#and the last 11 days of complete covid-caused isolation have NOT been helping

[theladyyavilee]

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[agusvedder]

I DON’T CARE if this doesn’t get any notes. I need to vent.

My name is Agustina, I’m 27 years old. I’m a nonbinary, queer, latinx person, parent of a 4 year old, non-verbal authistic child. I suffer from depression and anxiety.

I’m 9 thousand kilometers away from the woman I love.

I’m not a victim. I am a minority. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

I started watching Supernatural in 2015, you know, being a stay-at-home parent, who dropped her career and her job to live the first years of their child, there wasn’t much I could do in my free time but to watch a show. I caught a few episodes of season 11 on tv and then I decided to start from zero. I always acknowledged how problematic it was in terms of representation, but always saw small threads of light filtering in the message it sent, recognizing how its writers were trying to shed a little light, creating a jenga tower of storylines and new characters, only to be thrown away by poor, useless deaths and the erasure of said characters.

Since my first run on season 1 I related to Dean. I saw myself on him. (I will never be as brave and cool as him tho, never ever, but his personality traits, some of his family issues, his self worth issues, his loneliness, his unaddressed childhood trauma, his growth in a circle of violence, his reticence to address his feelings until he explodes?... Yeah. There are days where my girlfriend makes fun of me saying “Ok Dean”). I kept looking up to Dean in his geekiness, in his way he always put his life on the line to protect the people he loves and put them always first… even in the supernatural side of the storyline, he still was profoundly human and abnegated to the people in his life. Also because I’m deeply in love with Castiel but that’s another subject. Thanks to this show, I’ve found people in my own country who now I recognize as my family beyond SPN, who helped me accept myself the way I am, who are always there for me. My found family, my chosen family. Because family don’t end in blood, because family cares about you, not only for what you can do for them, because that’s what all of us have in common, and why this show resonated as strongly as it did for us. That’s why we found each other and ourselves in the process, in a circle of love, support, non-judgement and willingness to find a family in ourselves when our own blood relatives ignored us, abused us, refused to recognize us. We’ve found love and family. I’ve found the woman with whom I wanna spend the rest of my life with because of this show.

That’s the power of this story. I know my small circle is not the only one who lived this, who continues to live it.

I can talk about this forever, but there’s something I wanna talk about specifically here. When the ending aired.. what I felt was… like a bucket of cold water was thrown over my head. You know when your parents come home, or call you and give you the devastating news that someone you love died? that exact feeling. The adrenaline, the heartbreak, the feeling of loss. 

The whole season 15 and 15 years of storyline were completely overturned. The misogyny the writers tried so hard to erase, it was there again, in a faceless woman who was supposed to represent the person a lead chose to spend the rest of his life with, reduced to a lilac dress, a blurry face and a uterus. We never seen acknowledged the existence of Eileen Leahy, Sam Winchester’s romantic interest since season 11, his perfect partner whose disability wasn’t an obstacle for her to be a badass hunter. (BUT COVID!! <- No. Eileen Leahy appeared in two episodes this season without Shoshannah being on set: Last Holiday and Despair. If they wanted to include her, they would have. They didn’t because they don’t give a FUCK). Sam Winchester is an academic, a witch, a leader, a powerful hunter, a kind human being, and the ending that was given to him was living an unfulfilled life, dying at a ridiculous young age, having a son only to replace his dead brother? It was sad. Sammy deserved better. He always did.

My beloved Dean Winchester, who I love so deeply, who taught me a lot about myself, about life, love, family, about *ejem* VICIOUS CIRCLES and the power of breaking free from them, of learning to embrace one’s self, our real tastes, our real identity, to come out of a shadow of being reduced to someone’s caretaker instead of having an identity of our own, to spend life loving family the healthy amount.. well, he was killed in a ridiculous way, on a milk run of a hunt.  After being eager and ready to kill himself so many times. After all he’s been through, after saying he’s good with who he is, after considering retirement, after standing up to his dad, saying he already has a family, ready to cut the “I’m Okay” bullshit, address his feelings, his trauma, don’t letting those define him. He deserved better. He always wanted a family, he always wanted to break free from the version of himself he was created to be, “daddy’s blunt little instrument” (For fuck’s sake, he even said it in the same show 10’ before dying, man. If we don’t keep living, the sacrifice the people who died for us did, was for nothing). Are you telling me this man really would refuse his brother to call an ambulance? Refused his brother to get the first aid kit even knowing it was more serious than his brother thought? He was ready to live. He CHOSE life, and at the end his choice was stripped away from him. He clearly was a bisexual man and they never explored it.

Cas. The misfit. The fish outside of the water. Ambiguous gender and sexuality. Finally makes a homosexual declaration of love after all he’s been through. After being brainwashed, used, suicidal, isolated. After telling Sam and Dean he loved them more than once, that they meant everything for him. After confessing he’s been in love with Dean since he pulled him out of hell…. Was erased from the story. Erased, literally. Two emotionless mentions aren’t enough for a 12 year old family member who pulled both brothers out of hell, who died for them more than once, who until 2 seasons ago he didn’t even feel like he belonged there ‘cause he was never told he was loved. No one ever told him “I love you” back. Not Jack, not Sam, not Dean, not Mary. No one. Ever. And still, he died for love. And with his death, he was erased from the finale, being that the first finale Castiel wasn’t in since his appearance on the show. He deserved better. 

All roads lead to Rome and you know what we got at the end of that road? a bottomless pit of NOTHING. The building up towards a different end isn’t just in s15. It’s been there for years and years. And if you watch the show, you see it at plain sight.

 

Sam Winchester hurried to die to reunite with his brother in heaven EVEN WHEN HE SPENT 30 MORE YEARS WITH A WIFE AND A KID he only wanted to die to go back to his brother? it’s insane, it’s ridiculous. That’s not what the show has been about for seasons now. SEASONS. The road was paved towards a healthy brotherly bond, each brother living their future the way they wanted, finally breaking free from the curse John dropped on Dean that Sam’s destiny was in his hands. No no. What was that? Did it ever happen? Was it a fever dream? They really destroyed everything in 38 minutes of the finale? 

Stupid. 

Representation is important, stories are important. They change lives. You know how it changed mine? After I saw Jonathan Van Ness coming out as non-binary, I started to realize how I never called myself "a woman, a girl" or anything like that, how my "female presenting" aesthetic changes drastically depending on how I feel when I wake up  how I always called myself a "person", no gender involved. I realized I was a non-binary person even after becoming a parent. Thanks to Jonathan Van Ness. Thanks to seeing a person like her being unapologetically herself. 

Representation matters. 

It matters. 

It helped my mom understand me when I was 13 and had a girlfriend. It helped my dad educate himself about trans identities. It helped my sister understand about her demisexuality. It helps break circles of ignorance and stereotypes. It helps people process what these characters wanna tell, and realize they're human beings above it all. We suffer, we laugh, we grieve. We love. We exist. 

Supernatural missed a chance to be a historical show in terms of representation. And it breaks my heart.  I cant believe they decided to erase Dean's sexuality, to erase Castiel after saying loud and proud he's in love with a man, to erase Eileen whose disability only was a disadvantage when they KILLED HER in the most ableistic way in s11, to never show Charlie and her girlfriend again, that they decided to make God bisexual AND a villain, thay they decided to turn the only regular non-binary character of color into the villain too (Billie).

I'm still grieving.

This is why "a stupid show" is so important for me, and for lot of people like me. Cause representation can change lives. Stories can change lives. It certainly changed mine, and I'm not the only one. 

Don't let anyone tell you you're just a butthurt fan because you're suffering this ending. Every one of us have a story and this is mine. All of us are valid, our feelings are valid. And we'll get through this eventually

[memorylang]

12 Months’ Pandemic Chronicled | #51 | March 2021

Happy Palm Sunday yesterday, and Happy Passover from the night before! Right under two weeks ago, March 16, 2O2I, marked the one-year anniversary to the close of my first Peace Corps Mongolia service. While I’ve continued to serve virtually, I’ve done so informally as a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer. Having lived these past 12 months back in the States, today’s tales chronicle that year. 

Also commemorating the one-year anniversary, I’ve uploaded dozens of photos from my first nine months serving Mongolia. You can find those on my Instagram and Facebook, from February and March. I begin today’s stories with those. From there, I chronicle my journey across the year. 

Evacuating Mongolia (February 2O2O)

February’s final week, on Ash Wednesday 2O2O, I was in Mongolia celebrating the third day of Tsagaan Sar, its Lunar New Year. Returning to my apartment from my last supper, I read an email from Peace Corps Mongolia that we were evacuating. I pulled an all-nighter packing my apartment. Shortly after sunrise, I visited a Peace Corps neighbor’s apartment to pack theirs. Then in my final two days, I said hasty goodbyes to community members, exchanging parting gifts. 

Sunday morning, which began Peace Corps Week and March 2O2O, I and fellow Volunteers loaded into Peace Corps vehicles and rode in our caravan till evening. Then the snowstorm caused us to need to stay overnight in a hotel coincidentally located in a city that my cohort would frequent during our summer 2OI9 for training. My evacuation group reached Mongolia’s capital Monday afternoon, with briefings from staff throughout Tuesday. Mongolia had already begun to enforce mask-wearing and physical-distancing, so we couldn’t do much with our final hours in Mongolia. Indeed, since mid-January, many public places had already closed due to quarantine. 

Wednesday night, the week after my peers and I had received notice of our evacuation and now mere hours before my group would depart the country, we awaited the arrival of fellow Peace Corps peers to the capital. For, Peace Corps staff staggered our arrivals into and departures from the capital to account for both the time drivers would need to assemble us from across the nation and the limited flight options still going out of the country. Those of us who remained awake through our final night enjoyed getting to see and embrace peers for our final moments together. 

Over the course of Thursday, March 5, my group flew first from Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, through Moscow, Russia, to Berlin, Germany. Many of our itineraries diverged. From Germany, I and a few flew to Amsterdam, the Netherlands. From the Netherlands, I and a couple others flew to New York, New York. I slept four and a half hours’ in a hotel. Then I flew alone Friday from New York to Las Vegas, Nevada. I returned to my home of junior high and high school in North Las Vegas. 

American Twilight Zone (March 2O2O)

My first few weeks in the States felt weird, not just because of reverse culture shock. Back in Mongolia, fellow Peace Corps Volunteers, particularly Health Volunteers, had followed American media and read that our presidential administration had been downplaying the COVID-19 pandemic. Problematically, too, when leaders acknowledged it, some labeled it the “China virus” and accused Asians of spreading it. These set the tone. 

When I arrived in New York, I felt perturbed by the lack of mask-wearing and physical distancing. The morning when I’d fly out, I felt annoyed when the worker who checked me into my flight joked that I might have the virus since I’d flown in from Mongolia. Mongolia had no COVID cases—and wouldn’t have its first community transmission till November 11, 2O2O. Friends, too, when I said that I’d come back, distrusted that I couldn’t have the virus. So, although Peace Corps peers and I had already been quarantining nearly a month and a half before returning to the States—and very much craved to reconnect with folks—we found ourselves again isolated. 

Then Vegas felt weird. Nevada had reported its first COVID case the day before I returned, yet Mongolia hadn’t any. Yet Mongolia had shut down, and Nevada hadn’t. Society moved as though little was happening. My brothers still had school and were gone most of most days. Dad worked weekdays out-of-town. Thus, while I lived again in the States, even inside my family’s home, I was the only one around. I felt lonelier than how’d I’d felt before leaving my life abroad. 

The Filipina family of my father’s fiancée was perhaps the most understanding of my circumstances. The oldest daughter was celebrating her birthday that first Sunday, March 8, since my return to the States. So, I got to join them in enjoying the occasion. As I’d come to learn, Mongolia and the Philippines had more cultural similarities than I’d expected. I’d also feel dismayed to learn that people weren’t treating the youngest daughter kindly in her food service role, for some customers believed that her being Asian meant that she had the Coronavirus. 

Resettling Into Lent (March 2O2O)

Most every morning, my first few days and weeks, tracks from Disney's “Frozen II” became my anthems. I’d seen the film that Friday, March 6, when I’d flown alone back to Vegas. I’d connected especially with “Show Yourself,” “Some Things Never Change” and “The Next Right Thing.” I started to learn the lyrics not only in English but also in Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. 

My local church was still open. Meanwhile, in Mongolia, our church had been closed for nearly months. So, I attended services daily. I overheard old parishioners wondering what all this pandemic talk was about. I visited Reconciliation and a Stations of the Cross service. I applied to sing in the choir with which my late mom sang. 

My second week in the States, church and schools closed. Meanwhile, Peace Corps announced its global evacuation. My peers and I weren’t to expect to return to Mongolia this summer and instead were to expect that fall would be the soonest. My youngest brother’s hs senior spring ended abruptly, so he stuck around at the house. Our oldest brother left to quarantine with his girlfriend and her sisters. 

I cleaned much in and around the house. My greatest achievement early in the pandemic was to lead a garage clean-up with all siblings when my sisters visited. The task enabled us to at last park a vehicle in it once more. My siblings and I donated, too, decades of belongings. 

Among the unearthing, I dove deep into family history. I wrote up my understanding of my father's and my late mother's ancestries, which were also mine. Months later, I'd join WikiTree, talk to distant relatives and migrate large swathes of history onto the platform. 

Easter in Action (April–May 2O2O)

Gloom seemed to enshroud the world by Easter. I saw from the telly the Vatican's Lenten services, witnessing Pope Francis’ words from his city to the world and for Holy Week. His Good Friday Way of the Cross felt especially moving, for prisoners had written beautiful reflections that made me realize how little of a prison our quarantine was. 

My younger sister in LA had also returned to visit Vegas. I resumed daily exercise routines, including trying to concurrently complete handheld video games and walk miles on the treadmill. This began my May push to make the most of my days back in America. I kicked up a daily Duolingo habit, rising through leagues, and talked regularly with Mongols during early mornings. Such helped my sanity, especially when state offices gave me a hard time trying to get the unemployment assistance to which lawmakers entitled evacuated Returned Peace Corps Volunteers.  

Around Memorial Day, an uncle and aunt visited from Kansas to celebrate my youngest brother’s high school graduation online. The relatives also took my siblings, a family friend and me on my first national parks trip in years. We saw Saguaro, Great Basin and Capitol Reef. During the trip I’d grown my Goodreads library and soon enough uncovered the Libby app. The journey led me too to begin a pensive look back on my life. 

Summer in Reno (June–July 2O2O)

Dad remarried on June 6, 2020. Shortly thereafter, I relocated to Reno to help Pa and Stepma (“Tita”) handle copious amounts of yard work. With more time to reflect, I took up the request of a homebound friend to pray rosaries daily over the phone with him. 

Another friend of mine was going through a dark patch too but had a love of films. So each morning I’d rise early to see one of his recommendations then discuss it while working the yard if I wasn’t praying a rosary. I fondly recall the conversations while trimming plants, as I wander the Reno backyard even now. 

Near the same time, the friend and another encouraged me to tell my stories. So I began to write a memoir, on which he’d give feedback. The other friend had me appear on his podcast. Both experiences made the summer feel very whole. In memory of my first summer in Mongolia 2OI9, I also wrote a more detailed series on those experiences. [Arrival (June 2OI9), Meeting Host Family (July 2OI9), Summer’s End (August 2OI9)]

I celebrated my 23rd birthday in Vegas with an overnight vigil, praying 23 rosaries alone and with Catholic friends from around the globe. I felt such joy to reconnect meaningfully with so many across languages and cultures. Languages became a growing theme for me. I’d also begun again playing Pokémon GO after having not played since 2OI6. 

That summer, I finished seeing “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” (Season 7) as well as relevant bits from “Star Wars: Rebels.” I kept up with the Japanese episodes of “Pokémon Journeys: The Series.” Those, I’ve watched with English subtitles to know what’s happening. I’d also begun to read chapters of the Bible daily, at that time checking in weekly with an ol' friend. I started with Acts then Proverbs, Ephesians then Psalms. Meanwhile came Hebrews and John. Then were Ruth and Matthew. Now I read 1 Kings and Mark. I’d grown to appreciate both the Hebrew and Christian Bibles with renewed interest. 

Autumn Languages (August–September 2O2O)

Much of that fall, I was back in Reno. Yet, my younger brother had also come to Reno for his undergraduate fall semester. The guest room where I’d stayed quickly became his room, which left me a tad displaced. Still, I stuck through. Mornings, I rose early to read through a Latin textbook before daily conversations with a close friend who’d majored in classics as an undergrad.

Meanwhile, I’d stepped up to arrange meetings with Congressional lawmakers on behalf of the National Peace Corps Association. I’d also taken on roles within my alma mater Honors College and within the Social Justice Task Force for the American Psychological Association’s Society for the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality. I kept people organized and took notes during meetings. Meanwhile, my siblings and I had been starting a scholarship foundation, so I’d taken point on negotiating a partnership with the Vegas-based Public Education Foundation. 

As a nice break, I joined friends I’d met in high school on their near-monthly trips to national and state parks. These sights included Lassen Volcanic, Burney Falls and Tahoe’s Emerald Bay. Realizing that I wouldn’t return to Mongolia that fall, I booked a Department of Motor Vehicles appointment to renew my learner’s permit—The earliest appointment would be in December. 

In entertainment news, I’d finished seeing “Queer Eye: We’re in Japan,” “Love on the Spectrum” and “Midnight Gospel.” I’d also started playing “Pokémon Masters EX” when I’d heard that it included characters from multiple generations. I enjoyed how the stories felt new yet nostalgic. 

National Park Winter (October, November, December 2O2O)

October was a great month for my spiritual life. I got to attend my youngest sister’s Confirmation. I enjoyed my first retreat in years. I also got to tape videos for my alma mater. 

Then I returned to Vegas some weeks to complete more yard work. I’d also relocated belongings in different rooms and was able to have my own bedroom back in Vegas. This gave me a decent space in which to work. From November, I’ve also been hosting weekly video calls to help Mongols from my community abroad continue to practice English. 

I’d also listened to Riordan audiobooks, “Blood of Olympus” and “Hidden Oracle,” and various authors’ financial literacy materials. By December, “Kafka on the Shore” was a real highlight. In Reno, I saw too “The Mandalorian” (Seasons 1–2), emphatically recommended by a friend with whom I’d hiked at Red Rock Canyon. My other friends and I reunited to try again at Crater Lake and succeeded. 

My siblings and I partnered with the Vegas-based Public Education Foundation to launch our family LinYL Foundation to honor our late mother with scholarships for students. Though my formal role’s within outreach, I’ve done a fair bit of organizational leadership given my undergrad experiences. I’ve also been helping another non-profit start-up. Through it, I’ve gotten to meet alumni of overseas programs. 

My family celebrated Thanksgiving and Christmas in Vegas with our stepsisters. I’d also celebrated American Independence Day with them. Christmas felt peculiar, as I’d returned from Mongolia to Vegas the Christmas before, too! 

Then my national parks friends and I hit a new record, seeing Walnut Canyon, Petrified Forest, Meteor Crater, Sedona’s Devil’s Bridge and the Grand Canyon. Having successfully renewed my learner’s permit, I scheduled my driving test for the earliest date—February. I returned to Reno and at New Year’s reunited with friends for whom I’d participated in their wedding the year before. 

Road to Rejuvenation (January–February 2O2I)

Following the U.S. elections came the presidential inauguration. I felt more at peace with the state of the nation after that. Though U.S. politics have absorbed media significantly throughout the pandemic, I felt relieved by the calls for unity and returns to political normalcy from Inauguration Day. 

Meanwhile, I sought to kick off 2O2I strong, with renewed optimism and control. I practiced driving almost daily. I’d seen “Daredevil” (Season 3) too and progressed in the Blue Lions story of my younger sister’s “Fire Emblem: Three Houses” copy. At February’s start, after years of challenges, I secured my driver’s license. 

Mid-February, my national parks friends and I saw Utah’s Mighty Five. Our trip spanned Canyonlands, Arches, Capitol Reef (different section), Escalante, Bryce Canyon and Zion. I got to help drive at the end from Vegas to Reno, a major milestone. 

Thanks to Discord, I attended a virtual alumni reunion of my high school alma mater. I experienced our school's recreation in “Minecraft: Java Edition,” wandering into the classroom where I used to play “Minecraft” as a freshman. In “RuneScape,” after 12 years on-off, I’d achieved level 99 in all but the newest skill. I'd even gotten the characters I wanted in “Pokémon Masters EX” and nearly finished my Kanto Pokédex in “Pokémon GO.” (I've never before completed a Pokédex.) 

I finished February recording music for my undergrad parish’s online edition to our annual performance for “Living Stations of the Cross.” I got to lector at and attend a friend’s baptism. I’d also soaked up my youngest sister’s boyfriend’s Disney+ again and saw “WandaVision” entirely. Its takes on grief and joy astounded. 

Social Justice (March 2O2I)

These bring me to where and how I am today. I write from Reno, Nev., where snow had fallen and the weather grown warmer. Spring is here. 

The announcement of increasing vaccines gave me lots of hope. Since I've lost so many people this past year to COVID-19 and other conditions I'm grateful that we may near the end. An email from and a check-in call with Peace Corps confirmed that summer would be the soonest I’m going back abroad. Still, I’ve kept in touch with my people in Mongolia. 

My older brother and his girlfriend moved into the Vegas house, so I haven’t felt as obligated to be there. Thus, I’ve focused more time on the church in Reno. 

A great fount of a spiritual joy for me has been getting to help lector for my college parish’s weekly Proclamations of the Word. I received particular acclaim for my reading from 2 Chronicles, for Lent’s Fourth Sunday, which delighted me. At the time I’d been reading 1 Kings, so I’d enjoyed recognizing parallels. In some ways the exercises are like a miniature college course. Beyond regular Sundays and Holy Week, I’d also lectored for such feast days as St. Joseph’s Day (March 19) and the Annunciation (March 25). 

My siblings’ and my family foundation chose our first year of recipients. It’s been an exciting process, reading and witnessing our inspiring candidates. I hope that I'll get to meet these students someday, but ah, the pandemic. 

I’ve gotten back into “Frozen II,” thanks to its authentic behind-the-scenes docuseries. I've also passed the one-year anniversary of my first seeing the film. Each morning I’ve sought to see something on Disney's platform—real' nice. 

Our psychological division’s presidential task force for Social Justice released our statement about the Capitol riots, which received strong critics but stronger supporters. Then came the Atlanta situation. 

In my U.S. Week 5I (Feb. 19–25), during a walk past the nearby elementary school, I’d had an unpleasant personal experience that led me to feel very grateful when the #StopAsianHate campaign began. I’ll likely share more later, but today’s blog story is about done. 

Hope and Easter 2O2I (April 2O2I)

At the last Adoration activity before Easter, our parish offered Reconciliation, so I returned again. Absolution offers such sweet cleansing for my mind and soul. Now Holy Week begins. I'm still lectoring, too! 

This summer, I hope to write more on my memoir. I’m still revising my research. I'm set to finish all five tiers of Duolingo Latin tomorrow. Then I'll get back to my textbook. 

I still delight in chatting with ol’ friends. My national parks homies and I will hit Redwood next weekend. Then my parish has Spring Retreat. I look forward to getting vaccinated in coming months then hugging folks forevermore. 

You can read more from me here at DanielLang.me :)

[jennymanrique]

Contra-Vax

Vaccines to the rescue? Only if people roll up their sleeves. Photo courtesy of Valleywise Health

Science moved at unprecedented speed to develop vaccines against the new coronavirus. It was too fast for some latinos -- especially those egged on by myth and misinformation 

On the ranch where Gabriela Navarrete was raised in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua, she learned early on that the land could provide what she needed to cure her ills. Mesquite bark, olive oil, corn vinegar and baking soda were useful for treating everything from joint pains to throat infections. In case of indigestion, the medicine was a good old stomach rub.

Navarrete, 69, passed on to her three daughters and one son the lesson that "everything natural is what is good for the body."

So when the COVID-19 pandemic began, she quickly stocked up on Vitamin C, infusions of ginger, chamomile and peppermint, and linden tea for sleeping.

And while this arsenal failed to defend her against the coronavirus last year, she remains resolute: Her principle of "consuming everything natural," she said, is more powerful than the idea of getting vaccinated.

That's why she’s decided that the new COVID vaccines are not for her.

"Getting the vaccine is going to be very bad for me because I think they are made from the virus itself," Navarrete said, talking from her home in Anthony, New Mexico, a small town on the border with Texas. "The only time I got the flu shot, I got a lot worse and I don't want to do that to my body anymore."

Graciela Navarrete and her grandson, Diego.

The coronavirus reached Navarrete’s family through her 17-year-old daughter, an athlete who resumed volleyball practice once the school gym was opened after the lockdown. Everyone avoided hospitalization. They were treated by the family doctor with antibiotics, ibuprofen and albuterol in inhalers.

"The virus gave me very bad headaches and I still struggle when walking, so I accepted the medicines. But I am definitely not getting vaccinated."

Like others her age, Navarette is at a higher risk of infection. Yet that’s not enough for her or her children to discount messages they’ve gotten via WhatsApp, complete with videos, that claim, for example, that vaccines are made with tissues of aborted fetuses.

Doubts and fears 

Nationwide, people across demographic lines have lingering doubts about the new COVID-19 vaccines, according to a new survey by the Monmouth University Polling Institute.

Half of the survey respondents said they plan to get vaccinated as soon as they’re allowed to. But 19% say they want to first see how others react to the inoculations, while 24% say they will avoid the vaccine if they can.

Among Latinos, according to recent data from the COVID-19 vaccine monitor launched by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) to track attitudes and experiences with the vaccines, 18% of adults said they will definitely not get the vaccine. Another 11% said they will only do so if it’s required by employers. And, among those who have decided that they will get vaccinated, 43% said they want to wait and see how the innoculations affect other Latinos.

According to the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Latinos are nearly twice as likely to be infected by COVID-19 as non-Latino whites. The same population is more than four times as likely to be hospitalized and almost three times as likely to die of the virus. This is due, partly, to the large number of Latinos working in essential jobs that expose them to co-workers and the public. Other factors, like access to health care, also play a role.

Despite the higher risk, some Latinos remain uncertain about the safety of the new coronavirus vaccines.

An example: Navarrete in Texas, said she believes the myth that vaccines carry bits of an actual virus.

"There are other vaccines that have virus particles, including live virus particles," said Gerardo Capo, chief of hematology at Trinitas Comprehensive Cancer Center in New Jersey. "This vaccine is more modern. It has internal proteins of the virus that are not considered to cause an infection. It is impossible."

Vaccine hesitancy among Latinos in the U.S. is not necessarily an ideological issue or a belief in the anti-vaccine movement. "It has more to do with not having enough information or having inadequate information," said Nelly Salgado de Snyder, a researcher with  the University of Texas at Austin.

Doubts exist even among Latino health care professionals.

Ada Linares, a nurse in the New York area, told palabra. that it’s not the suspicious messaging seen on social media or via WhatsApp texts, but her own unfamiliarity with this vaccine -- how it was developed and potential side effects perhaps overlooked in testing and trials that moved at unprecedented speed.

“I have always been pro-vaccine, and I think this is why we are here today,” she said. “But at the same time, I don’t know much about (the vaccines).”

Nurse Ada Linares hesitated for some time but she eventually rolled up her scrubs and took her doses. Photo: Jorge Melchor

Avoiding the needle 

In Texas, officials started by vaccinating health care workers, residents of nursing homes and some people older than 65 years.

Throughout the state, according to the KFF monitor, only 15% of vaccines have reached Hispanics, even though Latinos account for almost 40% of the population, 44% of coronavirus cases and almost half of COVID-19 deaths.

"We need to focus on equity as part of the COVID-19 vaccination effort," said Samantha Artiga, director of KFF's racial equity and health policy program. "It is important to monitor data by race and ethnicity to understand the experiences of the communities ... , who is receiving the vaccines, and who has been the most affected by the pandemic."

But it’s more than just reluctance. Studies into low flu vaccination rates among low-income Latino seniors show that being uninsured -- and even the lack of transportation to get to vaccination centers -- are huge barriers.  

Experts suggest that no-cost COVID-19 vaccines, available to everyone regardless of health insurance or immigration status, could help close the gap, “if the information is available in linguistically appropriate materials and the concerns of people are clearly addressed. Immigrant families should be assured that their medical data is private and will not be used by federal agencies,” Artiga said.

Conspiracy theories

In addition to debunked conspiracy theories that Pfizer and Moderna vaccines can alter DNA, or contain microchips implanted by Bill Gates to monitor people with 5G technology, other rumors specific to the Latino community have spread through social media.

“The viral disinformation includes anonymous voice messages on WhatsApp that say that since Trump does not like Mexicans and built the wall, he wants to vaccinate us so we cannot have more children, or that the vaccine is a poison for those of us who are here undocumented, that it is a way to get rid of us,” Salgado de Snyder said.

Photo illustration by FrankHH/Shutterstock

She suggested one possible reason such disinformation is embraced: “People believe it because they don't have the level of education or the institutional support to confirm this information that they hear from other Latinos. Many of them do not speak English and most of the scientific information is not available in Spanish,” she said.

Salgado de Snyder is the co-author of the study, “Exploring Why Adult Mexican Males Do Not Get Vaccinated: Implications for COVID-19 Preventive Actions,” conducted by the Migrant Clinicians Network and published last September.

Data was collected in 2019 at the Ventanilla de Salud at the Mexican Consulate in Austin. Before the pandemic, the clinic offered free vaccines against maladies like influenza, tetanus, hepatitis A and B, and human papilloma, in association with Austin Public Health.

Some 400 patients gave researchers a variety of reasons for not getting vaccinated, including lack of time or money, fear of injections and of potential side effects, insufficient information or motivation, and the perception that they are  healthy and don’t need inoculation.

"While women are more familiar with the health system because in Mexico there is a universal voluntary and free vaccination program, men have the mistaken belief that vaccines are the cure for a problem, they do not see (a vaccination) as a preventive tool," Salgado de Snyder said.

“As breadwinners, they do not want to miss a day of work to go to get vaccinated,” she added. “That is why our recommendations in times of COVID are that through some type of mobile clinic, employers offer vaccines in workplaces such as construction companies or meatpacking plants,” she said.

Moving too fast

María del Rosario Cadena remembers that during her childhood in Tampico, in Mexico’s Tamaulipas state, she received vaccines against hepatitis and polio without any side effects. But she is "very suspicious" about the COVID-19 vaccines that seem to have been developed and approved so quickly.

"I've seen on TV that it affects various parts of the body and people get very sick after receiving it," del Rosario Cadena said.

Maria del Rosario Cadena

Apart from her doubts about the vaccine, del Rosario Cadena insists she follows all recommendations to guard against COVID-19: She wears a mask, she practices social distancing, and she’s always washing her hands. And, since she doesn’t go out "at all," the 71-year-old said she believes that “isolation is my vaccine. I feel I don't need it."

Her daughter, Rocio Valderrabano, 55, is diabetic, so she will soon have access to a COVID-19 vaccine. But she has doubts, so she’ll wait and see how some friends -- nurses -- react to their second doses. "I know people who have had COVID and spent four days with oxygen. I know they had a very bad time ... but I still want to wait and see if there are side effects (to the vaccine)."

Clinicians said mistrust also comes from knowing there were few people of color in the vaccine trials. In the trial for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, participants were 13% Latino, 10% African American, 6% Asian, and 1% Native American. Moderna’s trial population was 20% Hispanic, 10% African American, 4% Asian.

"We hope that the labs that are developing new vaccines will include more Latino patients in their trials," said Dr. Lucianne Marin, a pediatrician at Los Barrios Unidos Community Clinic in Dallas, one of 75 community centers in Texas that will provide vaccines in immigrant neighborhoods.

Marin and the rest of the Barrios Unidos staff have already received both doses --  injections that caused her "a bit of discomfort, fatigue, and a headache."

“Anything strange that enters the body can cause a reaction,” she said. “But one has to understand that the vaccine is not made from the live virus. It’s from genetic material that will help to generate antibodies. … I tell my patients that a fever or a pain in the body cannot be compared with the exposure to the coronavirus.”

The community clinics are out to debunk myths and dispel fears. They emphasize the greater risk of infection for Latinos who have chronic health problems like diabetes, hypertension, and excessive weight.

In doctor’s offices or in telemedicine visits they invite grandmothers to be champions in their families and spread the message about the need to get vaccinated. “Among Latinos, the elders of the family are highly respected and they are listened to; if they are convinced (of the vaccine), the family will be too,” Marin said.

Community health workers also share messages on Facebook, or partner with local Spanish-language media on virtual discussions featuring doctors and public officials -- even representatives from consulates of Latin American countries.

“It is our job to be the reliable messenger,” Marin said. “Vaccines are safe and free.”

Originally published here

Want to read this piece in Spanish? Click here

[tabloidtoc]

National Enquirer, November 30

You can buy a copy of this issue for your very own at my eBay store: https://www.ebay.com/str/bradentonbooks

Cover: The Kennedy family torn apart 

Page 2: Angry and isolated Caitlyn Jenner is on a downward emotional spiral that some friends believe have left her one step from the psycho ward -- she feels shunned by her own family and can’t find romance and is unhappy with with her looks -- Caitlyn is so tense and insecure and sensitive about everything so she’s diving into more and more prospective projects in a desperate effort to kickstart her flagging career and she’s flying off the handle all the time plus she’s tried to drown her sorrows in a new round of cosmetic improvements including a face-lift and lipo to trim her waist and thighs but she’s horrified she’s still not happy with her looks after all her surgeries 

Page 3: Lovestruck Halle Berry has leapt headfirst into a red-hot romance with Van Hunt but the singer is a skirt-chasing cheat -- Van and his ex-wife split in 2007 after she said he abandoned her and their only child to move to L.A. and she claimed the musician admitted adultery shortly before divorce documents were filed -- Halle would be disturbed to hear that Van walked out on his son because she’s a very family-oriented person and she could never imagine living on the other side of the country to her kids -- Van’s grown and matured since the divorce and is sure to have shared all about his situation with Halle and he’s said to be on good terms with his ex-wife but people say once a cheater always a cheater and that’s got to be at the back of Halle’s mind 

Page 4: Runaway Prince Harry is reeling after being publicly snubbed by his royal relatives and now he is having second thoughts about ditching his official duties for a glam life in Hollywood; he’s finally realizing just what he gave up when he left England with wife Meghan Markle and their son Archie and he’s wondering if it was worth it -- the simmering rift between Harry and the royals exploded after they refused his request to be part of Britain’s Remembrance Day ceremonies to honor fallen soldiers so Harry retaliated by staging a photo op at Los Angeles National Cemetery with Meghan with his military medals pinned on his navy suit; Harry was banned from wearing his military uniform when he quit royal duties and he also had to give up his military duties which devastated him -- photos from the cemetery released by the couple triggered an immediate backlash and they were accused of being shameless publicity-seekers trying to steal headlines and overshadow the royals doing their duty back home; it was a disaster and Harry was shocked -- he’s reaching out to the palace to make amends but calls to his brother Prince William and father Prince Charles have gone unanswered

* Katie Holmes and Emilio Vitolo Jr.’s hot new romance is in a pressure cooker as their families fight to claim the couple as their guests for the holidays -- things were going great for them but this tug-of-war may tear them apart because Emilio’s folks told him they want him home with them but Katie is desperate to spend Christmas with her relatives in Ohio and they really want to meet her new boyfriend and Katie is feeling guilty because she spends so much time with Emilio’s clan at his dad’s Manhattan eatery so she thinks it’s only fair that he does this for her but Emilio’s never missed a holiday gathering with his own family and there are a lot of them he hasn’t seen because of the pandemic 

Page 5: Celine Dion is finally ready to put the past behind her as the fifth anniversary of her beloved husband’s death approaches in January and she is planning to leave Las Vegas with their sons and she is pining to return to her native Quebec and give twins Nelson and Eddy and 19-year-old Rene-Charles a taste of her own childhood -- Celine had been careful to not upset her kids’ lives since the death of their dad from throat cancer but she now believes the boys would benefit from spending time in The Great White North -- she also thinks it might be more likely she’ll find lasting love in her home country 

Page 6: Defiantly plump Lizzo has ditched her diet and frightened friends are staging an intervention to get her to a fat farm to save her life -- Lizzo had committed to eating vegan after weighing in at 350 pounds but once on vacation it lasted like two days before she couldn’t take it any longer -- she has anxiety issues and uses food to comfort herself but the stress the weight is putting on her heart and other organs could have a detrimental effect on her health and cut her life short

Page 7: Mark Harmon and Pauley Perrette have agreed to meet for peace talks after a long-simmering feud triggered her angry departure from NCIS and Mark reached out to her to invite her back -- Mark feels bad about how Pauley left the show and knows she played a big role in its success and he’s anxious to set things right between them and bring back one of the show’s favorite all-time characters for fans -- Mark also feels he’s been painted unfairly in Pauley’s departure and would like to know he was not behind it but the two clashed for years with Pauley charging Mark’s bullying caused her to quit the show and Pauley even tweeted she is terrified of Harmon and him attacking her -- while Pauley is not saying yes or no to returning to the show she’s definitely willing to sit down and talk 

* The drama between sickly Phil Collins and his squatting ex-wife Orianne Cevey is really getting down and dirty with Orianne charging that Phil degenerated into a pill-popping addict who stopped showering and brushing his teeth and was impotent and she also claimed Phil became emotionally and verbally abusive and refused to provide emotional support or love or care for her -- Phil’s lawyers said Orianne’s charges are scandalous and scurrilous and unethical and for the most part patently false or grossly exaggerated

Page 8: Power-hungry host Savannah Guthrie is gunning to be the reigning queen of Today and is willing to walk over anyone to achieve her goal and her blind ambition is ripping the once-invincible morning show apart and she even used Al Roker’s prostate cancer diagnosis to push her own agenda and capitalize on Al’s absence for surgery to demand more airtime for herself -- every meeting starts with the focus on whatever Savannah wants and the staff is far from happy about it and morale has never been worse -- Savannah has constantly pushed the producers for Jenna Bush Hager and herself to take the lead on big news stories and keep Hoda Kotb stuck in the fluffy stuff and Hoda’s completely pissed off -- Savannah’s rising star has come with temper tantrums and diva-like demands -- fed-up Hoda recently met with friends of Gayle King and there is speculation the two women could make a powerful pairing and revitalize third-place CBS This Morning 

Page 9: Regis Philbin’s death certificate reveals paramedics waged a desperate 40-minute battle to try to save his life -- he suffered a heart attack just after 3 a.m. on July 24 at his home in Connecticut and he was rushed to the emergency room where medics fought to save his life but he eventually succumbed at 4:18 a.m. 

Page 10: Hot Shots -- Queen Latifah on the NYC set of The Equalizer, socially distant host Ellen DeGeneres went the extra mile to greet guest Jimmy Kimmel on her talk show, Steve Schirripa and Bridget Moynahan shot Blue Bloods in NYC, Kristen Taekman prettied up her pout in L.A., Tracy Morgan attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new community center at Brooklyn’s Marcy Houses 

Page 11: Smitten ‘70s TV stars Patrick Duffy and Linda Purl may owe their late-in-life romance to Zoom but according to the actress the couple didn’t rush their relationship -- the two have been friends for decades but a COVID-19 group video chat helped spark love during lockdown -- after one of their lengthy one-on-one conversations Patrick jumped into his car and drove 20 hours from L.A. to her Colorado home like a lovestruck teenager 

* Beloved Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek left behind a final touching message for his fans and it will be extremely moving -- Alex’s final message will follow his last episode of Jeopardy! set to air on Christmas Day

Page 12: Straight Shuter -- Joel Michaely at the opening of The Comeback Trail (picture)

* Kelly Clarkson’s divorce meant she booted ex Brandon Blackstock out of her professional life but he’ll still be in her work life thanks to Blake Shelton -- Brandon might not be Kelly’s manager anymore but he still manages Blake which might get awkward when Kelly runs into him backstage at The Voice

* Keeping Up with the Kardashians is notching all-time low ratings and the family is blaming Kim Kardashian saying she’s lost her sense of humor and she’s too busy trying to be taken seriously

* Nitpicky Ryan Seacrest has ditched celebrity designer Nate Berkus’ husband Jeremiah Brent as his decorator because they had a nasty falling out over the renovation of Ryan’s townhouse in New York City 

Page 13: Steve Harvey’s daughter Lori Harvey escaped jail time after cops claimed she fled the scene of a Beverly Hills car crash in 2019 -- she was charged with two misdemeanors for hit-and-run and delaying a police investigation after she walked away from a smashup that damaged her Mercedes G-wagon and nearly destroyed another vehicle but she cut a deal with prosecutors and pleaded no contest to resisting arrest and will serve two years probation -- she reportedly had been texting at the time of the accident 

* Reba McEntire confirmed she turned down a regular role on The Voice which left the life-changing gig open for Blake Shelton -- Reba said she didn’t think she could ever tell somebody that they’re terrible 

* Cancer warrior Olivia Newton-John revealed she kicked a dependence on morphine with medical marijuana -- to cope with her pain during her third bout with breast cancer that had spread in 2017 doctors put her on mega doses of the highly addictive drug and she weaned herself off the morphine with the cannabis which she thinks is incredible and says people should know that because you’re not going to die from cannabis and you can use it to wean off morphine and she’s continued on a regime with cannabis ever since 

Page 14: Crime 

Page 15: Los Angeles’ newly elected District Attorney George Gascon has vowed to reopen the probe into actress Natalie Wood’s mysterious drowning and her husband Robert Wagner could finally be dragged before a grand jury -- Gascon said he’ll work with investigators from the L.A. Sheriff’s Department homicide squad to reexamine the case after the previous D.A. refused to present evidence to a grand jury -- Natalie drowned in 1981 while enjoying a holiday with Robert and actor Christopher Walken off Catalina Island 

Page 16: The Talk has been thrown into chaos by cast shake-ups and co-host Sharon Osbourne’s power grab and may be on the verge of being silenced forever -- staffers are expecting the worst after popular co-host Eve announced she was splitting after four seasons becoming the latest in a long line of damaging departures and while Eve blamed her exit on COVID-19 travel restrictions from England much of the blame goes to self-promotional Sharon’s relentless efforts to take over the show after former moderator Julie Chen’s departure last year -- Sharon has made it clear she’s in charge now and the other ladies are not thrilled with being reduced to supporting cast and fans have started calling for Sharon’s head 

Page 17: John Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono has sparked fears she’s nearing the end after handing her business dealings off to their son Sean Lennon -- the wheelchair-bound Yoko had been managing the late Beatle’s vast $800 million holdings since his 1980 shooting death but it’s now beyond her abilities

Page 18: American Life 

Page 19: Johnny Depp is writing and planning to star in a tell-all movie about his divorce war with loathed ex-wife Amber Heard -- after a U.K. court ruled he was physically abusive toward Amber during their marriage Johnny wants to tell the world his version of the marriage and he will set people straight about what happened and clear his name to millions to fans and he believes this is a slam dunk once he gets it in front of the right producer especially as he’s more than willing to play himself 

* The family of vicious Boston mobster James “Whitey” Bulger has filed a lawsuit against the federal government accusing prison officials of orchestrating the 2018 hit on the Mob boss -- the action accuses the Federal Bureau of Prisons of intentional or deliberately indifferent deeds that led to the murder of the wheelchair-bound mobster just hours after he was inexplicably transferred to the Hazelton penitentiary in West Virginia where he was beaten to death by prisoners to keep him from singing about corruption inside the FBI and the Department of Justice -- Whitey was bludgeoned with a padlock stuffed inside a sock and his murderers had enough time to cut out his tongue and eyes to make it seem like a classic Mafia hit 

Page 20: Angelina Jolie lives in constant fear one of her six children will be kidnapped and held for ransom according to her former bodyguard -- Angie and her ex Brad Pitt are worth hundreds of millions which Angie feared provided plenty of incentive for criminals to target her offspring

* Hollywood Hookups -- Sofia Richie and Matthew Morton dating, Sabrina Parr and Lamar Odom split, Daniela Rajic and Paul George engaged

Page 21: Justin Bieber’s pastor Carl Lentz lost his job over a steamy affair with an exotic beauty -- Lentz was fired from the megachurch Hillsong and his mistress claimed the two were in love 

* Wildlife lover Bindi Irwin has announced 20 weeks into pregnancy her baby is the size of a tiny emu -- she delivered the news flash beneath a photo with her husband Chandler Powell appropriately taken at the Australia Zoo

* Hugh Grant made a bizarre confession admitting his bout with COVID-19 left him wanting to sniff strangers’ armpits -- Hugh revealed he tested positive for coronavirus antibodies and believes he contracted the bug in February and the illness caused a feeling of an enormous man sitting on his chest but Hugh also claimed he was rattled by losing his sense of smell which is a known symptom of the disease and purposely sought out putrid odors to test his useless nose 

Page 22: Jailed Ghislaine Maxwell’s latest devastating court defeat has heightened fears that the woman accused of being billionaire sex fiend Jeffrey Epstein’s madam will die behind bars just as he did -- since July Maxwell has been locked up in solitary confinement at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center where her jailers subject her to daily strip and cell searches and is monitored 24 hours a day she doesn’t suffer the same fate as Epstein whose death was officially ruled a suicide -- now the U.S. Court of Appeals has denied her bid to publicly name the women who have come forward in the media and civil actions as Epstein’s alleged victims and implicated the British socialite in his twisted sex ring so the damning decision upheld an earlier ruling and shattered her defense team’s bid to investigate and refute the claims of the unnamed accusers

Page 23: Tom Cruise’s plan to shoot the first movie in space may be in jeopardy after Russia vowed to beat him to it -- Tom has teamed with tech billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX program to film the unnamed project on the International Space Station in October 2021 -- but a rival Russian agency plans to already be in outer space by then and the Russian film is titled Challenge and its team has sent out a casting call for a female lead -- Tom sees this as a gauntlet being thrown down and he always rises to the challenge and he’s told SpaceX they have to get up there before next October

Page 28: Cover Story -- Kennedy curse rips clan apart -- the family takes sides as Michael Skakel skates and William Kennedy Smith stalls $50 million will 

Page 32: Ric Ocasek’s oldest son has blasted him as a deadbeat dad who was never there -- Chris Otcasek who uses the original spelling of the family name wrote on Instagram that his father in essence died the day he was born and he was never present and he was never there -- Ric left his mom who was his second wife Suzanne while she was pregnant with their second child 

* Lisa Marie Presley has had a medical emergency so severe it brought her bitter custody trial with fourth ex-husband Michael Lockwood to a halt 

Page 36: Health, Ask the Vet 

Page 38: Pope John Paul II was aware that disgraced and defrocked Cardinal Theodore McCarrick was a pedophile but elevated him anyway to the powerful post of Archbishop of Washington D.C. in 2001 -- McCarrick had showered over $600,000 in donations on powerful clerics including Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict while facing allegations of abuse -- Pope Francis finally defrocked McCarrick in 2019 

Page 42: Red Carpet -- Mandy Moore 

Page 45: Spot the Differences -- Emma Corrin as Princess Diana in The Crown 

Page 47: Odd List 

[lockdownuk]

Lockdown Diary Part 9

A personal account during the lockdown in the UK due to the Covid-19 outbreak.

23/03/2020 8:30pm Boris Johnson, UK Prime Minister, gives a live address to the nation to, effectively, put the country on lockdown to stem the spread of the deadly coronavirus strain, Covid-19.

Many of us have been self-isolating for days but this latest development within the UK in reaction to the pandemic feels very serious and very scary. I decided to keep a simple diary and where better but online.

Day 241: Shit day at work. To cut a long story short, I could complete a task Sueanne gave to me and then I got it in the ear, including a snotty email ay 5:40pm. Pissed off.

Day 242: Had a meeting with Sueanne (our weekly 1-2-1 actually) and she was alright. I feel much better tonight. Last night I didn’t even have an appetitie - unheard of! Going to make up for that tonight, pie and loads of veg! A much better day. Ridiculously, I believe yesterday was all my own fault - I take work for granted sometimes and I let myself down by ignoring the urgency of a task just because it was Sueanne asking me to do it and she was a peer. She is now my boss, and I should respect that.

Day 243: So-so day at work. It’s strange how used to work I am after over six months on furlough. It’s been less than two months back but all the highs and lows amd frustrations are commonplace. Most importantly, it being Thursday, I cannot wait for tomorrow eveninga dn to kick back, drink and smoke. Spoke to dad this morning, he’s same as...that’s always good to know. Sugar levels have been a fucking roller coaster today, and it has really fucked me off! No salad at lunch due to them being so fucking high when I got back from my walk. It ended up being my tea. Sarted watching The Undoing...it’s OK. 

Day 244: Glad it is Friday. Just cooking a (very hot) chicken madras, cracked open my first beer. Gonna eat, drink, smoke and watch a good film.

Day 245: Gold was the film I watched last night, with Matthew McConaughey and it was a good choice. I then watch a Kevin Hart stand up show on Netflix...very Eddie Murphy, very funny. I did a 12 km walk today...fucking felt it in my legs. Walked the footpath from Stoke Doyle road to Benefield road for the first time. I liked it and it comes out between Lytham Park and Wakerley Close....I posted on FB about the fact that when I move to Oundle, Clifton Drive was the last street heading out of town. Saw Becks on the walk down Benefield road, She mentioned she’s tired of lockdown. I replied that I’m tired of the virus!

Day 246: Up at 1pm, nice long walk, ordered new slippers and waterproof jacket (my Craghopper is bust again).

Day 247: I screwed up at work today, went for a (ridiculously) late lunch right when I was meant to be at an online meeting that Sueanne had reminded me about in the morning. There’s mitigation but, when push comes to shove, I fucked up and now Sueanne’s on the warpath - one more slip up and it’ll be an offical disciplinary matter. 

Day 248: Suzanne wants me to troubleshoot a ticket she has in her queue, some database request for a Cork guy. It’s a test and it’s fucking me off.

I did testing for a network change tonight...8 till 11:15pm.

Elliot and Aaron cleaned the windows today. It was nice to see them.

Rita sent a couple of emails recently. Dad’s ear is all clear but Paul has got testicular cancer.

Day 249: New waterproof jacket arrived today. It’s very nice, bargain for £25 odd. Also picked up slippers from M&S food hall in Corby so, while over their, did a shop at Tesco’s...£109 mainly booze.

By the time I was back, I ended up doing my evening walk at 9.30pm!

Day 250: Leigh from Oundle Chronicle has got back to me. She (he?) has selected the photos that are going to be in the article and wants me to write a sentence on each - where they were taken and what inspited me to do so. Whether that means the stuff I wrote before is not going to be used, or not, I dunno! New slippers are OK and the new jacket is still impressing me.

Day 251: Typing on Day 252. Usual Friday, beers, meatballs, pizza, long chat with Fog. I should mention that, as we approach the end of Lockdown2 in England, Boris and his government have laid out a three tier structure for how the second lockdown will be eased. It’s caused confusion and consternation across the board. None of it affects me, still isolating like I was on day 1. Day 252: Totally forgot about my diary entry yesterday! Up at 1pm, nice long walk, nipped rong Elliots to pay for my windows, had a chat with him, Artron and Camilla - it’s so nice to socialise! Gonna make fish pie and supp a few ales. Day 253: The weekend is over way too quickly. It’s 7.30pm on Sunday as I type and I wish it wasn’t. I wish it was 7.30pm on Friday. Day 254: In a meeting, a working Zoom, with Andy Ashler in the US re: qfiniti, which Sueanne pissed me off about earlier in te day (RCI diary updated), but the meeting went well. I am desparately trying to buy an iPad on Black Monday. As usual with tech, I cannot make my mind up which to buy! Day 255: I haven’t bought an iPad....I’ll wait for the 10.2″ iPad to come down in price. I had more involvement with Andy Ashler and in the US with the Qfiniti project at work. I’m really enjoying it, it’s very technical...although I didn’t finish ‘til 6pm because of it. The Oundle Chronicle is out and an article about me and my pics is on the back page. Leigh, the editor, sent it to me electronically. It’s good. I am chuffed!  Day 256: I booked some holidays today, making sure that I didn’t include any days off in the week December 14-18 (SB’s off). So, this coming Friday (4th Dec), Next Weds-Fri and Monday 21st. I know I have only been back from Furlough a couple of months but I am more than ready for some kick-back time.  1-2-1 with SB today, it was a relaxed affair, most espcially becaus eof my success thus far with the Qfiniti project - that being said, I got pretty much nowhere with it today.  Ordered a couple of long sleeved Ts and a fleeced hoody from a shop called Doubletwo today, well cheap in the sale. I saw half a dozen joggers on the Milton Road blind bend tonight, oblivious to any other potential path user. I posted about it (in my own, sarcastic way) on the Oundle Chatter FB group. It was met how I’d expected plus some direct digs so I deleted it. Cowardly but, I figure, I don’t get my point across, the vast majority of joggers really don’t think they are doing anything wrong by bulldozing there way around town and, lastly, I couldn’t be bothered with the flak, and its tennis like back-and-forth!

Day 257: Got tomorrow off so worked late tying up loose ends, including the qfiniti project - fucking nuts really, making sure no one asks any questions of SB or the team, in terms of my work load, for just one day off! Still, just had tea, cracked open a beer and am watching Shaun of the Dead. Nice.

Day 258: The main thing I did today is walk. It was about 12km but felt much longer ‘cos it was wintry, pissing down, windy and slippery as fuck. And I really enjoyed it! Badge messaged me today to ask how I am and, in replying, I mentioned that I think I am becoming addicted to walking...it wasn’t a throwaway comment. Just cooked up a chilli (which I think I have ruined with a Knorr beef stock pot), and will tuck in with beers, smokes and telly. While it’s been a day off, this Friday evening will be as all others are at the moment, late, drunken and solitary fun - no doubt.

Day 259: Typing on day 260. That chilli last night was actually OK. Plus I ‘invented’ a meatball wrap - moving on from the TikTok ham and cheese wrap you fold into the toaster, I tried the same with meatballs but no fucking way could I fold it into the toaster slot (pissed up kitchen shenanigans), so I wrapped it in tin foil and heated it in the oven, Fucking delicious. I watched Shaun of the Dead. I think it’s the first time since its release and I couldn’t help thinking “zombies just aren’t like that [in real life]” Wtf?

Day 260: I was quite sensible (for a Saturday) last night, in bed by 2am, up at my alarm this morning, 10:30am. Nice long walk, taking in a new path up by Biggin Grange and took plenty of pics that turned out really good. Btw, posh lost yesterday at Portsmouth (with 2000 fans there) and they lost midweek and last weekend in the FA Cup to Chorley, at home. 

Day 261: It’s freezing today...actually 0 degrees. This house is so fucking cold, even with the heating on.

Day 262: Typing on day 263. Last day of work for 5 days. Beers are in order. And a sausage casserole. Day 263: I completely forgot to do a diary entry yesterday....concentrating on starting my work break off on the right foot, which I did. As a result, I didn’t get up until 1pm. So, to stop that sort of day wasting, no beers tonight. Just got back from a shop (£90 in Tesco’s), trying to sort out Romiley’s Christmas present, then something to eat (more sausage casserole) and a early, sober night.

Day 264: So, after abstinence last night, I was up before 11am and did a walk that included the track from Benefield Road to Monson Way past Park Wood. It was fucking hard work due to mud. I have lost coumd the amount of times I nearly slipped right over. Throw into that a hypo, the 12-13km walk was tough. Sorted out Romiley’s present (guitar stand, music stand and guitar exercises book). Took soime nice photos today as well which I’ve prepared and shared. No booze today/tonight either. Some break, a younger me would say!

Day 265: Friday, and I am typing with a beer, balti on the hob and I am just gonna choose a film and roll a single skinner. I am knackered. Up at 10am, cleaned the hall and stairs after a 10km walk. Also, I spoke with dad who is, as always, fine.

Time to make up for the last two sober nights.

Day 266: I am typing this on day 267. So drunk last night I left nearll a full can of beer and went to bed in my jogging bottoms and t-shirt. I have had a day off from any exercise at all which felt very odd. A few beers and watched Snatch. Day 267: While I was nowhere near drunk last night, due to sleeping in late (2pm) I was up ‘til 3am watching TikTok so today I struggled out of bed at just before 1pm. Watch the start of the season’s final GP (Verstappen won from pole and it was boring af), back on the exercising including a 9km walk. Back to work tomorrow which I feel totally conflicted about! Posh won yesterday at home to Rochdale (with the allowed 2000 fans) 4-1 including a 17 minute first half hatrick from Jonson Clarke-Harris.

Day 268: Back to work - Sueanne’s off and it’s the first day I’ve been at work with Jon in charge which involves a daily ‘SUMO’ (whatever that acronym stands for?) at 9.30am every day. I am still involved with te qfiniti upgrade project which seems to have taken a step backwards in the 3 days I had off, so I was working until gone 9.30pm! I have decided to do a quiz, hopefully for Christmas, whereby I don’t want the actual answers (to 25 particular questions, all with a common theme in the answer), merely an omitted question!  

Day 269: Stand Up Meeting Online. SUMO. Ian Bird told me. I might struggle with double Y for my quiz. Work was OK, more Qfiniti stuff. Posh drew away to MK 1-1. Posh were 0-1 up but Lincs lost at home. I can’t undertsand why that pleases me so....oh, yeah I can Steve Dee.

Day 270: Struggling to order Dad and Rita booze for Christmas without it being a Morrison’s delivery that I can do through Amazon Prime. That would be OK but it’s just a bit clinical! Meanwhile, now I am paying for Prime, and they are showing some Premiership games (for example, tonight I watched Liverpool v. Spurs (2-1), I really have to contact Sky - I am paying £71pm atm! Sam posted pic of her Christmas tree but mentioned how she’s finding it hard to get in the spirit - Paul has testicular cancer and the outlook is bleak - fuck know’s what she’s going through with all that, trying to shield Romiley from the worst without lying!

[newstfionline]

Headlines

Democrats Nominate Biden for President (NYT) Democrats formally nominated Joseph R. Biden Jr. for the presidency on Tuesday night, anointing him as their standard-bearer against President Trump. Denied the chance to assemble in Milwaukee because of the coronavirus pandemic, Democratic activists and dignitaries cast their votes from locations across all 50 states, the American territories and the District of Columbia. By voting to nominate Mr. Biden, 77, Democrats delivered to the former vice president a prize he has pursued intermittently since before the night’s most prominent young speaker, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was born.

Colleges grapple with coronavirus as students return (AP) Notre Dame and Michigan State universities became the latest colleges to move classes online because of the coronavirus on Tuesday as colleges struggle to contain outbreaks and students continue to congregate in large groups without masks or social distancing. Tuesday’s actions followed the decision by officials of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to switch to remote learning starting Wednesday, as the virus makes its mark on colleges—and college towns—across the United States. Other universities are reconsidering plans to hold in-person classes or implementing new testing regimes. And some are threatening crackdowns on students who get too close with others, in violation of social distancing rules. In the past few days alone, college students at schools in North Carolina, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Vermont, Kansas, Colorado and at the Air Force Academy have tested positive, creating a ripple effect that has put hundreds of other students into quarantine or isolation.

Anger escalating into violence (Times of London) All across the United States this summer, against the febrile backdrop of lockdowns, a recession, protests over police brutality and the political tumult of an election year, there are reports of minor arguments escalating into shootings. In Chicago 2,500 people have been shot, a rise of 44 per cent on last year. In Philadelphia the tally is 1,203, a rise of 36 per cent. More than a thousand people have been shot in New York city, a rise of 84 per cent, with murders up 29 per cent. Among the victims was a man heading to work who was shot after a run-in with a stranger on a platform of Grand Central station. Another was shot 11 times after an argument over a parking space. In Kansas City, where murders are up by 38 per cent, arguments were the leading cause of killings, according to police data.

San Francisco blanketed in smoke as California fires rage (AP) Thousands of people were under orders to evacuate in regions surrounding the San Francisco Bay Area Wednesday as nearly 40 wildfires blazed across the state amid a blistering heat wave now in its second week. Smoke blanketed the city of San Francisco. Police and firefighters went door-to-door before dawn Wednesday in a frantic scramble to warn residents to evacuate as fire encroached on Vacaville, a city of about 100,000 that lies between San Francisco and Sacramento. Fire officials said at least 50 structures were destroyed and 50 were damaged and that four people were injured.

Reeling From a Storm, Iowans Worry They Have Been Forgotten (NYT) A week after a violent storm tore through Iowa, toppling trees and leaving grain silos in crumpled heaps, residents of devastated places like Cedar Rapids were left wondering whether the rest of the nation had any sense of their plight. Between the coronavirus pandemic and the rush of news in a presidential campaign year, attention to the Midwest’s storm seemed to shift away especially quickly, residents said, leaving them feeling overlooked even as they dug through rubble. At one apartment complex in Cedar Rapids, residents whose homes were destroyed in the 100-mile-per-hour winds that left hundreds of thousands of Iowans without power have been living in tents. They cook meals on grills. Some who have chosen to try to stay inside step over splintered walls and hope that the building does not crumble further.

Vaccine warning from the pope (Reuters) Rich countries should not hoard a coronavirus vaccine and should only give pandemic-related bailouts to companies committed to protecting the environment, helping the most needy and the “common good”, Pope Francis said on Wednesday. “It would be sad if the rich are given priority for the COVID-19 vaccine. It would be sad if the vaccine becomes property of this or that nation, if it is not universal and for everyone,” Francis said at his weekly general audience. The World Health Organization said on Tuesday that any nation that hoards possible vaccines while excluding others would deepen the pandemic. “The pandemic is a crisis and one never exits from a crisis returning to the way it was before,” Francis said.

Satellite maintenance (The Verge) Last February, Northrop Grumman’s MEV-1 satellite successfully latched on to a doomed communications satellite Intelsat 901, which had run out of fuel after 20 years. As a result, for the cost of $13 million a year MEV-1 will allow Intelsat 901 to stay active for another five years, potentially moving on to another host afterwards. This could be the future of satellite maintenance, and a successor satellite MEV-2—which hopes to remain in service for 15 years—is now bound for Intelsat 10-02, where it will hopefully latch on and extend that satellite’s lifespan as well.

Venezuela Deploys Security Forces in Coronavirus Crackdown (NYT) President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela has tackled the coronavirus much as he has any internal threat to his rule: by deploying his repressive security apparatus against it. Officials in Venezuela’s government are denouncing people who may have come into contact with the coronavirus as “bioterrorists” and urging their neighbors to report them. The government is detaining and intimidating doctors and experts who question Maduro’s policies on the virus. And it is corralling thousands of Venezuelans who are streaming home after losing jobs abroad, holding them in makeshift containment centers out of fear that they may be infected. In commandeered hotels, disused schools and cordoned-off bus stations, the returning Venezuelans are forced into crowded rooms with limited food, water or masks and held under military guard for weeks or months for coronavirus tests or treatment with unproven medications, according to interviews with the detainees, videos they have taken on their cellphones and government documents.

Batman prowls streets of Santiago delivering food to homeless (Reuters) A stranger disguised as Batman is prowling the streets of Santiago delivering food to the homeless, providing sustenance and light-hearted solace to those in need following months of lockdown in the Chilean capital. The man, who wears a shiny batman suit complete with a coronavirus-ready sanitary facemask, delivers a few dozen plates of hot food to homeless people throughout the South American capital on a regular basis. He said he prefers not to be identified. “Look around you, see if you can dedicate a little time, a little food, a little shelter, a word sometimes of encouragement to those who need it”, he said, adding the disguise was meant to bring good cheer and unite.

IRA members arrested across Ireland (Foreign Policy) British and Irish authorities conducted a joint raid on suspected members of the paramilitary New Irish Republican Army across Ireland on Tuesday, arresting 10 individuals under antiterrorism legislation. Officials said Tuesday’s sweep was part of an ongoing investigation into the group’s activities, occurring just days after it held an armed show of strength in the city of Derry. Members of the New IRA were most recently implicated in the killing of journalist Lyra McKee in April 2019.

Scotland leans toward leaving the UK (Financial Times) Just six years after Scotland voted “No” to independence, opinion polls suggest that if a second referendum on the issue was held, a majority would now back leaving the UK. The shifting polls have dismayed Scottish supporters of continued union and sent shockwaves through a Conservative UK government suddenly scrambling to find ways to shore up UK unity even as it grapples with the coronavirus pandemic and looming introduction of post-Brexit border controls with the EU. Brexit’s unpopularity in Scotland and a widespread perception among voters that Edinburgh has responded better to Covid-19 than London appears to be tipping the balance toward a separation that would strip the UK of a third of its landmass and 8 per cent of its population.

Decadent dogs (Foreign Policy) North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un sees threats to his authority all around him. Known for his penchant to ruthlessly crack down on those he views as rivals, he even stands accused of ordering the assassinations of close relatives. Now, Kim has gone one step further. According to local sources, last month, Kim ordered pet dogs in the capital of Pyongyang to be rounded up and confiscated, claiming they represent “Western decadence” and are little more than a “‘tainted’ trend by bourgeois ideology.” The report said that high-ranking North Korean officials often keep pets as a show of status, and the regime’s decision to confiscate pets from ordinary people has stoked some resentment.

Wetting the Buddha’s toes (Foreign Policy) The record-setting rains and flooding in southern China continues, with the waters now reaching the toes of a famous statue of the Buddha in Leshan that normally sits well above the confluence of the Min and Dadu rivers, for the first time since 1949. The Three Gorges Dam is facing the largest inflow since it was completed in 2006, although claims that the dam is in imminent danger of collapse are exaggerated. The Chinese government is waging a complicated battle against the waters, diverting as much as possible onto farmland while evacuating other areas and issuing warnings across entire provinces.

UN crisis looms as US readies demand for Iran sanctions (AP) After a resounding defeat in the U.N. Security Council, the United States is poised to call for the United Nations to reimpose sanctions on Iran under a rarely used diplomatic maneuver—a move that is likely to further isolate the Trump administration and may set off a credibility crisis for the United Nations. The sanctions had been eased under the 2015 nuclear deal that President Donald Trump withdrew from two years ago. But last week the U.S. lost its long-shot bid to indefinitely extend an international arms embargo on Iran and has now moved to a new diplomatic line of attack. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is set to travel to New York on Thursday to notify the Security Council president that the United States is invoking the “snapback” mechanism in the council’s resolution that endorsed the nuclear deal. It allows participants to demand the restoration of all U.N. sanctions in a complicated procedure that cannot be blocked by a veto. The administration’s snapback plan is bitterly opposed by China and Russia as well as the other Security Council members, including U.S. allies Britain and France, and could set the stage for a battle over the legitimacy of the U.N.’s most powerful body.

15 Years After an Assassination Rocked Lebanon, a Trial Ends on a Muted Note (NYT) The case went to trial in a country far from the crime scene with none of the accused in custody. It cost hundreds of millions of dollars to prosecute and employed armies of investigators, researchers and lawyers. But when the verdict on the most consequential political assassination in Lebanon’s recent history arrived on Tuesday, it left the country without a sense of closure and failed to answer even the most basic question: Who ordered the killing? For a huge suicide car bomb attack in Beirut in 2005 that rattled the Middle East and killed former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and 21 others, a United Nations-backed tribunal in the Netherlands acquitted three defendants for lack of evidence. The fourth man, Salim Ayyash, was convicted of participating in a conspiracy to carry out the bombing. But if he is ever apprehended, the court will have to try him all over again since he was tried in absentia. The long-awaited verdict from the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, which was created in 2009 at the behest of the United Nations Security Council, disappointed many Lebanese and others who had hoped that an international inquiry would reveal—and punish—those responsible for the crime and break the country’s long cycle of impunity for political killings.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

The first time Bob Duffy entered the world of epidemiology, he was an amateur scientist. It was 2003. He had retired from the New York City Fire Department and taken a sabbatical from his normal life in suburban Long Island to help his daughter Meghan earn her Ph.D. in Michigan. She was studying the ecology and evolution of infectious diseases, using tiny lake crustaceans as a model organism.

Together, Meghan and Bob would go out in a truck, towing a little, flat-bottomed rowboat. They were studying how epidemics begin and spread under a variety of conditions. They’d unhitch at one lake, and then another, working their way across the countryside as they collected and counted diseased crustaceans and the fish that preyed on them. “Over the course of a few months, you can go through a whole epidemic,” Meghan Duffy told me. Her father was her paid research assistant, and one of his jobs was to catch the fish. After 30 years of running into burning buildings, he couldn’t believe his luck, she said.

The last time Bob Duffy entered the world of epidemiology, he was a statistic.

Bob Duffy was a father, grandfather, retired firefighter, and longtime volunteer in his Long Island community. He died on March 29.

COURTESY OF MEGHAN DUFFY

He died, at home, on March 29, 2020. Officially, the cause of death was chronic lung disease. But there was more going on than just that. A sudden illness had left him too fatigued to leave the house, and he had had contact with multiple people who later tested positive for COVID-19. Yet Bob’s death certificate doesn’t list that disease as a cause or even a probable cause of his death. He never got tested — he didn’t want to enter a hospital and be separated from Fran, his wife of 48 years.

Instead, because he didn’t die at a hospital and because this was at the beginning of the pandemic, when guidelines were rapidly changing and testing was hard to come by, Bob Duffy became one of the people who fell through the statistical cracks. As of this writing,1 22,843 New Yorkers have officially died from COVID-19. Bob Duffy is not counted among them.

More than a month later, the question of who counts as a COVID-19 fatality has become political. In Florida, the Medical Examiners Commission accused state officials of suppressing their state death count. Pennsylvania’s death tally bounced up and down, enough to prompt the state senate to discuss giving coroners a bigger role in investigating COVID-19 deaths. And President Trump has questioned the official national death count of 90,340 as of May 19,2 reportedly wondering whether it was exaggerated.

The experts who are involved in counting novel coronavirus deaths at all levels — from local hospitals to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — disagree with the president. If anything, they say, these deaths are undercounted. And with a death like Bob Duffy’s, you can begin to see why.

Bob was a person, beloved by his family and his community. Ever since he died, Bob has also become a number — data entered into a spreadsheet, just like the tiny shellfish he and his daughter once pulled from cold Michigan lakes. His death might never end up being attributed to SARS-CoV-2, but his death matters to the way we understand it.

There was never a cough. Instead, the first sign of illness Fran Duffy remembers was when she and Bob tried to go for a walk and he couldn’t make it to the end of the block. “We got three houses down, and he said, ‘I can’t walk today. I’m too tired.’ I thought maybe he’s getting a bug. Maybe he’s just tired. So we came back. That was Wednesday,” she said.

He died four days later.

It was a very fast decline. But in other ways, Bob’s final illness was just part of a long string of sicknesses. Over the two decades since his retirement, he had had a stroke. He also had had cancer in his mouth, colon and liver. There was scarring — fibrosis — that had damaged his lungs and forced him onto supplemental oxygen. The radiation treatments that had cured his cancers years ago had also left him with nerve damage in his legs and a slowly eroding jawbone. Bob was not the picture of health. We are, after all, talking about a guy who worked for the NYFD during a time when firefighters did not routinely wear the ventilators and masks they had been issued. It was a macho thing, Fran said. You couldn’t be the one guy who put on the mask if nobody else did.

So when Bob got sick in late March this year, whatever it was was not the only thing he was sick with. He was also so sick of being sick that he wasn’t interested in going to the hospital. Even as his temperature soared to 103 degrees, Bob chose to do a video chat with his family doctor, Ihor Magun, rather than leave the house. Fran remembers the doctor suggesting they treat Bob as if he was positive for COVID-19, in terms of isolation from friends and family. He could have gotten a test — but the nearest testing center at Jones Beach was 30 minutes away, and then there were the long lines besides. Fran thought about driving him out there, but he was already sick enough that that option seemed worse for him than not knowing what it was that he had contracted.

All those small decisions, made in the moment because of what was best for Bob, ended up determining how his death was recorded.

The way deaths are counted, like so much else in the U.S., differs among (and even within) states. There’s a lot of variation in this process, even on a good day — a fact that stretches all the way back to the beginning of mortality records in this country. While the census began counting living people nationwide in 1790, recording deaths was left up to state and local governments. The first state to fully document its deaths was Massachusetts, in 1842. It wasn’t until 1933 that all states were turning in death counts to federal authorities.

Even today, now that the death certificate itself is fairly standardized, who first records your death and decides what you died of varies by where you live and where you die. And that variation is only likely to increase when people begin dying of a new disease that we still don’t understand. In Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, for example, medical examiners — medical doctors who investigate deaths and perform autopsies — must provide official certification for every COVID-19 or COVID-19-related death in the county, said Dr. Sally Aiken, president of the National Association of Medical Examiners. But that’s not true everywhere. In New York State, medical examiners get involved only in cases that seem strange or suspicious, like when an otherwise healthy young person dies with no prior warning, said Richard Sullivan, president of the New York State Funeral Directors Association. Otherwise, the decision is left up to health care workers.

Bob’s death certificate was filled out by his family doctor and did not mention COVID-19. The county medical examiner called Fran but asked only about Bob’s preexisting conditions. He had had enough of them that there was no reason to suspect foul play, and that was all the medical examiner needed to know.

If Bob had died in a nearby hospital, such as one of the ones in Nassau County owned by Northwell Health, he would have been tested for COVID-19, either before or after his death. Whether he’d been there for five minutes or a month, hospital staff would have been in charge of filling out the part of his electronic death record that pertains to cause of death, a representative from Northwell told me. This process can look deceptively simple — just write a cause of death on the line — but there’s more to it than you’d think.

A standard certificate of death provided by the National Center for Health Statistics leaves room for the chain of events that led to someone’s death.

The New York electronic death records form provides three lines for cause of death, which are supposed to be filled out in a way that tells a story. The idea is that nobody ever really dies of just one thing, Aiken told me. Even if you die in a traffic accident, the death record might read something like “Blunt force trauma … as a consequence of a car crash.” This is the information that helps people further up the data chain classify a death accurately. Leaving any part of the story out means a gap in the data later.

Not everyone fills out these records completely, though. And early on during the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a lot of confusion happening, said Shawna Webster, executive director of the National Association for Public Health Statistics and Information Systems, which represents vital registrars nationwide. “It might just say ‘coronavirus,’ which I’m sure you know is not as descriptive as it needs to be,” she said. There are, after all, multiple ways COVID-19 might kill a person. On the other end of the spectrum are people who fill out the forms completely wrong. “Please do not put ‘COVID-19 test negative,'” Webster said. “Do not do that. There were several.”

In the days after his first symptoms, Bob’s condition worsened. He’d become so tired he couldn’t leave the house — then so tired that walking anywhere by himself was impossible. He had a massively high fever. But even Saturday, the night before he died, he was still talking, Fran said, and so she asked him what he wanted for dinner. She expected something light. Bob said, “Corned beef hash.”

“I said, ‘Bob, corned beef hash?'” But he was sure. So Fran put it together for him, the man she loved. She had to move him to a wheelchair and bring him to the kitchen to eat. He could no longer walk without falling. “I bring him to the kitchen and I’m just turning to the sink to wash my hands and I hear plop,” she said. He had fallen asleep at the table. “His head went right down in the plate. And I just said, ‘Bob. What about the corned beef hash!’ So it just … he thought about it and he wanted it, but he just couldn’t get it, you know?”

Doctors say this kind of oxygen depletion and exhaustion — coupled with an ability to still communicate — is a common feature of COVID-19. Even after he collapsed at the table, Bob was lucid enough to talk to the priest who gave him his last rites later that night. He died the next day.

Over the next few weeks, it would become clear that Bob had been in contact with a number of potential sources of COVID-19 — or maybe he’d been a source that passed it to them. It’s impossible to know. His son-in-law was later diagnosed with the disease, and his wife — one of Bob’s three daughters — tested positive for COVID-19 antibodies. One day Fran would open the newspaper to find that the woman who had cut her and Bob’s hair for three decades — and who had come to their house just before Bob got sick — had died of COVID-19.

But Bob’s death certificate makes no mention of the novel coronavirus. Bob’s doctor did not return requests for an interview, so we don’t know why he made the choices he did when completing the certificate. But Bob’s immediate cause of death is listed as “cardiopulmonary arrest” — his heart stopped — as a consequence of “chronic obstructive lung disease,” as a consequence of “fibrosis.”

Bob is a prime example of why doctors and other experts think that COVID-19 deaths are probably being undercounted — not overcounted, as some COVID-19 skeptics have alleged. In fact, if Bob had died today, there’s a decent chance that he’d have been labeled a “probable” COVID death, based on current CDC guidelines, which, among other things, advise doctors to include “probable COVID-19” on death certificates when a patient has had symptoms of the disease and been in contact with people who tested positive. Originally, only people who themselves had tested positive for the virus were being counted. Like Bob, a lot of people were probably left out. But even as the guidelines were revised and the national death count — which includes probable as well as confirmed cases — shot upward, experts said that undercounting was still more likely than overcounting.

COVID-19’s death toll has been so overwhelming that officials have had to resort to makeshift morgues in trailers.

TAYFUN COSKUN / ANADOLU AGENCY VIA GETTY IMAGES

Some of this reasoning is based on logic. We know that we had a widespread shortage of tests when people were already dying of COVID-19, so it makes sense that these two problems would overlap at times.

Other reasoning is based on data. In a lot of states the number of pneumonia deaths in March was higher than what you’d expect for that time of year, or for the level of influenza active during that time — an important detail, given that pneumonia can often be a complication of that disease as well. These increases were particularly noticeable in New Jersey, Georgia, Illinois, Washington and New York, according to research led by Dan Weinberger, a professor of epidemiology at Yale School of Medicine. But pneumonia isn’t the only way COVID-19 kills. All deaths in the state of New York went up in March, and these excess deaths — deaths above the usual rate for that place and time of year — outstrip diagnosed COVID-19 cases statewide by nearly three times. Data collected by The New York Times suggests that the high number of “excess” deaths in New York continued through April.

Yet another reason why experts say we’re not overcounting COVID-19 deaths is that we’re now counting them in much the same way as we have always counted deaths from infectious disease. The methodology is longstanding and is used for all sorts of diseases — and there’s never been cause to think that the methodology made us overcount the deaths from those other diseases.

In the bureaucracy of death everything happens fast, fast, fast, and then, after a while, things just grind on.

If you look at the CDC’s annual report of flu deaths, for example, you’ll see that it’s “estimated,” modeled on official flu deaths reported, deaths from flu-like causes reported, and what we know about flu epidemiology. The calculation is done this way precisely because public health officials know that a straight count of formally diagnosed flu deaths would be an undercount of actual flu deaths.

While flu tests aren’t in short supply and essentially anyone who wants to be tested for the flu can be, not everyone who catches it gets tested. Plenty of people get sick with the flu and never go to a doctor, said Alberto Marino, a research officer at the London School of Economics who has studied disease case and death counts for both LSE and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. If they die — especially if they are also old or have some underlying condition — the role the flu played in their deaths can easily go unnoticed and unrecorded. We don’t record “probable” flu deaths (again, the tests aren’t rationed), but we do record deaths due to “flu-like illnesses” — and plenty of people who die from the flu don’t have that listed as the cause on their death certificates.

Likewise, when a doctor lists COVID-19 as a condition that led to someone’s death — even if it was just the last in a series of illnesses — they’re not doing anything different from what’s been done with the flu for years, Aiken told me.

Basically, if you think COVID-19 deaths are being inflated, then you shouldn’t trust annual flu death counts, either. Or a whole host of other death counts. The only reason to really think that COVID-19 death counts are less trustworthy at this point is that the flu is politically neutral while the new coronavirus is not.

If there’s any major difference between the way we count flu deaths and the way we count COVID-19 deaths, it’s that nobody is trying to publish flu deaths daily, in real time. And that’s where death counting for COVID-19 gets complicated.

When Bob Duffy died, his community responded immediately. Fran found her mailbox filled with cards; flowers and baked goods piled up on the porch. At one point, there were so many tulips, hydrangeas and pansies that the Amazon delivery guy started to make comments, so Fran decided to plant the flowers around the yard. “There’s not one card that doesn’t have a separate letter in it,” she said. And many were from people she didn’t even know.

Besides being a firefighter and Ph.D. assistant, Bob spent many years working with the local Catholic parish’s social ministry. Essentially, he was a volunteer social worker. He made sure people who were hungry found meals. He helped strangers pay their utility bills, and he coordinated a Long Island-wide food bank. “Most people volunteer one day a week. Bob officially volunteered five days a week,” Fran told me. “He ended up with the keys to the parish. He was up there seven days a week, and he couldn’t be stopped.”

So when he did stop, people cared. And they cared for his widow.

Bob Duffy’s family will never know for sure whether he died of COVID-19.

COURTESY OF MEGHAN DUFFY

Death happens suddenly, abruptly. At first, family, friends and, sometimes, if we’re lucky, strangers burst into action like Roman candles, sending out showers of casseroles and condolences like sparks. For a short period of time, there is a lot to do, decisions to be made, love to be accepted. But then there is quiet. And then there is the rest of your life. The absence that death leaves behind lasts far longer than the initial flurry of condolences.

The bureaucracy of death has a similar dynamic — first, everything happens fast, fast, fast, and then, after a while, things just grind on.

In New York, in the heady first day or two after a person dies, the doctor or hospital enters the cause of death on an electronic death record, the funeral home fills out demographic data on the same form, and the state registrar of vital statistics logs the data. But from there things slow down considerably.

Usually, that’s fine — death statistics aren’t so volatile that we need them to be updated as quickly as, say, election returns or live sports scores. But the pandemic has changed our relationship with these stats. Now they’re how we know whether we’re stopping the spread of COVID-19, and just how big that spread is. The problem is that the system isn’t designed to do that work.

Normally, if a death is uncomplicated and requires no investigation or autopsy or debate, death records are transferred to the National Center for Health Statistics, an arm of the CDC that organizes and analyzes the data of life and death in this country. It’s here that a death is categorized and tabulated. And this process is happening now, with COVID-19 deaths as well.

It takes time to investigate some of the deaths and get them to NCHS — the frequency of investigations varies widely, but state-level emergency operations teams work with medical personnel and state epidemiology surveillance to review COVID-19 deaths and possible COVID-19 deaths, Webster said. So the records can be in the state databases for a while before they’re solid enough that they go to NCHS. Then, someone at the NCHS is reading each of these death records to make sure that, say, a car crash victim who happened to have a COVID-19 diagnosis is logged in a database differently from a COVID-19-positive patient who died on a ventilator. The result of all this is that, even though public counts include confirmed COVID-19 deaths and probable ones, the deaths aren’t just being recorded willy-nilly. And it will be possible, in the future, to go back and look at the records and see which cases were confirmed by testing and which weren’t.

But these are slow stats. And they’re slowed down even further by the confusion caused by a novel virus pandemic. Currently, the count of COVID-19 deaths produced this way is at least two weeks behind, said Robert Anderson, chief of the mortality statistics branch of the NCHS. The counts in some states, including New York, might be lagging even more. This system is the gold standard, Webster said, but it’s designed to produce accurate statistics — not monitor a pandemic in real time.

Death is hard — hard to count, hard to experience.

And so the CDC also has fast stats on COVID-19 deaths. Besides going to the NCHS, the data from the New York State vital records office is also gathered directly from that agency’s database and into one maintained by USAFacts, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization charged with collecting daily death reports from the state and county registrars that first record them. The CDC’s COVID Data Tracker comes directly from the USAFacts count.

That means there are two distinct death counts being published by the CDC — one slow, one fast. (That’s in addition to counts being kept by Johns Hopkins University, The New York Times, and other entities.) As of May 19, the CDC’s slow count was 67,008, and its fast count was 90,340. You’ll find both counts in various sections of the CDC’s website, and when you look at those pages, it’s not always clear what these separate counts do and don’t represent. It’s easy to get confused and assume that the death count you’ve just seen in the newspaper has suddenly been cut in half. On May 2, conservative firebrand Dinesh D’Souza falsely claimed exactly that, linking his followers to the CDC’s slow count.

The smaller, slow count is more accurate, but it doesn’t reflect how many people have died as of today. It’s weeks behind. The fast count does a better job of portraying the real-time situation, but the exact number will shift as state and local counts fluctuate. Some of that change is due to confusion between state and local entities. New York City, for example, has its own vital records office — almost as though it’s an independent state — and the fast-count numbers it produces for itself don’t usually match the fast-count numbers produced for it by the State of New York, said Tanveer Ali, a data visualization analyst for USAFacts.

And while Bob Duffy will not be counted in either the slow or the fast counts happening now, he will likely end up included in the data — if only by algorithmic proxy. Eventually, experts said, the CDC will come back and do an estimated burden of death counts for COVID-19, just as it does for the flu every year.

All of this is why we won’t know the exact number of people who died of COVID-19 for years, Aiken said. Again, that’s nothing new. Final estimates for the number of people who died in the 2009 H1N1 pandemic weren’t published until 2011. Getting the slow count right, sorting through differences between disparate and nonstandardized state reporting systems, correcting errors and categorizing probable cases, finding ways to understand how many Bob Duffys we’re missing — it all takes time. This is, experts emphasized again and again, something nobody has ever done before. But the precedent that does exist suggests we shouldn’t expect to get a “right” answer soon. “If you look at opioid mortality, they’re two and a half years behind on compiling that,” Aiken said.

Death is hard — hard to count, hard to experience. The personal and the statistical both reside in a space where the question of “what happened” can be answered as an absolute — as certain as we can ever be about a thing — while simultaneously remaining painfully inexact and mysterious.

We will almost certainly never know exactly how many Americans died of COVID-19. But any count we get by leaving out deaths probably related to the virus — and, ultimately, leaving out Bob and a lot of people like him — will be less accurate than a count that includes them.

“We like to have answers. We like to have a yes, a no, a definite answer,” Fran said. Bob had been dead for about a month when Fran spoke to me from her kitchen. Just that day, someone she didn’t know had sympathetically left a loaf of banana bread in her mailbox. He was still so close. He was so far away. “But we certainly don’t always get what we like,” she said. “That’s really the truth, you know?”

Additional reporting by Kaleigh Rogers.

[bryonysimcox]

You've Got to Look for the Good Stuff: Week 14, Spain

Like light is to darkness, this week has been an antidote to the last. My mood has lifted and the days have flown by, as lockdown continues and we do too.

Sunshine is a simple remedy. Each day this week has been warm and dry, if not bright and sunny too. It’s allowed us to live more inside-outside, which not only makes life easier but lifts my mood. It’s been a stark contrast to the constant rain and cold which dominated last week’s blog post.

I’ve also loved seeing pictures of children out in the streets and parks again, as Spain slowly lifts its coronavirus measures. It’s almost incomprehensible to imagine what it must be like for all these youngsters, many of whom have been cooped up in city-centre apartments with their siblings and parents for weeks and weeks. Even with the generous garden we have here and our weekly walks to the supermarket I’ve been going borderline insane, so I shudder to think how isolation has affected kids and their mental health.

Gaba Podcast live streams continue to punctuate my week. Adam Martin, whose podcast I mentioned in Week 10’s post, shares breathwork and meditative practices that have really helped me ease my busy mind. One of the things Adam talked about this week was what we consider to be ‘exercise’, in light of zealous Brits moaning that people sitting in the park, standing still in public and seemingly staring into space are breaking government-imposed controls around exercise. Adam argues that we consider sport and movement in open space an essential part to looking after our physical health, whilst ignoring the ‘exercise’ or psychological nurturing that our mental health deserves.

While this pandemic takes lives, we need to keep in mind the impact that social distancing is having on our psyches.

I titled this week’s digital diary entry ‘You’ve Got To Look Out For The Good Stuff’ because I’ve realised that there’s plenty of good stuff around, but quite simply, you’ve got to look for it. That might sound pretty obvious, but in comparing this week to the last, I can see that the main thing that’s changed isn’t my situation, but more so my mindset. Admittedly, the sunshine has made a huge difference, but apart from that, we’re still stuck in lockdown in Spain in the same physical, geographical and financial situation that we were in last week.

What’s caused this shift in mindset? Honestly, I don’t know. I think life in lockdown is making us act in all kinds of strange ways, cycling through an emotional spectrum so extreme we’ve rarely experienced it before and yet now feels like the norm. Tears, laughter, smiles and frowns easily paint my face in a matter of hours. So maybe my mood this week has just been luck. But as my shifted mindset has worked its magic, somehow I’ve seen and experienced little nuggets of ‘good stuff’. I hope that some of you have seen and enjoyed those nuggets too, wherever you are.

After rain left the road to the supermarket blocked, we finally made it to the shops this week, when the water subsided.

Perhaps fearful of another rainfall, this time we piled the trolley high in the local Aldi and returned home to stock up the cupboards. A plentiful fridge has resulted in some more cooking adventures - this week including George’s new specialty, Spanish omelette, and a new fave of mine too, veggie paella.

We picked and podded the final batch of broad beans this week, and helped to dig up the patch where they were growing to make way for the vegetables of the coming season: tomatoes, courgettes, cucumbers and peppers. One of the inadvertent blessings of being ‘marooned’ here in Catalunya has been to see and enjoy the changing of the seasons, and my interest in food growing and land management increases with them. George and I have always said we’d like to live in Spain in a self-built tiny house with a bit of land, and somehow we’ve landed in a situation right now that’s not far off! In addition to the vegetables we can get from the garden, I’ve been buying fresh eggs from the neighbour (often still warm from the coop!) which is a real treat.

(images, left to right) ‘Why simple changes [like growing food] are really profound’ a lovely illustration I discovered from Brenna Quinlan, George prepping the soil for tomatoes, and my new favourite thing to cook, veggie paella.

Food isn’t the only ‘good stuff’ to be grateful for. Since I mentioned Simon Mair’s article in my post from Week 11, I’ve been researching ‘Ecological Economics’ and its potential to lead us towards more just and sustainable ways of living. That research finally came to a head this week, when I had the pleasure of interviewing not only Simon himself but also friend and futures thinker from Mumbai, Mansi Parikh.

Making a video about alternative economic futures which address some of the challenges posed by Covid-19 is turning out to be a bit of a challenge in itself!

The interviews with Simon and Mansi were utterly fascinating, and I was so grateful to be able to talk to two super knowledgeable folk, who like me, are passionate about the future and how we can make it better. They shared their time and their insights, and now I’m left with over 150 minutes of recorded zoom calls to make sense of!

I want to use these interviews to make a video which engages people who perhaps wouldn’t usually be interested in economics, without ‘watering down’ the message or intent of the film. It’s such a hard balance to strike, to create something which is at once accessible and engaging but also rich with ideas. As the week progresses, I’ll start editing the footage and hopefully the narrative of the video will reveal itself.

One of the best things about making a new video is the chance to do loads of research! There have been so many articles which have got my brain buzzing, from ‘no-growth’ economics to deliberative democracies, and I’ve also just started reading ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism’ which is a manifesto for a post-Capitalist future. Even if this research doesn’t directly inform the video I’m working on, it serves to inspire me. I’ve actually found myself a few times this week almost overwhelmed by how much interesting media there is out there to consume, and often just resort to adding thing to my ‘read later’ list, or quoting my favourite gems on Twitter.

(images, left to right) Recording interviews with Mansi and Simon, and my latest reading project...

The realisation of a project we began in January, ‘Place Portraits: Episode 1’ was finally released this week.

George had the idea a while ago to create a video series exploring cities and places through analogue photography. Whilst it was a super simple idea, we thought these short, laid-back videos would contrast with some of the longer-format stuff or more informative films we’re hoping to upload on the Broaden YouTube channel.

Back at the start of our trip we shot on a roll of Kodak Portra 400 and Fujifilm C200, using the trusty Pentax that was once George’s dad’s camera. We’d had the photos back from the processing lab for a while, but have only just completed the edit and got the film online, which is such a nice feeling. We’ve had some lovely responses to the resulting four-minute video, and I’ve especially valued constructive feedback so we can start to think critically about what Episode 2 might look like.

(video) Place Portraits: Episode 1 - Paris

Since ‘The Hundred Miler’ hit 90K views this week (which in and of itself is pretty nuts), I knew I had to temper my expectations about how many views we’d get with Place Portraits. Even though it’s not far past 200 views, each and every one of those views counts and I’m chuffed to see it finally online. Watching Broaden’s audience slowly grow has also served as great motivation to submit The Hundred Miler into film festivals, a process which we started this week.

There’s probably plenty more good stuff which deserves to be celebrated, but the one which can’t go unmentioned is of course the company of others.

Embracing what has become a routine activity for many of us these days, I’ve spent some cheerful hours on phonecalls and videochats to others across the globe.

This week included a three-way call between Ireland, Australia and Spain with dear friends that George and I used to live with catching up on career plans, cats and newfound hobbies. I also enjoyed a game of movie charades (which involved some impressive commitment from some people!) and even attended an evening of ‘drag queen bingo’. These digital hangouts leave me asking ‘Would I be connecting with friends and family this much if the world wasn’t in a global pandemic?’ and I think the answer would be no.

(images) Just some of the beautiful humans that feed my soul.

I’m grateful that these human connections are now much more of a priority. In being restricted to a simpler and more isolated way of living, we’re certainly reassigning value to the things that matter. That’s something which I’ve found from making the economics video and learning about the idea of value, but also something I’ve felt in a visceral way when a phone call with my parents or a friend leaves me beaming.

There’s so much good stuff out there, you’ve just got to be open to it.

[ditloe]

6/365

January 6, 2023

I think today was the latest I’ve woken up since the new year. I woke up at 11:30am and I think I woke up from all the footsteps outside of my room. My mom was doing laundry or something because I heard her get the laundry baskets from the closet. 

I had a missed call from my brother and found out that baby Caeleb tested positive for RSV :( I’m so sad and feel terrible... I really hope I wasn’t the cause of that. My brother said that maybe Adi gave it to him, but also not sure. I appreciate my brother for not blaming anyone and just dealing with the problem at hand. 

I decided to do my 10k steps early in the day! I didn’t want to be put in that situation again where it’s too late to finish the 10k completely. Speaking of, my Apple watch is fixed now and it’s sensing me walking. Last night I did 5k steps only (past midnight) and was glad I did some walking. Today I hit the full 10k all before 3pm. I was glad to get it done early so I wouldn’t be stressed about it later. 

Haven’t really been talking to my parents much honestly. I just get food from the kitchen and then clean up after myself. I mean, I am supposed to stay in isolation for 5 days, so I can’t really mingle with them freely. I also hate wearing n95 masks. It makes it really hard to breathe. I actually told my mom I wouldn’t be joining them to her birthday trip in Vegas. I told her it was because of money issues and it’s true. If she is bringing up money and basically on my butt about paying her back, then I really can’t go with her. I wonder if she expected me to pay for my flight and hotel room. It’s fine though. I hope they enjoy themselves. I am going to try and pick up some shifts if needed since I’m available. 

Chris and I are currently on Discord just chilling. I brought up (very briefly) where my sick basket was. When he got sick, I made him one and got him all the goodies he would need and some other little things. It’d be nice to get one since I don’t get small gifts often. It definitely sucks that Chris does not do these little things for me. I appreciate him doing big things like helping with the car or handy work, but it isn’t the same. I want to be surprised with flowers or gifted things just because. He doesn’t see that, and I’ve brought it up to him multiple times and he never changes. Romance feels dead and sometimes it just seems that we’re friends. I feel like when he gets money from his projects, he uses it towards his lasers and stuff. I understand that is important, but he doesn’t really think to do something nice for me out of the blue. If we were a long-distance couple, it would not work out because he doesn’t do anything to keep the spark alive while we’re apart. Chris and I have been together for so long and I hate how things are being too comfortable. 

Wow, I feel sad now after ranting about my love life. COVID sucks and it has definitely kept me from going out, but it has also showed me that it’s okay to be independent and I should be finding ways to make myself happier instead of searching it from others. 

Honestly, I just need to make more money and worry about myself. I need to do what I want and live life. My financial instability is definitely hindering me from doing things I want to do. I will definitely ask my manager about switching over to part time if I do get a chance to see her on a weekday. Otherwise, maybe I can email her to set up a video appointment. 

Steps: 15,350 (minus 5,199 steps because those steps were supposed to be from yesterday)

[classyfoxdestiny]

Wait until end of August for promised 2,000 testing sites to beat ‘pingdemic’

Wait until end of August for promised 2,000 testing sites to beat ‘pingdemic’

Only around 200 of the 2,000 daily testing sites for key workers promised by Boris Johnson to beat the “pingdemic” are in operation and hundreds of them will not be in place until the end of next month – two weeks after the 16 August date when the requirement to self-isolate will be lifted.

The delay was blasted by business figures, with one haulage industry leader telling The Independent it made the scheme “entirely pointless” and accusing the government of “running the clock down” to 16 August rather than helping truckers get back to work.

Facilities to allow key workers to carry on working after being identified as contacts of Covid-positive people were first announced last week, following warnings that the economy risked grinding to a halt with as many as 600,000 employees a week being told to stay home.

But companies have complained that they are unable to register workers or access testing sites, with the Road Haulage Association on Tuesday branding the scheme a “shambles”.

Now official Department of Health figures show that little more than one-tenth of the 2,000 sites planned across the UK are up and running.

The figures reveal that 800 sites have been identified for use and are being prepared for mobilisation as fast as possible, with something over 200 of them currently conducting testing.

But a further 1,200 are yet to be “onboarded” in the first step towards preparation for operations, and the department does not expect the full complement of 2,000 sites to be in operation until the end of August.

By that time, the “pingdemic” is expected to be over anyway, as there will no longer be any requirement from 16 August for fully-vaccinated people – currently more than 70 per cent of the adult population – to self-isolate if identified as a contact by NHS Test and Trace or pinged by the smartphone. Only unvaccinated workers, those with one jab or those waiting to complete two weeks after their second jab, will need to use the sites.

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UK news in pictures

27 July 2021

A view of one of two areas now being used at a warehouse facility in Dover, Kent, for boats used by people thought to be migrants.

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26 July 2021

A woman is helped by Border Force officers as a group of people thought to be migrants are brought in to Dover, Kent, onboard a Border Force vessel, following a small boat incident in the Channel

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25 July 2021

Vehicles drive through deep water on a flooded road in Nine Elms, London

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24 July 2021

Utilities workers inspect a 15x20ft sinkhole on Green Lane, Liverpool, which is suspected to have been caused by ruptured water main

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23 July 2021

Children interact with Mega Please Draw Freely by artist Ei Arakawa inside the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern in London, part of UNIQLO Tate Play the gallery’s new free programme of art-inspired activities for families

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22 July 2021

Festivalgoers in the campsite at the Latitude festival in Henham Park, Southwold, Suffolk

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21 July 2021

A man walks past an artwork by Will Blood on the end of a property in Bedminster, Bristol, as the 75 murals project reaches the halfway point and various graffiti pieces are sprayed onto walls and buildings across the city over the Summer

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20 July 2021

People during morning prayer during Eid ul-Adha, or Festival of Sacrifice, in Southall Park, Uxbridge, London

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19 July 2021

Commuters, some not wearing facemasks, at Westminster Underground station, at 08:38 in London after the final legal Coronavirus restrictions were lifted in England

PA

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18 July 2021

A view of spectators by the 2nd green during day four of The Open at The Royal St George’s Golf Club in Sandwich, Kent

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17 July 2021

Cyclists ride over the Hammersmith Bridge in London. The bridge was closed last year after cracks in it worsened during a heatwave

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16 July 2021

The sun rises behind the Sefton Park Palm House, in Sefton Park, Liverpool

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15 July 2021

Sir Nicholas Serota watches a short film about sea monsters as he opens a £7.6 million, 360 immersive dome at Devonport’s Market Hall in Plymouth, which is the first of its type to be built in Europe

PA

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14 July 2021

Heidi Street, playing a gothic character, looks at a brain suspended in glass at the world’s first attraction dedicated to the author of Frankenstein inside the ‘Mary Shelley’s House of Frankenstein’ experience, located in a Georgian terraced house in Bath, as it prepares to open to the public on 19 July

PA

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13 July 2021

Rehearsals are held in a car park in Glasgow for a parade scene ahead of filming for what is thought to be the new Indiana Jones 5 movie starring Harrison Ford

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12 July 2021

A local resident puts love hearts and slogans on the plastic that covers offensive graffiti on the vandalised mural of Manchester United striker and England player Marcus Rashford on the wall of a cafe on Copson Street, Withington in Manchester

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UK news in pictures

11 July 2021

England’s Bukayo Saka with manager Gareth Southgate after the match

Pool via Reuters

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10 July 2021

Australia’s Ashleigh Barty holds the trophy after winning her final Wimbledon match against Czech Republic’s Karolina Pliskova

Reuters

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9 July 2021

England 1966 World Cup winner Sir Geoff Hurst stands on top of a pod on the lastminute.com London Eye wearing a replica 1966 World Cup final kit and looking out towards Wembley Stadium in the north of the capital, where the England football team will play Italy in the Euro 2020 final on Sunday

PA

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8 July 2021

Karolina Pliskova celebrates after defeating Aryna Sabalenka during the women’s singles semifinals match on day ten of the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London

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7 July 2021

The residents of Towfield Court in Feltham have transformed their estate with England flags for the Euro 2020 tournament

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6 July 2021

A couple are hit by a wave as they walk along the promenade in Dover, Kent, during strong winds

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5 July 2021

Alexander Zverev playing against Felix Auger-Aliassime in the fourth round of the Gentlemen’s Singles on Court 1 on day seven of Wimbledon at The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club

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4 July 2021

Aaron Carty and the Beyoncé Experience perform on stage during UK Black Pride at The Roundhouse in London

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3 July 2021

England’s Jordan Henderson celebrates after scoring his first international goal, his side’s fourth against Ukraine during the Euro 2020 quarter final match at the Olympic stadium in Rome

AP

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2 July 2021

Dan Evans serves against Sebastian Korda during their men’s singles third round match at Wimbledon

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1 July 2021

Prince William, left and Prince Harry unveil a statue they commissioned of their mother Princess Diana, on what would have been her 60th birthday, in the Sunken Garden at Kensington Palace, London

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30 June 2021

Dancers from the Billingham Festival and Balbir Singh Dance Company, during a preview for the The Two Fridas, UK Summer tour, presented by Billingham International Folklore Festival of World Dance in collaboration with Balbir Singh Dance Company, inspired by the life and times of female artists Frida Kahlo and Amrita Sher-Gil , which opens on July 10 at Ushaw Historic House, Chapel and Gardens in Durham

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29 June 2021

A boy kicks a soccer ball in front of the balconies and landings adorned with predominantly England flags at the Kirby housing estate in London

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28 June 2021

Emergency services attend a fire nearby the Elephant & Castle Rail Station in London

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27 June 2021

People walk along Regent Street in central London during a #FreedomToDance march organised by Save Our Scene, in protest against the government’s perceived disregard for the live music industry throughout the coronavirus pandemic

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26 June 2021

A pair of marchers in a Trans Pride rally share a smile in Soho

Angela Christofilou/The Independent

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25 June 2021

Tim Duckworth during the Long Jump in the decathlon during day one of the Muller British Athletics Championships at Manchester Regional Arena

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24 June 2021

A member of staff poses with the work ‘The Death of Cash’ by XCopy at the ‘CryptOGs: The Pioneers of NFT Art’ auction at Bonhams auction house in London

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23 June 2021

Bank of England Chief Cashier Sarah John displays the new 50-pound banknote at Daunt Books in London

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22 June 2021

Actor Isaac Hampstead Wright sits on the newly unveiled Game of Throne’s “Iron Throne” statue, in Leicester Square, in London, Tuesday, June 22, 2021. The statue is the tenth to join the trail and commemorates 10 years since the TV show first aired, as well as in anticipation for HBO’s release of House of the Dragon set to be released in 2022

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21 June 2021

Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon receives her second dose of the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine

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20 June 2021

Joyce Paton, from Peterhead, on one of the remaining snow patches on Meall a’Bhuiridh in Glencoe during the Midsummer Ski. The event, organised by the Glencoe Mountain Resort, is held every year on the weekend closest to the Summer Solstice

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19 June 2021

England appeal LBW during day four of their Women’s International Test match against India at the Bristol County Ground

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18 June 2021

Scotland fans let off flares in Leicester Square after Scotland’s Euro 2020 match against England ended in a 0-0 draw

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17 June 2021

Members of the Tootsie Rollers jazz band pose on the third day of the Royal Ascot horse racing meet

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16 June 2021

A woman and child examine life-size sculptures of a herd of Asian elephants set up by the Elephant Family and The Real Elephant Collective to help educate the public on the elephants and the ways in which humans can better protect the planets biodiversity, in Green Park, central London

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15 June 2021

Hydrotherapists with Dixie, a seven-year-old Dachshund who is being treated for back problems common with the breed, in the hydrotherapy pool during a facility at Battersea Dogs and Cats Home’s in Battersea, London, to view their new hydrotherapy centre

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14 June 2021

Scotland’s David Marshall in the net after Czech Republic’s Patrik Schick scored their second goal at Hampden Park

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13 June 2021

Raheem Sterling celebrates with Harry Kane after scoring England’s first goal of the Euro 2021 tournament in a match against Croatia at Wembley

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12 June 2021

Oxfam campaigners wearing costumes depicting G7 leaders pose for photographers on Swanpool Beach near Falmouth, Cornwall

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11 June 2021

Members of the Vaxinol team, who are commercial, industrial and residential cleaners specialising in disinfection and decontamination, use electrostatic spray systems to deep clean the Only Fools Bar in Liverpool

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10 June 2021

A woman walks her dogs as the incoming tide begins to wash away the heads of G7 leaders drawn in the sand by activists on the beach at Newquay, Cornwall

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9 June 2021

Adam Chamberlain, 45, general manager of Big Tree pub in Sheffield, has put up over 500 flags, taking 36 hours, in preparation for Euro 2020, which kicks off this weekend

Tom Maddick / SWNS

UK news in pictures

8 June 2021

REUTERS

RHA managing director for policy and public affairs Rod McKenzie told The Independent: “This follows the pattern of the government’s actions ever since these measures were announced – confusing, badly thought-through and, as many of our members are saying, entirely pointless.”

The haulage industry has been lobbying for double-jabbed and negative-testing drivers to be automatically exempted from self-isolation instructions in order to keep supermarket shelves full and factories supplied, he said. The industry regarded the government’s solution to the pingdemic as “unworkable” from the start.

“Now it seems that what they have been doing is running down the clock to 16 August in the hope of being seen to do something, even if it’s completely impractical,” he said.

Liberal Democrat health spokesperson Munira Wilson said: “The government needs to get a grip so we can get our lives back to normal. Businesses are on their knees as staff self-isolate and millions of kids have missed school due to Covid.

“Our priority needs to be making sure schools can return in September and businesses can operate safely. The government’s inability to get more testing centres up and running puts that in jeopardy.”

Daily testing was first announced on 19 July, after a week in which half a million people were off work self-isolating as contacts, with the scheme initially open only to critical workers including railway signallers and air traffic controllers who were fully vaccinated.

Three days later on Thursday last week, amid growing clamour from businesses for employees to be allowed to go to work, the scheme was extended to an estimated 10,000 food industry workers, with no requirement to be inoculated and the number of planned sites increased to 800.

Then on Monday, another expansion was announced, with a further 1,200 testing sites promised at workplaces around the country in sectors such as prisons, waste collection and defence.

Health secretary Sajid Javid said at the time that daily contact testing would play a “vital role” in helping minimise the potential for disruption caused by rising cases of Covid-19 while keeping staff protected.

Until now, however, there has been no official timetable for how soon all 2,000 would be in operation, with Downing Street saying only that they believed 500 would be up and running by the end of this week.

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[orbemnews]

How the Pandemic Left the $25 Billion Hudson Yards Eerily Deserted When Hudson Yards opened in 2019 as the largest private development in American history, it aspired to transform Manhattan’s Far West Side with a sleek spread of ultraluxury condominiums, office towers for powerhouse companies like Facebook, and a mall with coveted international brands and restaurants by celebrity chefs like José Andrés. All of it surrounded a copper-colored sculpture that would be to New York what the Eiffel Tower is to Paris. But the pandemic has ravaged New York City’s real estate market and its premier, $25 billion development, raising significant questions about the future of Hudson Yards. Hundreds of condominiums remain unsold, and the mall is barren of customers. Its anchor tenant, Neiman Marcus, filed for bankruptcy and closed permanently, and at least four other stores, as well as several restaurants, have also gone out of business. The development’s centerpiece, the 150-foot-tall scalable structure known as the Vessel, closed to visitors in January after a third suicide in less than a year. The office buildings, whose workers sustained many of the shops and restaurants, have been largely empty since last spring. Even more perilous, the promised second phase of Hudson Yards — eight additional buildings, including a school, more luxury condos and office space — appears on indefinite hold as the developer, the Related Companies, seeks federal financing for a nearly 10-acre platform on which it will be built. Related, which had said the entire project would be finished in 2024, no longer offers an estimated completion date. The project’s woes are in many ways a microcosm of the broader challenges facing the city as it tries to recover. Related said it was counting on wealthy buyers filling its condos and deep-pocketed customers packing the mall to make Hudson Yards financially viable. But that was before the coronavirus arrived in New York. With the pandemic forcing white-collar workers to stay home — and keeping foreign buyers and tourists away — it is not clear when, or if, demand will reignite for the vast supply of upscale aeries and blue-chip office space crowding the city’s skyline. “The challenges facing Hudson Yards aren’t unique,” said Danny Ismail, an analyst and lead of office coverage for the real estate research firm Green Street Advisors. “All commercial real estate in New York City has been impacted by Covid-19. However, I would argue that post-pandemic, Hudson Yards and the area around it will be one of the better office markets in New York City.” The creation of Hudson Yards capped nearly 30 years of planning for the last large, undeveloped parcel in Manhattan, industrial land between Pennsylvania Station and the Hudson River. It is New York’s largest public-private venture and the city’s biggest development since Rockefeller Center in the 1930s, aided by roughly $6 billion in tax breaks and other government assistance, including the expansion of the subway to the West Side. Even with the subway expansion, Hudson Yards is still relatively isolated from the rest of Manhattan, off the beaten path from the busiest avenues for tourists, shoppers and workers. Related acknowledged that it was facing the same financial problems as the rest of the city, but said tenants were still moving into the project’s office buildings and that Hudson Yards would eventually rebound. Four office buildings at Hudson Yards — including 50 Hudson Yards, which is under construction — are 93 percent leased, a spokesman for Related said, though it is unclear how much of that occurred last year. Facebook signed a lease in late 2019 for roughly 1.5 million square feet. “Our strong office leasing, even during the pandemic, is why we’re well positioned to lead New York’s comeback from Covid and why the adjacent neighborhoods and the entire West Side will recover faster,” the spokesman, Jon Weinstein, said. Still, the troubles confronting Hudson Yards have caused Related to rethink its plans. Led by its billionaire founder Stephen M. Ross, the company set out to build Hudson Yards in two phases. The first phase, which opened in 2019, has four office towers, two residential buildings, a hotel and the mall. The second part was supposed to include 3,000 residences across eight buildings closer to the Hudson River, as well as a 750-seat public school and hundreds of low-cost rental units. At least 265 apartments are meant to be “permanently affordable,” according to a 2009 agreement between City Hall and Related. In total, Hudson Yards was expected to stretch 28 acres over existing rail yards and encompass 18 million square feet of space, roughly double the size of downtown Phoenix. The developer has considered an array of new options, including even a casino, though that idea is no longer front and center, according to Mr. Weinstein. Related cannot construct the second half until it builds a deck over the rail yard. The company, along with Amtrak, has been in discussions with the federal Department of Transportation about a low-interest loan to finance the platform and preserve the right of way for a new rail tunnel under the Hudson that Amtrak is planning to build. Related has been seeking more than $2 billion, according to two officials briefed on the proposal who were not permitted to discuss it publicly. “The residential is going to have to recover, or they switch it up and look at a different product mix over there,” said Robert Alexander, chairman of the tristate region for the real estate brokerage CBRE, which is marketing space at Hudson Yards. “To me, it’s a major development site and there’s very, very, very few major development sites in New York.” Related is also facing pressure from its investors to deliver a fuller accounting of the project’s finances. A group of 35 investors from China — a sliver of the roughly 2,400 who contributed $1.2 billion to Hudson Yards — sued the company last year, accusing it of refusing to open its books or say when it might repay their investments. An arbitrator in the case recently denied the investors’ claims and ruled that Related was not required to disclose detailed financial information. The company’s lawyers said that Hudson Yards was facing “significant headwinds as a result of Covid-19” and that because of the economic downturn and lockdown restrictions, it may be unable to recoup its investment in at least one property there, 35 Hudson Yards, a mixed-use tower with a hotel, according to filings in the case obtained by The New York Times. Another group of Chinese investors, whose contributions of $500,000 per person were part of a United States visa program that can grant them a path to citizenship, are said to also be considering filing a similar lawsuit against Related, according to a person familiar with the situation who was not authorized to speak publicly. Related made it clear before the outbreak that it intended to earn the bulk of its money at Hudson Yards through its condos and mall since Mr. Ross said it had been leasing office space at cost, without taking a profit. The pandemic has laid bare the tough road Related faces. In 2020, 30 residential units sold at Hudson Yards, compared with 157 the year before, according to an analysis for The Times by the appraisal firm Miller Samuel. So far this year, several condos are under contract at Hudson Yards, according to Related, a possible sign that the market may be stabilizing. Still, Manhattan has a record number of condos for sale right now, especially luxury units like those at Hudson Yards, and it could take years for sales to truly bounce back, according to Nancy Wu, an economist at StreetEasy. “Hudson Yards was built for a buyer that’s no longer there and maybe partly a tenant that’s no longer there, and that was someone who wanted to live in Manhattan but not live in the city per se,” said Richard Florida, a professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and School of Cities, referring to the development’s homogeneity and somewhat isolated location. The retail picture is also bleak. The vast space occupied by the failed Neiman Marcus store will no longer be taken by another retailer. Instead, Related will convert it into more offices. In the meantime, the company has intervened in Neiman Marcus’s bankruptcy case claiming that the department store owes $16 million for breaking its lease and an additional $129,000 for the removal of its signage throughout the mall, including a giant sign that hung in a five-story glass atrium. While the mall was closed by lockdown orders from mid-March to early September, shoppers are still largely absent. Related has battled its other beleaguered retail tenants, even threatening stores with $1,500 per day fines for failing to stay open after the mall reopened. Several stores, including Forty Five Ten, a luxury clothing store from Dallas that opened alongside Neiman Marcus, have shuttered permanently. The mall opened with 79 stores and now has 89, Related said. Related said the mall had added at least 11 stores since September, including Herman Miller, Levi’s and Sunglass Hut. In the weeks before Christmas, tourists and office workers were in short supply and some stores were still closed, while others like Rolex were open by appointment only. Mall employees far outnumbered shoppers inside the cavernous building, where the most crowded spot seemed to be the line at Blue Bottle Coffee. Weekday traffic at the Hudson Yards subway station, part of the No. 7 line extension the city paid for to help make the development possible, plunged to an average of 6,500 riders in December, a sharp drop from the 20,000 daily average in 2019, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the subway. The lack of shoppers at the mall has cut into Related’s revenue because the company structured some retail leases so that shops pay rent based on a percentage of their monthly sales. In addition, a number of leases were specifically tied to the fate of Neiman Marcus — if it closed, smaller stores would not have to pay rent or could break their leases without penalty. Related would not comment about its terms with tenants, including whether any were withholding rent payments. Mr. Weinstein, the company spokesman, said that retail would “always be a key element of our new neighborhood.” Despite the uncertainty, Hudson Yards has already helped turn the neighborhood into a key business district and part of a stretch of Manhattan along the West Side that is becoming a major tech corridor. The development has attracted a who’s who of companies, including HBO, CNN, L’Oréal USA, BlackRock and Tapestry, the parent company of Coach, Kate Spade New York and Stuart Weitzman. “I think New York City will be fine, and Hudson Yards will be fine,” Mr. Florida said. “Will Hudson Yards be the same as it is envisioned? That’s the open question.” Source link Orbem News #Billion #Deserted #Eerily #Hudson #left #Pandemic #yards

[lockdownuk]

Lockdown Diary Part 6

A personal account during the lockdown in the UK due to the Covid-19 outbreak.

23/03/2020 8:30pm Boris Johnson, UK Prime Minister, gives a live address to the nation to, effectively, put the country on lockdown to stem the spread of the deadly coronavirus strain, Covid-19.

Many of us have been self-isolating for days but this latest development within the UK in reaction to the pandemic feels very serious and very scary. I decided to keep a simple diary and where better but online.

Day 151: Great hour or so last night around Foggy’s. When I got home I watched World War Z and some stand up by Nate Bargatze and drank and smoked loads. Today, I got up just before 2pm and felt soooo unmotivated. I was going to have a day of doing fuck all but had a change of heart around 7pm so did my stair climb then walked for over an hour (7km) and got home at 9:30pm!

Day 152: Typing on day 153. I popped up and saw Foggy last night. One of the reasons was I wanted to take him a beer to say thanks for looking over my mitigation statement for my impending court hearing for speeding. He liked what i wrote but has given me some key amendments. Basically free solictor advice and I am very grateful. While there he hit me with the news that Ham’s sister, Preeya, has died (last Friday 14th August) from Covid 19. To say i was gobsmacked is an understatement. She was 49. The family could only talk to her over a loud speaker and had to say good bye that way as her life support was swithced off. Fucking hell, it’s terrible. And, what makes it worse, is how complacent I have become about the disease while it’s causing so much tragedy. As I said to Foggy, it’s important to renew our efforts in combatting this disease so that Preeya’s death at least means we learn. I also feel guilty for not realising that many people have passed like this - just because I (sort of) knew Preeya doesn’t mean I shouldn’t feel any less sorry for the dozens of people dying and many more affected everyday. My emotions are in turmoil and yet I’m not directly affected.

Day 153: Typing this on day 154. Gone midday before I woke up. Beers in the evening and watched Den of Thieves. Great film.

Day 154: Woke up at 2:37 pm FFS. Just done a walk and I feel like shit (booze induced).

Day 155: Went to bed at about 4am yesterday but was up at 10am today so, usual Monday correction of sleep patterns. Two long walks today plus a little housekeeping on photos, sharing to the Oundle chatter group, so, quite constructive. Hoir chat with dad plus a chat with a recruitment agemt about a helpdesk manager role in Peterborough.

Day 156: Typing on Day 157. I saw Karen sitting with TTP (and two others I couldn’t make out) at the T&K on my second walk. Why does that piss me off so much? I am being like Jack in Midnight Run. I need to let go.

I am also getting wound up with Tumblr - I can only make entries on this diary blog on the PC - when I try on the Android or Apple apps, they pop up with ‘post too long’. Trying getting info from Tumblr’s online help on that though - fucking not happening. I think I might move this to a Google Blog...it’s not like anyone else reads it. I’m not sure I’d want that - it’s far more a private diary now rather than the cute ‘blog’ idea it started out as. It is now a disciplinary exercise more than anything.

Day 158: Feeling less sorry for myself now. It’s 10pm and I am having a midweek beer as I wait for tea to cook.

Day 159: Decided I will split this diary into 30 day sections to appease Tumblr. My second walk today was at 8pm ‘cos it was pissing down from about 4pm ‘til 7:30pm...very dark and so wet. Home by 9.15pm.

Day 160: I went shopping in Corby (Tesco and Asda) - I only really went so I could get blue eggs. £75 on booze! I was going up to Fog’s tonight but at around 6pm it started to piss down. So, I shall drink at home. It’s 9.15pm, I think it’s going to get messy.

Day 161: Not sure when I wnet to bed last night but I didn’t get up until 2pm. Nice long walk (9km) in the rain!

Banners and Sam G went to London to have a few with Andy P. I’m a little flabbergasted, it’s like there’s no Covid19 all a sudden.

Day 162: Bank holiday Sunday so I am having a beer or two. Tea’s cooking, gonna watch The Accountant on BBC1 at 10.30pm. Today I got up at 1.55pm and managed to have a shower and be downstairs to see the start of the Belgian GP. Hamilton won, pretty easily. I then did my stair climb and a 9.8km (6 mile) walk.

Last night I watched a rather quirky, entertaining comic horror film called Ready or Not and then Ricky Gervais - Fame. That’s the tour I saw him live after seeing Henman’s final tennis match at the Davis Cup at Wimbledon. Bloody funny - the recording could even be the show Karen and I were at. Bed at around 5am, hence not egtting up ‘til way past midday!

Day 163: Bank Holiday Monday, just like a Sunday. I am making this entry on my phone as I'm now able to due to breaking up the diary blog into 30 day sections.

Molly's Game, a film I've tried to rewatch several times but it's never been free, is on BBC2 tonight. I'm recording it right now but actually watching Seinfeld from the start on All4. The first couple of episodes are a bit ropey if truth be told. Luckily, I know it improves.

Day 164: Managed to get hold of Michelle via her daughter Daisy to place a nice big order for C. Just as well ‘cos Tim’s ignoring me!

Rang and spoke with Barry Haddon today to check he’s OK.

Day 165: Picked up C from Michelle’s in Yarwell. While there I was mauled by her over friendly Staffordshirebull terrier getting bit on the thigh. Twice in six months I’ve been bitten by dogs.

Karen WhatsApp’d to see if I’d seen Miley Cyrus on the Live Lounge!

Day 166: Forgot to say that yesterday, I also bumped into and chatted with Pete Gilder. We mainly talked about (getting caught) speeding.

Today I did over 22k steps and I am fucked. 

I replied to an email from Shirley at work HR. After the furloughed staff call on Thursday, which I didn’t attend, they want us to cash in some (more) hoilday, which is fine by me, but I have also asked if we are any clearer as to what happens on 1st October, when the rentention scheme ends. I await her reply.

Day 167: Another 20k stpes today. Just 24k needed to have completed 1m steps since the start of July.

It’s Friday, about 9.45pm. I’m going to watch Molly’s Game and have a few beers.

Day 168: Got up at just before 2pm. It’s now 10.15pm and I am just having my first beer, Today was a lazyish day, completed 12k steps.

Day 169: Completed the 1m steps with 24 days to spare. Woohoo. Now, I am unsure whether to reduce the walking I have got so used to doing? I think I might keep up an average of 11k steps a day which is all I would have needed to accomplish to reack 1m in 3 months.

I’m pleased I did it today since I :went to bed a nearly 5am this morning!

Day 170: Actually typing this on day 171. Feels weird having done the 1m steps, almost like I’ve nothing to do. However, I am of course going to keep walking but not quite as hard/much. I did feel liek I was walking myself into the ground all in the name of finishiong the task ASAP. So, today I only had one walk, did 11,5k.

Yesterday’s Italian GP was a cracker. Hamilton had a penalty and ikt ended up with Gasly winning. Full of incident including a red flag so the race ‘restarted’.

I completely forgot ot make this entry on the correct day?

Day 171: I have decided to press on with the walking - not quite so urgently as before - to see what I can achieve steps-wise in 3 months. So, today, an unusually hot day for September, I did 18k steps plus cleaned the bathroom, hoovered my room and stairs and hallway. I am fucked!

Today I have bought a set of smart scales and a new pair of Skechers. The Skechers were almost free (£69 reduced to £30ish which I had in Paypal) and the scales were £20. Still, I shouldn’t. I don’t know what will happen at the end of October when the CJRS ends plus I don’t know what punsihment will be dished out, any day now, for the speeding offence! Fuck it!

Day 172: An eventful day. Boris has restricted gatherings to no more than 6 people and will use ‘Covid Marshalls’ to police this. It’s causing a stir amongst the online community. I have set up accounts with Gurushots and Picfair to showcase my snaps. The latter offers the opportunity to sell them. I watched Anchorman 2. It was pretty good. I also postd on the Oundle chatter group about walking in front of a car the other day - the driver, a yound lady, was enchanting the way she just smiled and let me pass - I used it as an opportunity to ask about George Higgins saving a child from near death at the hands of a lorry, the post about which has disappeared.

Day 173: Lots have seen my post re: my car incident but the bait hasn’t been taken.

Sarah Haines made a nice comment about my photo posts on the Oundle Chatter group also saying that she doesn’t know me but, it turns out she does. She is James Watson’s ex from when I first moved to Oundle so we caught up on Messenger.

Rachel Harris posted a meme slating Boris about the fact we were all encouraged to go out and about (inclding the Eat Out to Help Out scheme) and now we are being sent back to ‘our room’. Some of the comments continue to slate the government. I couldn’t resist commenting that, had the royal ‘we’ maintined social distancing and remembered there’s a fucking pandemic, perhaps we might not be under impending severe lockdown, as it now looks like. I also mentioned photos I have seen (one posted by Rach herslf) whereby you could be mistaken for thinking that there isn’t a pandemic. I have finished the comment with a line about we can only blame ourselves, not the hapless government! I wonder what reaction that will get!

Day 174: Scales were delivered today. If they are accurate I am a little over 11 stones, from 12st 7lbs before lockdown. Can’t quite believe it. I have a yearly diabetic review with Lynne in October so i can check then. If the scales are wrong, I’ll be livid on 2 scores!

Friday night beers as I type. Been looking forward to them since last Saturday!

Day 175: I do not trust the new scales. I get a different reading each time I step on them and by 10-12 lbs. Fucking things. Boots arrived today - they’re going back as well. Footy season started today. Posh lost away to Acrrington Stanley. “Who are they?”

Day 176: The GP was reflagged again today (a new track at Tuscany. A red flag two races on the trot is most unusual. Hamilton won.

Day 177: I managed to get the scales working. I’m pretty much the same weight I was prior to ld (about 12.5 st). This leads me to believe that if I wasn’t doing all the walking I am, I would be as fat as a fucking house. On that note, Google Fit is playing up. It loses the step and heart point count for each walk (although the workouts retain the route map info) Wtf?

I think K and TTP might be a thing from a post I saw on FB whereby some chap (who I don’t know) commented on TTP’s post that it was nice to see him and K. Kinda gutted if it is true but I shouldn’t be. That’s all I will say on here.

Day 178: Jim contacted me today to let me know he’s leaving RCI. He was quite secretive about why and what’s going on but, there it is. He went on to say that HR will be contacting me shortly to call me back from furlough. Sueanne is taking over as team leader but that’s temporary. and that they will most likely promote from within. I struggling to think what it would be like if Mark was boss! The way RCI are and how disjointed it is with Jim as boss, I shan’t take it as read until HR do contact me. Also, I dunno how I feel about it...I have got so used to not working. But, and it’s a big but, I doubt I’ll have a job after the retention scheme finishes so, if this does pan out, it’s good. I’ll be back to job hunting while in a job, as per before the pandemic.

Also, I received an email letting me know the punishment for my speeding offence was 6 points and a £233 fine, plus costs (£90) and victim support (£34), £357 in total. More than I expected. But, no ban, so I’ll suck it up. 

Day 179: Having midweek beers. I'm in that sort of mood.

Day 180: I WhatsApp’d Jim to let him know HR haven’t contacted me. His garbled response went from telling to give them a shout and let them know he is leaving, to which I asked ‘don’t they know?’, he then said hold fire (on Sueanne’s instruction) and she has said for me to sit tight and then, finally, that HR will contact me! Fuck knows what’s going on! I had a diabetic review with Lynne today. When you go to the surgery you have to let in, which I was by Keren. It was nice to see and chat with her. She is back with Ronnie which was news to me. Then Lynne came and got me. It was nice to see and chat with her also. She weighed me and I’m 12st 3lb. Apparently in Jan last year I was over 13st!

[zed-air]

Pandemic Thoughts

______

Strange times. Strange thoughts. 

Assorted and unstructured. Updated as needed.

- - - - -

2020-04-23

I spent a lifetime in the service industry, and I’m still very emotionally invested in it. A lot of restaurants will not survive the pandemic. Period. Pick a few favourites and support the hell out of them, as regularly as you can, if you want them to still be around a few months from now. Preferably independent ones that enrich your community. 

For those using third-party delivery services to bring you dinner, be aware: for every $10 a restaurant receives through Skip the Dishes sales, $3 of that sale goes to these delivery services (only $7 goes to the eatery). The pub/restaurant where I worked all those years wouldn't have lasted long with those margins. (link)

I've been hammering on about this for a while, and I'll probably continue doing so. If you're in a position to support local independent restaurants, go to the effort of calling them yourself and collecting your own order. Many offer their own delivery service, so use that when needed. Avoid using a third-party service unless necessary.

I still speak to local restauranteurs and pals in the service industry. They concur: these third-party delivery services are not about supporting local eateries. They were primarily useful for supplementing, not replacing, dine-in business. Overall, they are about convenience - and they are now crippling the businesses trapped into using them.

- - - - -

2020-04-27

Before I left the service industry, I fully expected to spend the rest of my life as a publican, performer, and venue operator. Had my fortunes been different and that proved possible, the current situation would have destroyed whatever I had built to this point. This will likewise be the case for countless others worldwide right now, including established successful ones. (link)

I have no idea what will remain after this - when we reach a point that public gatherings are an option again. Will there be anywhere left to gather? Will there be any venues left where performers and audiences can safely meet? Safely rehearse? Safely travel? 

Have I played my last concert? Have we all? Not a clue.

- - - - -

2020-04-28

I chipped a couple teeth some time in the last month. Thanks to PPE mask shortages and general public health concerns, I’m unable to get an appointment with my dentist of 20+ years. As a result, two relatively minor procedures are likely to spiral into major dental issues before they can be addressed. Probably much more expensive ones too. With a persistent jaw ache to keep me company in the interim. 

About two months ago, I wiped-out badly on slippery ground whilst entering my workplace, and I’m pretty certain I either fractured or broke my tailbone in the fall. It’s made sitting fairly painful, and resuming standing agonizing. Only time and avoiding sitting can really help mend it, so I’ve been trying to alternate between walking, sitting, and lying down whenever possible. Two months later, it’s only marginally better. No point bothering trying to get an x-ray these days. Same goes for the non-essential blood work a different doctor requested.

The pandemic is causing major interruptions and interference in many different areas of life, and might cause a variety of completely unrelated health issues in the process. People will die (and have died) just from the massive disruptions all this has caused. Please keep things like this in mind if your primary complaint is being bored at home, or that you’re being oppressed. 

- - - - -

2020-05-19

I was finally able to get into my dentist’s office today to fix my chipped teeth from a few months ago. Spent the appointment listening to a staff meeting with telephone earbuds, and trying to hear how COVID-World is affecting operations. This is modern life now: work from everywhere, go nowhere, remain active whilst being passive (possibly as your skull is drilled out), and do your best not to catch the plague in the process. Tough times, and tight days ahead.

Keeping busy. The weather’s finally stable enough to allow my wife to start working on her new garden. After a long winter and countless weeks delay, this will be very healthful for her. I’m taking any available radio shifts, workshopping various music ideas of my own, mixing songs for The Bolt Actions album when there’s time, and working with my daughter on her remote schooling. We’re also spending a lot of time learning math by playing cribbage, and trying to take walks when the weather’s agreeable. She misses her school friends and teacher. This is a bizarre time to be anybody, but it must be particularly strange to be a child right now.

Temperament-wise, this period hasn’t been as difficult for us as it has been for so many others. I can spend long periods indoors without irritation or issue, but motivation and action are sluggish as inertia reigns. I should be reading books like mad in the evenings, but I don’t remember the last time I felt like picking one up. As time grinds into a homogenous paste, weeks disappear. This has made keeping up with friends and correspondence far tardier than I intended. The atmosphere has been very good at dispelling impulse activity, though. I don’t remember my last drive-through hamburger or vending-machine soda. Nevertheless, it remains troubling to see so many businesses and friends struggling with the very real feeling that they won’t survive these times, and that what will follow might be unrecognizable.

I hope you’re coping ok.

- - - - -

2020-05-28

Keeping occupied during isolation. I’ve been listening to a lot of vinyl records, and I’ve also been enjoying my long-neglected CD collection now that I have the remote radio kit linked to my stereo.

I’m going through recordings at a pretty heavy clip presently. Keeping track of what I’ve listened to is bogging down my phone with photographs and notes. Decided to change how I’m sharing this information. My posts on zedair.net are a bit clunky and overlooked, and I don’t want to bog-down my own personal Instagram profile with music posts. 

So, I’ve started a new Instagram to better document the Zibliothek. Not ideal, but it’ll keep things orderly and more people are likely to see and/or enjoy it there than they do here. It’ll save me some extra cross-posting time too. Feel free to give it a follow if you like album art, books, films, and other cultural artifacts.

- - - - -

2020-08-13

I’ve now been tested twice now for COVID. Negative results both times, I’m relieved to say.

In Edmonton, most folks are being directed to the same facility in Mill Woods on the city’s south side - walking distance from the neighbourhood where I grew up. The building used to be a Grant MacEwan campus, but has since been converted to some kind of Covenant Health facility. The tests occur in the building’s gymnasium.

I keep hearing that the tests are quick, but both times I've gone there have been 400-500 people in a line snaking around a field. Off days, I'm told, but luckily both had beautiful weather. Each time I got inside, I asked if something was amiss to cause such a backup, and the nurses (who are working like crazy just trying to keep up) can only apologize for the delay. I would never give them a hard time about it, but I still don't know why some days there's a quad filled with bodies waiting to enter, and other days where one can get in and out in under 30 mins. 

The first time I went, I had an appointment for 10:30am. Not knowing what to expect, I arrived at 10:30 and found two long lines of people. The left line is for people with appointments. The right line is for drop-in testing. Finding it a bit perplexing, I asked a random person in middle of the left line if she have an appointment, and for when. Like me, her appointment was for 10:30, and she was a good 200 people ahead of my place at the back of the line. I have no idea if the people in front or behind had the same appointment times. You just joined the back of the line regardless of appointment, and waited for everyone before you to finish. I'm not certain what making an appointment actually accomplishes, but it seems to get you access to the faster-moving line once it actually starts moving. The actual time of the appointment seems meaningless. The appointment line was stationary until around 11:15 with zero movement, but then began moving gradually, slow and steady. I didn't notice much movement in the drop-in line. On that occasion, I was finished by 12:15. 

My second test occurred yesterday. The second time, I decided to try the drop-in. Hindsight has taught me that, though this line is much shorter than the appointment line, it moves far slower. I recognized several people from the appointment line who arrived hours after I had, who were tested and leaving before I'd advanced 50 feet. Lesson learned: always make an appointment, but never for earlier than 11:30am.

I seem to be a beacon to people with questions in situations like this. Behind me in the drop-in line was a very talkative, but friendly woman who was about to fly to Egypt with her husband. They required COVID clearance to be allowed to fly. Anyway, after the first hour she bailed to go collect her husband, who'd been waiting in the car due to mobility issues. I promised I'd hold her spot. They parked far away, so it was nearly another hour before they returned to the line. I enjoyed the quiet interim.

Husband didn't seem to like her talking with a strange man, but eventually decided I was harmless and struck up a separate conversation with me. Given that the line was moving super slowly, and that I'm chronically friendly when there's a language barrier, it made for a long slog when he led with "So, do you think this whole Corona hype is a media invention?" Especially when I'd already said that my profession is in radio.

I don't know whether it was a constructive conversation, but we parted friendly, and they will hopefully have clearance to fly to Cairo in a few days time.

[sinrau]

More than 180,000 people have died because of COVID-19 in the United States. And this week, the agency tasked with fighting the worst pandemic in a century recommended surrender.

Earlier this week, the US Centers for Disease Control updated its COVID-19 advice to recommend fewer people get tested for the virus. The agency’s previous advice urged tests for “all close contacts” of infected people, stressing the importance of contacts being “quickly identified and tested.” Now, it says people without symptoms “do not necessarily need a test,” even if they were directly exposed or attended a large gathering in a viral hotspot. It makes exceptions for “vulnerable individuals” and adds a vague instruction to follow local health officials — who, under normal circumstances, would look to the CDC for guidance.

It’s not clear why this change was made. But ultimately, it doesn’t really matter because here’s the important thing:

If it’s actually followed, the CDC’s advice will kill people.

SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, has devastated the world because it’s stealthy. By the CDC’s own guidance, infected people take an average of five days and a maximum of 14 days to develop symptoms, and estimates suggest around 30 to 40 percent of people never develop them at all. Research suggests people can still transmit the disease without symptoms and may be most likely to spread it before they feel sick.

Coronavirus is devastating because it’s stealthy

Fighting COVID-19 requires cutting the chain of infections. That involves finding cases as soon as possible, figuring out if the patient exposed anyone else, and either quarantining all their contacts for two weeks or running tests and isolating only the people who are sick. The latter option is far less disruptive, and it also lets contact tracers find those cases’ contacts to quarantine them — hence the CDC’s earlier guidelines. Now, the agency recommends neither. It just tells people to monitor themselves for symptoms, which does much less to stop the virus’s spread.

President Donald Trump’s administration has promised treatments and vaccines as a solution for the virus. But these aren’t a viable short- or even medium-term option. Just completing necessary vaccine trials will take months, even with development proceeding at an unprecedented rate. It will take longer still to make and administer enough doses to seriously slow the pandemic. Other countries have gotten their outbreaks under control with testing and tracing, along with two-week quarantines for travelers, another recommendation the CDC just discontinued.

The agency’s justification for its change is baffling. Admiral Brett Giroir, the US testing leader, said the agency is applying guidance for doctors and frontline health workers to everyone in the country. “A negative test on Day 2 doesn’t mean you’re negative. So what is the value of that?” Giroir also said. “It doesn’t mean on Day 4 you can go out and visit Grandma or on Day 6 go out without a mask on in school.”

Testing is not about getting to take a mask off

But the value of testing was never letting individual people take big risks. It’s valuable because it tells people when they need to isolate themselves and warn their close contacts about exposure, helping everyone else take the smaller risks that keep society functioning, like selling groceries or teaching kids with a mask on. On a larger scale, testing reveals hotspots where even these risks may be too high, so targeted quarantines can replace large-scale lockdowns. And over time, it drives cases down until you can finally go visit Grandma.

Conversely, we’ve known for months that under-testing is deadly. At the start of the pandemic, state and federal health authorities restricted coronavirus testing to sick people who traveled abroad or were exposed to a lab-confirmed case. The strategy, based on assumptions that the coronavirus was still being imported from abroad, missed an exponentially growing outbreak among the residents of New York City. Without sufficient testing, local leaders had little information to work with. They blundered into a disaster that killed 10,000 city-dwellers within just six weeks of the very first confirmed case — the equivalent of three September 11th attacks. If the city had reacted just a week faster, according to disease modelers, the vast majority could have been saved.

The US has scaled up testing since March, and missing another New York-scale outbreak is unlikely. But the virus has fanned out across countless smaller communities, and as schools and businesses reopen, detecting invisible infections and stopping outbreaks is more important than ever. The CDC is telling these communities to move backward — away from a functioning economy and managed pandemic, and toward either constant, anxious lockdown or a cavalier acceptance of sickness and death.

The CDC is asking America to move backward

The American testing system is overloaded, so the CDC might be trying to save testing capacity. But it’s not taking new steps that would help make up for the rationed tests, like recommending that people who can’t get one self-quarantine. Nor is there a coherent plan for deploying tests where they’re most desperately needed or beefing up contact-tracing programs to get more benefit from every positive test. Again, other countries have successfully done this — while the US has tried to ignore the virus with horrifying results.

The government has had months to build a sustainable testing system, and the answer to its repeated failures isn’t telling citizens that they don’t need the thing it’s unable to provide. When authorities downplayed the usefulness of face masks to avoid a shortage, it caused lasting confusion around a simple public health measure. Downplaying the necessity of testing — one of our greatest tools for fighting the virus — is dangerous.

In fact, Trump has repeatedly suggested that finding more coronavirus cases makes America look bad. He falsely claimed the country would have “very few cases” if it stopped testing for COVID-19, and he claims he told the administration to “slow the testing down” at one point, denying the statement was a joke.

The CDC’s supposed explanation actually makes its new policy sound worse. Frontline workers knowingly expose themselves to infected people day after day, so it’s true that testing gives them (and public health experts) less useful information. It’s not clear why those guidelines should apply to everyone, unless the CDC thinks the average American church or supermarket is so hopelessly virulent that there’s no point even trying to find and extinguish outbreaks. Based on what we know about the virus’s prevalence, that’s simply not true.

It’s good that states are ignoring the CDC, and bad that they have to

Fortunately, states don’t seem to be following this advice. California Governor Gavin Newsom immediately said he was disregarding the new guidance. Texas, Florida, New York, and other hard-hit states have followed suit. Local health experts have urged the CDC to revise its guidelines, and even National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci has expressed concern that they’ll discourage tests. The agency has responded to outrage by saying that, basically, it’s not not recommending tests — “testing may be considered” for close contacts of infected people, said director Robert Redfield.

That doesn’t change how alarmingly short-sighted this recommendation is and how harmful it is for the federal government to be working against the best practices for public health. The White House appears relatively unconcerned with the virus’s death toll, which has hovered around 1,000 people a day (or roughly two 9/11s every week) since late July — Trump stated earlier this month that the number “is what it is.” But testing is also core to any kind of economic recovery, something Trump has heavily emphasized. Even if you somehow forget that COVID-19 is killing people, making workers stay home for weeks or risk debilitating their fellow employees with illness is, in fact, very bad for business.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, among others, claimed the CDC is placating Trump by discouraging tests. Given Trump’s statements about testing, that’s not out of the question — and it would be one of many ways that Trump’s administration has exacerbated the pandemic. But the biggest question right now isn’t whether the president is politicizing the CDC. It’s whether the CDC will keep telling Americans to give up on containing the coronavirus.

The CDC’s testing guidance will make the pandemic worse

[bigyack-com]

Coronavirus Live Updates: Disease Caused by Virus Is Deadlier Than the Flu

The global death rate of the new coronavirus is 3.4 percent, the W.H.O. says.

The head of the World Health Organization said on Tuesday that the global mortality rate for Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, was 3.4 percent. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the organization’s director general, said in a news conference in Geneva that Covid-19 is deadlier than the seasonal flu, but does not transmit as easily. “Globally, about 3.4 percent of reported Covid-19 cases have died,” said Dr. Tedros. “By comparison, seasonal flu generally kills far fewer than 1 percent of those infected.” The estimate most likely takes into account the growing number of infections being recorded outside China, mostly in South Korea, Iran and Italy.“While many people globally have built up immunity to seasonal flu strains, Covid-19 is a new virus to which no one has immunity,” meaning more people can be infected and some will suffer severe illnesses, said Dr. Tedros. The coronavirus does not transmit as efficiently as the flu but “causes more severe disease,” he added.When the coronavirus crisis was concentrated in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the new virus was first found, the W.H.O. said that the mortality rate of the disease ranged from 0.7 percent outside of Wuhan to as high as 4 percent inside the city. The organization also said that the epidemic would affect different countries in different ways. Data from the Chinese government shows that the mortality rate in that country is about 3.7 percent, with most deaths reported in Wuhan and the surrounding province of Hubei. Dr. Tedros added on Tuesday that the disease can be contained, but warned that “rising demand, hoarding and misuse” of medical supplies such as masks could compromise the world’s ability to fight the outbreak, and he recommended a 40 percent global increase in the production of such supplies.

Deaths outside China exceed those in the country for the first time.

As the new coronavirus epidemic rapidly travels around the world, the spread appears to be slowing in China.The number of deaths from the coronavirus reported outside of China on Wednesday surpassed for the first time those reported within the country — the latest sign that the front line of the epidemic may be shifting elsewhere.The Chinese government on Wednesday reported 38 more deaths from the virus, bringing the nationwide death toll to 2,981. At the same time, the number of new infections grew by 119 to 80,270 total, according to official figures. Most of the new infections and deaths were reported in Hubei Province, the central Chinese province at the center of the outbreak. Shanghai has reported only one new infection in the past six days.Experts said the downward trend in official figures outside of Hubei is a strong indication that the draconian measures put in place by the government to contain the spread of the virus are working, at least for now. Those measures include strict quarantine and travel restrictions on broad swaths of the country as well as the closures of schools and workplaces.“It’s very clear that the actions taken in China have almost brought to an end their first wave of infections,” said Professor Benjamin Cowling, an infectious disease expert at Hong Kong University.The concern in China now, experts say, is what will happen once the country begins to normalize economic activity and people start going back to work and school. There are also worries about infected travelers coming back into the country and reintroducing the virus to recovered communities. Already, local governments are taking steps to quarantine people coming back into the country from certain countries abroad.“The question is what will happen if there’s a second wave,” Mr. Cowling said, “because the kind of measures that China has implemented are not necessarily sustainable in the long term.”

Hospitals in South Korea struggle to find beds for thousands of infected patients.

The South Korean government scrambled on Wednesday to find hospital beds for thousands of people infected with the new coronavirus, as the country reported a higher number of new cases than China, the center of the outbreak. South Korea reported 516 new cases on Wednesday, bringing the total number of infected patients to 5,328, including 32 deaths. By contrast, China, once the leading source of cases, recorded only 119 new cases. Nearly 90 percent of the South Korean patients were residents of Daegu, a southeastern city, and nearby towns. In Daegu alone there were 4,006 patients, but more than half were still waiting for hospital beds. Most of the patients, the authorities said, showed only mild symptoms of Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus.Heath officials on Wednesday began transporting patients to government, corporate and religious sites, where rooms were refitted to serve as temporary clinics. They also transported more serious patients to military and state-run hospitals in nearby cities and provinces.“Daegu is in a very difficult situation,” Prime Minister Chung Sye-kyun said in the city on Wednesday. Hundreds of newly commissioned military doctors and nurses were being flown into Daegu to help the disease-control operations, he said. “We can win this war against Covid-19 when we all fight together,” he added.South Korea has tested more than 130,000 people for the virus, as it has raced to find and isolate infected people. Across the country, the government is operating 48 drive-through testing centers, where people can be examined without getting out of their cars, in an effort to limit the chances of exposure to other people.As his government declared an all-out campaign against what has become the biggest epidemic outbreak outside of China, President Moon Jae-in said Wednesday that he was canceling his trips to the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Turkey, originally scheduled for later this month.Mr. Moon apologized for shortages of face masks on Tuesday, as people formed long queues outside retail stores and pharmacies. He upbraided his cabinet ministers to be “more sensitive” to the public’s needs and to “not sit at your desks, but get out to the field.”

U.S. expands testing for people who fear they have been infected.

Vice President Mike Pence said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would lift all restrictions on testing for the coronavirus, and would release new guidelines to fast-track testing for people who fear they have the virus, even if they are displaying mild symptoms. The guidelines “make it clear that any American can be tested, no restrictions, subject to doctor’s orders,” Mr. Pence told reporters at the White House. The federal government had promised to ramp up testing after drawing criticism for strictly limiting the tests in the first weeks of the outbreak. “The estimates we’re getting from industry right now — by the end of this week, close to a million tests will be able to be performed,” the head of the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Stephen Hahn, said at a White House briefing on Monday.Some companies and public health officials cast doubt on the government’s assurances, saying in some cases that tests under development are still weeks from approval.And even if a million test kits were available, public health laboratories say they would not be able to process nearly that many within a week. A spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services said on Monday that public health labs can test 15,000 people daily, though that figure is expected to grow.

Death toll in the U.S. rises to nine after two earlier deaths in Washington State are tied to the virus.

Two people who died last week in the Seattle area were infected with coronavirus, officials said on Tuesday, suggesting that the virus had spread in that region days earlier than health officials had previously known.That brought the death toll in Washington State, and in the United States, to nine. So far, those deaths have all been in the Seattle area.The confirmation of additional deaths adds to an escalating emergency in a region that has rapidly emerged as a focal point for the virus in the United States, where there have now been at least 120 cases of coronavirus in more than a dozen states, as local health authorities from coast to coast raced to assess the risk to schools, medical centers and businesses.The other deaths, all announced over the last few days, included residents of a nursing care facility in Kirkland, a Seattle suburb.Also on Tuesday, Amazon emailed its staff in the Seattle area saying it learned that an employee in one of its many office buildings in the South Lake Union neighborhood tested positive for the virus. “The employee went home feeling unwell on Tuesday, February 25 and has not entered Amazon offices since that time,” the email said.Health officials in North Carolina announced that state’s first case of coronavirus on Tuesday afternoon. They said the patient there had traveled to Washington and been “exposed at a long-term care facility” where there was an outbreak, an apparent reference to the Life Care nursing center in Kirkland, Wash.The North Carolina patient was said to be doing well and isolated at home in Wake County.

The last swimmer in Wuhan defies the current, and the coronavirus.

Most every afternoon, one resident of Wuhan, China, ambles down the stairs beneath the city’s majestic Yangtze River Bridge, completes an elaborate warm-up of stretches, checks his watch and plunges headlong into China’s longest river.Most residents rarely leave their homes in the locked-down city of 11 million people, where the coronavirus outbreak began. The rhythms of everyday life — work, school, shopping, commuting — have been suspended, but Lu Jianjun, 53, has persisted in his daily ritual.“A healthy body is an asset for the revolution,” he said, citing a motto coined by Mao Zedong. “Chairman Mao loved to swim in the Yangtze — right here, actually. We should do the same, no matter what happens.”The coronavirus that has infected nearly 50,000 Wuhan residents and killed more than 2,250, but “the hospitals haven’t made a cent from me,” Mr. Lu said. “I haven’t had a cold or fever for nearly 30 years.”After the government implemented emergency controls in January and shut down public transportation, the other swimmers in Wuhan disappeared. “Usually, there’s a dozen or more of us every afternoon,” Mr. Lu said. “Before they shut down the city, there were several of us still swimming.”“Now it’s just me,” he added.Mr. Lu grunted dismissively at younger people hesitant to jump in the river. He made sure that his son and nephews became strong swimmers. “Why stop swimming?” he said. “Of course, it helps! Everyone’s immunity is different, but no matter what, swimming helps. Look at my health.”

Drive-through facilities offer testing without exposure.

In South Korea and Britain, health officials have set up drive-through facilities where patients can be tested for the coronavirus without leaving their cars.Health officials in those countries say it reduces exposure to other patients in places like waiting rooms, where uninfected people could mix with the infected. Medical workers in protective clothing meet patients at their cars, then reach inside the windows to take samples.The earliest testing sites have indicated it can streamline the process, proponents say, with the screening completed in less than 10 minutes.“Here we can test many people within a short period of time in a less crowded manner, and there are lower risks of infection because it’s done inside the car,” Kim An-hyun, chief of a community health center in Goyang, South Korea, told local broadcaster MBC, according to Reuters.The idea has spread to 48 locations in South Korea. Several facilities have been set up in the past week across Britain, which require appointments.

China censored information about the virus as early as December, a new report finds.

China’s censors blocked social media posts about the spread of the coronavirus as early as December, according to a report released Tuesday by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab.Many in China have expressed anger at measures taken by the authorities to snuff out the spread of early warnings online. Focus has fallen in particular on Li Wenliang, a doctor who sought to alert others about the disease, only to be held by police and accused of spreading rumors. He would later die from the virus, triggering almost unanimous anger and mourning online.The new findings underscore the broader and more systematic ways officials sought to contain word of the virus, even as it spread across communities in the central city of Wuhan. Censors on two popular Chinese messaging services used keywords to target a wide array of references to the outbreak, the report said.“Censored terms included factual descriptions of the flu-like pneumonia disease, references to the name of the location considered as the source of the novel virus, local government agencies in Wuhan, and discussions of the similarity between the outbreak in Wuhan and SARS,” according to the report.Even after Beijing officially acknowledged the epidemic and sought to contain it by locking down millions of people, heavy censorship has persisted. In particular, on the popular messaging app WeChat, there have been widespread efforts to stifle discussion of the outbreak.Lotus Ruan, a researcher with Citizen Lab, said such information controls can be particularly dangerous during a public health emergency, because they can prevent people from getting accurate information.“The broad censorship of the coronavirus we found is significant because blocking general information during a health crisis can limit the public’s ability to be informed and protect themselves,” she said.

Production disrupted, India curbs the export of key drugs.

The spreading coronavirus may soon affect people’s health in a different way: The outbreak is starting to hurt the supply of essential drugs.Drug makers are struggling to get raw ingredients for common antibiotics and vitamins from Chinese factories, which were closed for weeks as China battled to contain the coronavirus. Now, even as some of China’s factories have restarted, shortages of some drugs may develop.The disruption is being felt most acutely in India, where the authorities on Tuesday ordered the country’s vast pharmaceutical industry to stop exporting 26 drugs and drug ingredients, most of them antibiotics, without government permission.That’s a problem for the rest of the world, which relies on India’s drug makers for much of its supply of generic drugs. India exported about $19 billion of drugs last year and accounted for about one-fifth of the world’s exports of generics by volume, according to the India Brand Equity Foundation.

Facebook gives global health officials free advertising to combat misinformation.

Facebook said on Tuesday it was taking measures to help curb the spread of the coronavirus by partnering with the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and governments around the world.The social network said it had been working with different groups over the past month to use its ample resources for global aid during the outbreak by offering insight into the behavior of the 2.9 billion people who use its products, or the ability to spread correct information about how to deal with and prevent the virus.“We’re focused on making sure everyone can access credible and accurate information,” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, said in a post to his Facebook page. “This is critical in any emergency, but it’s especially important when there are precautions you can take to reduce the risk of infection.”If someone now searches for the coronavirus on Facebook, they will see a pop-up on the site directing them to the W.H.O. website or a local health authority for the most up-to-date information. The company is also handing out free advertising to global health agencies — including unlimited free advertising for the W.H.O. — to spread information on how to combat the virus.Facebook has played a role in the spread of misinformation around the coronavirus since the outbreak began. Some people have posted ads claiming false cures and other bogus information to turn a profit. Conspiracy theorists have used the company’s platforms — including Facebook, Messenger and WhatsApp — to spread misleading information around how the disease is spread. Facebook said it was doing what it could to identify and limit such activity.Reporting was contributed by Amy Qin, Sui-Lee Wee, Cho Sang-Hun, Katie Rogers, Christina Goldbaum, Vindu Goel, Reed Abelson, Sopan Deb, Mike Isaac, Karen Weisse, Paul Mozur, Elaine Yu and Sarah Kliff. Read the full article