act weakly, or erroneously, or worst of all slowly — a crime. In an exponential epidemic, all experts agree, the virus has to be hit as hard, accurately, and fast as possible.

The good news: the measures taken already should be enough to keep the fire from sweeping quickly through the American population. The bad news: they are nowhere near sufficient to put the fire out. And there is no realistic way to end the lockdown while the epidemic is still burning — at all. Ten sparks in the whole country are ten sparks too many.

And while the fire burns, our financial system — never made to be paused — is now melting into the water table. So is our economy, for finance and commerce are now inseparable. So is our society, now just an economy.

The terrible truth the virus has revealed is that the US and UK — as opposed to post-Communist Asia and post-Napoleonic Europe — are not even countries. They are free-trade zones. Our governments are not governments. They are bureaucratic anarchies with ceremonial elected monarchs. Pitting them against this ruthlessly objective virus is sending Don Quixote to Vietnam.

We thought we had the best government in the world. It is quite a shock to find we have the worst — outside the Third World, of course.

(Or do you think it’s doing great? While official authorities must be filtered no less skeptically than fringe sources, many still do excellent work. As of April 1, status of the epidemic, by the consistently reliable Marc Lipsitch, of Harvard; status of the response, from Science.)

Plan A
Welcome to war. This essay outlines a broad strategy — “Plan A” — for winning World War V. Plan A is as strong and hard and fast as I can make it. And it thinks completely outside the box.

You probably think this is just a cliche. In fact, Plan A is so extreme that you are probably not ready for it. This is a pity. You can always change your mind and come back.
/snip/

 

[Ragnarok]

New York: Jews At Brooklyn Hospital Will Enjoy Privileged Access to Ventilators Over Gentiles

Maimonides Medical Center, Brooklyn's largest hospital, is non-sectarian and supposed to serve all New Yorkers equally regardless of race. According to new reports, this is about to change. The potential ventilator shortage in COVID-19 ridden New York has led to hospitals across the city to...

www.unz.com

New York: Jews At Brooklyn Hospital Will Enjoy Privileged Access to Ventilators Over Gentiles
ERIC STRIKER • APRIL 3, 2020





"Maimonides Medical Center, Brooklyn’s largest hospital, is non-sectarian and supposed to serve all New Yorkers equally regardless of race. According to new reports, this is about to change.
The potential ventilator shortage in COVID-19 ridden New York has led to hospitals across the city to begin debating rationing health care for those who stop breathing or fall into cardiac arrest. While no official protocols are in place, it has been reported that doctors are already informally implementing do-not-resuscitate orders against the wishes of sick patients in order to more efficiently use ventilators.

At Maimonides, the Jews-only ambulance service Hatzalah has somehow gotten its hands on 50 ventilators and donated them to the Borough Park hospital. This donation comes with strings attached: Jews will get priority access, and in cases where an elderly Jewish patient is far gone and a young Gentile patient could be saved, the Jew must keep his ventilator indefinitely.

According to Hatzalah, it is against the Jewish religion to refuse patients care based on age or co-morbidities. This is by no means unique to Jews, as the Catholic Church and various other religious institutions believe the exact same thing. Once again, religion is being used to mask racial privilege.
The Jewish community’s behavior during this pandemic has been atrocious. A recent police raid on a warehouse belonging to Baruch Feldheim uncovered a massive stockpile of desperately needed medical supplies. Feldheim was selling struggling hospitals N95 masks at a 700% markup, revealing a callous willingness to profit from misery and death.

While right-wing pundits are comfortably spreading rumors that Chinese agents are spreading the virus across on purpose, and the FBI and Jewish leaders have promoted the hoax that racist white men are infecting Jews on purpose, neither side is keen to mention that in actuality it is Jews who have become overrepresented as vectors of COVID-19. According to Deborah Lipstadt, Jews are unwilling to follow state bans on large gatherings that endanger them and the people around them due to the “Holocaust.” Governor Phil Murphy of New Jersey has been forced to engage in mass arrests and ticketing to try and discourage the Jews of Lakewood, New Jersey from flagrantly violating his executive order forbiding large public gatherings.

Seeing how the supply of everything from ambulances to ventilators is being stressed by the sudden rush of patients, it would be in the interest of the citizens of New York for Governor Andrew Cuomo to take over Hatzalah and the stockpile of supplies in the hands of local Jewish gangsters to be utilized based on medical need, rather than race or profit."

SERIOUSLY?!?!?

What an irresponsible piece of Garbage you are!!!

IT'S DA JOOOOOS!!!!

Nowhere in the text and the link does it say that Jews get preferential treatment. They are just against triage on the basis of age and comorbitities for religious reasons and instead want the machines to be used for those who came first without any further criteria.

Apparently, that violates Jewish ethics, so the Jewish group wanted to make sure the ventilators it’s donating won’t be used in contravention to Jewish ethics.

Maybe I missed the part about Jewish patients getting priority access, so I would appreciate it if you can point it out to me.

Nothing like creating animosity where there should be none, right?

DOUCHEBAG!!!

 

[bev]

PLEASE post a link to that directive! I'd like to PUBLICLY POST IT ON FACEBOOK for ALL my friends who are in the medical field to copy / print / shove in the face of their CLUELESS administrators!!!

https://www.jointcommission.org/-/media/tjc/documents/resources/patient-safety-topics/infection-prevention-and-hai/covid19/public_statement_on_masks_from_home.pdf

ANNOUNCEMENT:

Joint Commission Statement on Use of Face Masks Brought From Home

The Joint Commission supports allowing staff to bring their own standard face masks or respirators to wear at work when their healthcare organizations cannot routinely provide access to protective equipment that is commensurate with the risk to which they are exposed. In taking this position, The Joint Commission recognizes:

1. Hospitals must conserve personal protective equipment (PPE) when these items are in short supply to protect staff who perform high-risk procedures.

2. The degree to which privately-owned masks and respirators will increase the protection of healthcare workers is uncertain, but the balance of evidence suggests that it is positive.

3. No Joint Commission standards or other requirements prohibit staff from using PPE brought from home.

4. Homemade masks are an extreme measure and should be used only when standard PPE of proven protective value is unavailable.

The evidence assessment and policy analysis that is the foundation of this statement may be found on page 2 of this document.

(Link)

 

[bev]

PLEASE post a link to that directive! I'd like to PUBLICLY POST IT ON FACEBOOK for ALL my friends who are in the medical field to copy / print / shove in the face of their CLUELESS administrators!!!

https://www.jointcommission.org/-/media/tjc/documents/resources/patient-safety-topics/infection-prevention-and-hai/covid19/public_statement_on_masks_from_home.pdf

ANNOUNCEMENT:

Joint Commission Statement on Use of Face Masks Brought From Home

The Joint Commission supports allowing staff to bring their own standard face masks or respirators to wear at work when their healthcare organizations cannot routinely provide access to protective equipment that is commensurate with the risk to which they are exposed. In taking this position, The Joint Commission recognizes:

1. Hospitals must conserve personal protective equipment (PPE) when these items are in short supply to protect staff who perform high-risk procedures.

2. The degree to which privately-owned masks and respirators will increase the protection of healthcare workers is uncertain, but the balance of evidence suggests that it is positive.

3. No Joint Commission standards or other requirements prohibit staff from using PPE brought from home.

4. Homemade masks are an extreme measure and should be used only when standard PPE of proven protective value is unavailable.

The evidence assessment and policy analysis that is the foundation of this statement may be found on page 2 of this document.

(Link)

 

[marsh]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4_ba0fVUME
6:17 min
New York State braces for spike in coronavirus cases
•Apr 4, 2020


ABC News
New York has at least half of the 290,000 confirmed cases and 7,800 deaths in the U.S.

 

[marsh]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pg-kd945arA
5:23 min
On shift in a New York hospital overwhelmed by coronavirus patients
•Apr 4, 2020


Washington Post

In Maimonides Medical Center on April 1, more than 80 percent of patients were infected with the coronavirus, and doctors and nurses feared the worst is yet to come. "There's going to be so much lost, so much life lost," infectious disease physician Monica Ghitan told The Washington Post.

 

[marsh]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-VHZ1-wqfY
6:28 min
How Taiwan overcame it's face mask shortage | Coronavirus Update
•Apr 2, 2020


DW News (German)

Countries around the world are reporting shortages of protective equipment such as face masks - for medical staff and for ordinary cititzens. But one country that's avoided this problem is Taiwan. So how did they do it - and could their approach be emulated by others?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLhNskkf_cA

 

[marsh]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvYz9SMl_ts
42:18 min
California Gov. Newsom Gives Coronavirus Update
•Streamed live 11 hours ago New testing task force


NBC News
Watch coronavirus livestream coverage of the outbreak as COVID-19 spreads, impacting markets and daily life across the U.S. and abroad.

 

[Mary Contrary]

View attachment 190567

That is SO funny!!!

 

[marsh]

 

[Hfcomms]

If a coronavirus is 160 nm in size do you really think a N95-100 are really going to stop there transfer. It might make you feel good but you're just pissing in the wind.

It‘s been covered several times but check out the NIOSH standards for this class of respirator. There are multiple layers of this filter media and they have been treated with an electrostatic charge to attract and hold particulate matter. Some virus will still get through but the respirator does have a 95% efficiency standard. This respirator provides an acceptable protection standard for general clinical use as well as every day people this mask fits the bill. Hopefully whatever virus does get thru will give you such a low inoculum that you either won’t get ill or if you do your body will have a better chance of warding it off. If I had to work in a ward of known Covid patients I would want a positive pressure PAPR type respirator.

 

[marsh]