#we’ve also had an increase in Covid outbreaks here

[isthisjackie]

Not to continue this negativity train, but I would like to also say how insane it is to live in the US rn. Like I made over $800 last weekend selling my stuff and it was great, and so far have already used like $400 of it for bills and necessities. Like maybe 6 years ago that would’ve been a large amount of money I could probs save and use for after my contract ends, and like it has like vanished in just a few days

[thatload900]

2020 Flu Deaths

2020 Flu Deaths Worldwide

Videos For 2020 Flu Deaths

First Death Of 2019-2020 Flu Season Confirmed In LA County

2020 Flu Deaths Worldwide

2020 Flu Deaths In Washington State

VACCINE DEATH WAVE: UK government posts bid for AI. VACCINES KILL: Study finds positive correlation between COVID-19 deaths, flu vaccination rates in. Mar 30, 2021 Pediatric Deaths - Pediatric deaths are the number of deaths of people under the age of 18. In 2019/20, there were 195 pediatric deaths. There has been one pediatric death during the 2020/21 season so far. Flu Season Resource Guide.

Despite rumours, Russia hasn’t had an outbreak of coronavirus-related diseases

Concerned public think that the cases of COVID-19 in Russia are allegedly hidden behind coronavirus-related diseases and complications, first of all, pneumonia. If so, the death toll from this disease was to have skyrocketed in the first quarter. However, as Realnoe Vremya’s analytic staff found out, the rumours seem to have no foundation. Official mortality data earlier this year even decreased compared to 2019 — as of February 2020 (more recent summarised data isn’t available yet). And though the pneumonia mortality rate in Russia is comparable with the COVID-19 rate in Iran — it also reduced compared to last year.

uelledNo mortality upsurge earlier this year

The Ministry of Health Care issued temporary methodical recommendations on 12 April, according to which amid the growing coronavirus incidence any flu case should be considered as suspected of COVID-19 depending on the epidemiological background. Microsoft 365 ipad. This fuelled the rumours that the cases of death from the coronavirus are hidden behind similar diseases — pneumonia, acute respiratory infection or flu.

In this context, Realnoe Vremya’s analytic staff decided to study the latest currently available mortality statistics — particularly to find out what happened to the acute respiratory infection and pneumonia death toll. Such data is now available until February 2020 — and despite some rumours, some of them suggest that there wasn’t registered a mortality upsurge in Russia either in general or because of acute respiratory infection or respiratory diseases.

Over the first two months in 2020, 307,000 people died in Russia — this is 5% less than a year ago. Cardiovascular diseases (almost half, 145,000 cases), tumours (48,000 cases), external causes of death (21,300 cases), diseases of the nervous system and digestive organs (about 17,000 cases each) are the main causes. Multiple remote desktop windows 10. There are 5-10% fewer deaths in the first three cases compared to last year’s analogous period, in case of the nervous system and digestion — 10% and 2% more.

As for specific diseases that caused death, coronary heart disease with 75,400 deaths is first. Malignant tumours (47,000) are second, cerebrovascular diseases with 44,000 cases come next. There are 5-11% deaths less.

Twice fewer people died from acute respiratory infection and flu than from COVID-19

Descargar vlc para macos catalina. There were relatively few deaths from the flu and acute respiratory infection in January and February — just 95. Most importantly, this number significantly decreased over the year — 197 people died from these diseases during the first two months in 2019. So we can assume here that if there were patients with non-diagnosed coronavirus among the dead people, this didn’t lead to a higher mortality rate — January and February were average.

It is noteworthy that the acute respiratory infection death toll in general is comparable with the number of coronavirus deaths in Russia or, more precisely, the difference isn’t big. 148 people died from the coronavirus in Russia as of 13 April (approximately a month since the death of the first patient in the country).

At the moment this indicator isn’t very high (though the number during the month is already 1,5 times higher than the number over two months in the case of the flu and acute respiratory infection). To understand it, now fewer people have died from the coronavirus in Russia than in January and February from accidental drowning (202 people), poisoning and alcohol intake (314 people).

Pneumonia deaths in Russia like coronavirus deaths in Iran

6ff5ce 365. Apart from the flu and acute respiratory infection, there is another disease that can be disguised as COVID-19, especially if the coronavirus isn’t diagnosed — it is pneumonia. However, there wasn’t registered any growth in January-February compared to last year too. 4,125 people died from pneumonia in Russia during the first two months in 2020. It is 15% less than during the analogous period last year.

We should remind you that the first death from the coronavirus in Russia was registered only on 19 March — so there is no coronavirus case among these 4,100 deaths (at least according to those diagnosed). Nevertheless, it is interesting that the death toll even from usual pneumonia in Russia is comparable with, for instance, with the coronavirus mortality rate in Iran. The first death was registered there on 21 February, during almost two months the indicator rose to almost 4,500 people. We also should note that more people died from pneumonia in Russia in January-February than from coronavirus in his “homeland,” in China, over three months since the first death: 3,341 people died from COVID-19 in China as of 13 April, while the first death was registered on 9 January.

The COVID-19 death toll nowadays in some countries is comparable with the pneumonia mortality rate in Russia in January-February. For instance, it is Belgium (3,900 deaths since first death on 11 March), Germany (3,000 deaths since 9 March), the Netherlands (2,700 deaths since 6 March). However, it is important to understand here that generally speaking such indicators accumulated in these countries not during two months but over a month since the first coronavirus death. This is why it is more correct to compare this indicator with the pneumonia death toll a month. In Russia, 1,929 people died from pneumonia in February 2020. It is more than from the coronavirus in less than a month since March 17 in Turkey (1,198 people), Brazil (1,230 people from the same date), Switzerland (1,115 people from March 5). So, with the proper level of containment of the epidemic, regular pneumonia in Russia claims more lives than the coronavirus in these countries.

2020 Flu Deaths Worldwide

10k deaths from respiratory diseases in two months

Videos For 2020 Flu Deaths

This comparison, of course, should not cause vain hopes or carelessness. In the leading countries in terms of mortality, the figures are much higher (and the population in most of them is lower, so the per capita mortality rate is, of course, ahead of the Russian rate of pneumonia). Besides, the key difference that makes the coronavirus “no more dangerous than regular pneumonia” is the transmission rate. The mortality rate from COVID-19 is not a stable result, consisting of many days with approximately the same number of deaths, they tend to increase significantly, despite all the efforts being made to contain the epidemic — as a result, they lead to very significant peaks. For example, on the highest for Italy peak day by death toll — March 27 — the figure was 919 people, in France on April 7 the death toll a day reached 1,417 people, and in the United States on April 10 — 2,035 people died from coronavirus. That is, on April 10, more people died from coronavirus in the United States than in Russia from pneumonia over the entire February.

However, we would like to note that if we count not only deaths from pneumonia but also from other respiratory diseases (this includes, for example, the flu, acute respiratory infections and other respiratory diseases), the death rate for the first two months of 2020 in Russia is 10,300. This figure is less than a year ago by 11%. However, in general, this death toll is comparable, for example, with the coronavirus death toll in the UK (10,600 deaths from COVID-19 since March 5) and France (14,400 people).

The situation with the dynamics of mortality from respiratory diseases is quite heterogeneous. While the national figure has decreased by 11%, there are cases of quite significant growth in some regions. For example, Ryazan Oblast with an increase in the pneumonia death toll by 46% (from 106 a year ago to 155 in January-February this year), the figure has jumped by 35% in Mari El (from 74 to 100 deaths), by 29% — in Kalmykia, by 25% — in Ulyanovsk Oblast and Kaluga Oblast, by 23% — in Moscow Oblast (while in Moscow itself it has fallen by 16%). There is also growth in Tatarstan — by 16%. At the same time, in some regions, the mortality rate from respiratory diseases has decreased significantly: in Sevastopol — by 61%, in Magadan Oblast — by 48%, in Kurgan Oblast and the Komi Republic — by 43%.

By Maksim Matveyev, Realnoe Vremya’s analytic staff

What was claimed

First Death Of 2019-2020 Flu Season Confirmed In LA County

The flu killed 64,000 people in 2018.

Our verdict

Incorrect. 64,000 people died in January 2018 in England and Wales of all causes. Public Health England estimates that across the 2017/18 flu season there were around 22,000 deaths associated with flu in England.

A block of text making comparisons between the number of deaths from flu and the scale of the Covid-19 pandemic has been shared on Facebook.

The text claims that “a real pandemic would be self-evident” with “bodies piling up on the street”. It adds: “The flu killed 64,000 people in this country in 2018, and you didn't bat an eye.”

This figure for flu deaths is far too high, and Covid-19 meets the definition of a “real pandemic”.

What counts as a pandemic?

The outbreak of Covid-19 across the world certainly meets definitions of pandemics that we’ve come across.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) says flu pandemics specifically are characterised by human-to-human spread of the virus in at least two countries within the same WHO region and “community level outbreaks in at least one other country in a different WHO region.”

More generally it says a pandemic is the worldwide spread of a new disease, and that aspect of novelty is also shared by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) with respect to flu pandemics.

The Oxford Dictionary of Epidemiology says a pandemic is “An epidemic occurring worldwide or over a very wide area, crossing international boundaries, and usually affecting a large number of people.”

Figures from Johns Hopkins University suggest that over 43 million people worldwide have contracted Covid-19, with over one million deaths.

While Covid-19 is not the deadliest disease the world has ever seen, in part the death toll has been kept down due to worldwide restrictions on behaviour that could cause the virus to spread more quickly.

And while the UK has not seen incidents of “bodies piling up on the street”, if that is the Facebook user’s criteria for defining a pandemic, it has arguablybeenmet elsewhere in the world.

How many people die of flu?

As for the claim that the flu killed 64,000 people in the UK (where the post’s author says they are based) in 2018, this is incorrect.

The only reference we’ve found to a UK figure like that in connection with the 2018 flu outbreak, is that in January 2018 around 64,000 people died in England and Wales, at the time the highest monthly total since 2006.

But this figure was for England and Wales and covered deaths from all causes, not just flu.

2020 Flu Deaths Worldwide

Public Health England estimated that over the 2017/18 flu season, there were around 22,000 deaths associated with flu in England. This was one of the highest flu death tolls in recent years, but is still significantly lower than the current death toll from Covid.

It’s possible that the post might be mistaking the number of deaths in the UK for a figure from another country. In the USA, the CDC estimates that 61,000 people may have died in the 2017/18 flu season, which again was the highest number in recent years. The CDC estimates so far that there have been 211,000 deaths involving Covid-19 in the USA.

2020 Flu Deaths In Washington State

This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because the flu did not kill 64,000 people in 2018.

[valuentumbrian]

Bull Market On!

Image Source: Mike Cohen.

By Brian Nelson, CFA

It’s very hard not to be bullish on the stock market these days. The prudence exercised by many of the largest companies in the S&P 500 remains unprecedented, in our view. Some of the best companies out there have tremendous balance sheets, as evidenced by huge net cash positions. Perhaps two of our favorite companies, Microsoft (MSFT) and Facebook (FB) are the best examples of this, but Apple (AAPL) still retains quite the large net cash hoard as it works to net-cash breakeven.

As we look at the next couple years, most investors will continue to focus on the Fed. We’ve seen this song and dance following the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) that wreaked havoc on the markets between 2007-2009. Many believed that the markets would have a Fed-induced crisis that would obliterate stocks after the GFC as they tapered and withdrew stimulus, but the Fed executed flawlessly. The bears seized on a municipal bond crisis, and a European debt crisis, but we still had one of the strongest bull markets in history following the Great Financial Crisis -- a bull market that ran through the onset of the COVID-19 outbreak.

Here we are just 16-18 months after the first case of COVID-19 was announced in the United States, and we are not just at new highs in the stock market--but we’ve already made many of them! The “old school” analysis with respect to drawdowns and withdrawals no longer holds in this hyper-intensive, information-driven economy, in our view, where 3-4 years’ worth of price behavior is experienced in 3-4 months. Those pursuing annual withdrawals in retirement in January, for example, didn’t experience any impact from the market meltdown, as January 2021 saw a market much higher than January 2020, despite the most abrupt fall in market history. Bear markets in the future may be even shorter than the 11.3 month historical average, too. The COVID-19 bear market was just 1.1 months.

We crunched the numbers, and a 60/40 stock/bond indexed and rebalanced portfolio has now trailed active stock selection, as measured by the S&P 500 Sector SPDR (SPY) as the midpoint, by 130 percentage points the past 10 years. The 60/40 stock/bond indexed and rebalanced portfolio failed at what it was supposed to do, too. During the worst of the COVID-19 stock market swoon, the 60/40 stock/bond indexed and rebalanced portfolio saved just 8 percentage points versus a full allocation to the largest U.S. equities. From our perspective, it has become hard to justify the 60/40 stock/bond indexed and rebalanced portfolio given its high correlation to equities, the vast underperformance during lengthy bull markets, and the short duration of bear markets when it comes to periodic withdrawals.

The arguments against active stock selection have vanished, in our view. The vast underperformance of the 60/40 stock/bond portfolio over a 10-year and even 30-year stretch relative to a diversified S&P 500 portfolio may be the biggest reason. Not only has modern portfolio theory (MPT) failed in this respect, but quant finance has also dropped the ball in other areas. The huge underperformance of the small value factor during the past decade has shown that it is a fool’s errand to believe that past performance is prologue. The entire basis of quant research can be readily dismissed by the most common disclaimer in this industry warning about past analysis not being prologue, and yet, many continue to fall for the nonsense. Stay away from quant conclusions until they start factoring forward-looking expectations into their processes.

The best of times with respect to cryptocurrency may very well be behind us as well. The alternative asset market isn’t as strong as it was in the beginning of this year, and Bitcoin (GBTC) and other cryptocurrencies have followed suit. A few cryptocurrencies have even zeroed out, and this is the true risk faced by anybody seeking the merits of modern portfolio theory with a small crypto allocation. An asset must have intrinsic value and go up in the long run for MPT to hold merit, meaning that you need a better model than just mashing historically uncorrelated assets together. The model we use at Valuentum is the discounted cash flow model, or enterprise valuation. We then seek to diversify among the most undervalued assets that have strong market backing via technical and momentum indicators.

Inflation is the talk of Wall Street the past few months, but we’ve seen a pullback in some of the prices that have surged. The housing market remains resilient, but lumber prices have come in quite a bit. The auto industry is working past the semiconductor shortage, and the huge ramp in used car sales may now be behind us. Crude oil and gasoline prices have increased materially, but the abundance of shale oil should keep a tight lid on long-term crude oil price expansion. Unlike OPEC, the U.S. government can’t limit production in a free economy, and the invisible hand will act as the counterbalance to high energy prices in time. We like stocks in an inflationary environment, and we love big cap tech and large cap growth in any environment.

Many are expecting net-cash rich corporates to start funneling some of their huge cash positions into the equity markets, and we don’t think they’ll be getting too complicated with their strategies. Share buybacks will be one avenue that they’ll use to deploy the capital, but many will also seek to allocate capital to the broader S&P 500, in our view. Money market funds have surged as a result of government stimulus since the COVID-19 meltdown (there is over $4.5 trillion just sitting in money market funds according to Bloomberg, more than at the peak of the GFC), and there may be hundreds of billions of dollars ready to enter the stock market in the next 6 months alone. Corporations are cash rich, and bond yields are paltry.

Buying demand for equities could set off a huge advance in stock prices, in our view, and the Fed may be fine with this as they were during the 10-year period following the GFC. We hardly experienced any meaningful inflation after the GFC either, but stock prices soared. In many ways, we’re expecting a replay of the 2010s (last decade) in the 2020s (this decade), and the next 10 years may very well be a replay of the Roarin’ 20s, a theme we have repeated before. We expect advisors and asset allocators to buy equities at almost every market dip, and we believe the Fed will support the markets in the event of even modest price weakness. These are unprecedented times, and that means the Fed will remain vigilant in support of equity prices.

Our favorite ideas remain in the newsletter portfolios, and as we noted before, Alphabet and Facebook have been lights-out with their relative price performance so far in 2021. The Valuentum Buying Index (VBI) has also showed its efficacy of late, with Facebook and Korn Ferry (KFY), two of the top ratings on the VBI, soaring. Facebook was a huge gift a couple years ago (in 2018) when it dipped below $150 per share. The market couldn’t have been more wrong on shares, and the stock has now more than doubled since then, trading north of $340 per share of late. Facebook has registered more 10s on the VBI than any other company in our coverage.

Though the meme-stock frenzy has been annoying and reveals the fragility of market structure as it relates to price-agnostic trading, the bias to the markets remains upward, in our view. Meme stock traders are long, advisors and asset allocators are pumping their clients’ money into the stock market on every dip, the short sellers have their backs against the wall, the Fed and Treasury aren’t going to go away, and more stimulus in the form of an infrastructure bill may serve to pad the bottom line of many in the energy and industrial sectors--the weakest sectors in recent years. The markets could go up for a long time yet, and we remain very bullish.

In the Dividend Growth Newsletter portfolio, we’re adding a 5-7% weight in ExxonMobil (XOM) and a 4-6% weighting in Chevron (CVX). In the Best Ideas Newsletter portfolio, we’re adding a 4-6% weighting in ExxonMobil and a 3-5% weighting in Chevron. We like their respective dividend yields, and the strengthening energy markets have only made their future free cash flow prospects better. See here. These changes will be reflected in the next editions of the newsletters, the July edition of the Dividend Growth Newsletter to be released Thursday, July 1, and the July edition of the Best Ideas Newsletter to be released July 15. Due to the July 4th holiday weekend, the July edition of the Exclusive publication will be released Saturday, July 10.

The Best Ideas Newsletter portfolio >>

The Dividend Growth Newsletter portfolio >>

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Order today!

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Valuentum members have access to our 16-page stock reports, Valuentum Buying Index ratings, Dividend Cushion ratios, fair value estimates and ranges, dividend reports and more. Not a member? Subscribe today. The first 14 days are free.

Brian Nelson owns shares in SPY, SCHG, QQQ, DIA, VOT, and IWM. Brian Nelson's household owns shares in HON, DIS, HAS. Some of the other securities written about in this article may be included in Valuentum's simulated newsletter portfolios. Contact Valuentum for more information about its editorial policies.

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The High Yield Dividend Newsletter, Best Ideas Newsletter, Dividend Growth Newsletter, Valuentum Exclusive publication, and any reports and content found on this website are for information purposes only and should not be considered a solicitation to buy or sell any security. Valuentum is not responsible for any errors or omissions or for results obtained from the use of its newsletters, reports, commentary, or publications and accepts no liability for how readers may choose to utilize the content. Valuentum is not a money manager, is not a registered investment advisor, and does not offer brokerage or investment banking services. The sources of the data used on this website and reports are believed by Valuentum to be reliable, but the data’s accuracy, completeness or interpretation cannot be guaranteed. Valuentum, its employees, and independent contractors may have long, short or derivative positions in the securities mentioned on this website. The High Yield Dividend Newsletter portfolio, Best Ideas Newsletter portfolio and Dividend Growth Newsletter portfolio are not real money portfolios. Performance, including that in the Valuentum Exclusive publication and additional options commentary feature, is hypothetical and does not represent actual trading. Actual results may differ from simulated information, results, or performance being presented. For more information about Valuentum and the products and services it offers, please contact us at info@valuentum.com.

[stormtodoroki]

Appreciation Much Needed

Word count: 3.2k

Pairing: Aizawa Shouta x Reader

Warnings: Mentions of Covid-19, Fluff, brief swearing here and there, slight mentions of partial nudity, soft boy Aizawa

~~~~~Tags and Authors Note below

Ever since the news of a virus outbreak had been let loose, the tensions had been high everywhere we looked. People were panic buying items resulting in outages,it only increased when the schools had all closed down and non-essential businesses were temporarily shut down. This meant that my loving husband Aizawa Shouta had been lounging around half dressed, the only times he was well kept and proper were during video calls with the other UA staff or with his students as he talked to them about their assignments and his expectations from them while they were at home. Not that I was complaining, in fact it was probably one of the best things to ever set my eyes upon every morning before work and every evening when I got home. Shouta had decided that since he’d be working from home that he would start doing more chores around the house, especially since no one was going outside some of the Pro Heroes got more time to relax and stay home.  No matter how many times I told Shouta not to worry about the chores and I could do them when I got home he’d flick my forehead and call me an idiot for thinking he was gonna let me do more work after being at work all day. Over the weeks he had me either on the couch and giving me massages or he would make me bubble baths to relax in while he finished the chores, insisting I leave it to him.

I stood in the doorway, my work uniform sticking to me as it had started to rain on my walk home from work so I had gotten a bit wet, but I was finally home and ready to relax with my hubby. A small smile  appeared on my face, I had just gotten home from work and heard Aizawa talking to someone, it sounded like one of his coworkers.

“I’m not telling you again Yamada, it needs to be something grand… I need it to show just how much she's appreciated…”

I heard him sigh deeply and could just see him pinch his nose in irritation, I had to stifle the laugh that had threatened to escape my lips.

“Hizashi...Stop… you’re giving me a headache. Look, she’s going to be home soon and I can't let her hear me talk about this… Just wait for my call tomorrow okay? Bye.”

I decided to walk in more and make my presence known, I cleared my throat and stepped into the living room. Shouta had frantically looked to me becoming a stuttering mess, which was even more adorable seeing as he had his hair up messily and wore a pair of sweatpants.

“H-ow long were you standing there, kitten? What did you hear?”

I gave him a shrug and tossed my bag on the couch and removed my wet sweater before placing a chaste kiss to his cheek.

“I literally just walked in and you were saying bye to someone. Was it Toshinori? I haven't had a chance to talk to him since this whole pandemic had started. I hope he is doing well, the poor dude has a lot on his plate already.”

Shouta seemed to buy my answer and nodded, he disappeared for a moment before returning with my robe and a towel, stopping in front of me he helped me remove my wet clothes before he slid my robe on. He then pulled me into his lap as he sat on the couch and dried my hair while placing tender kisses along my neck.

“How was work today Kitten, tell me all about it while I take care of you.”

I gave Shouta  a soft smile and closed my eyes for a moment before leaning back into his touch, a sigh escaped my lips.

“Well,as you know I’m in just about every room on an average day, and it's not really that different now, just the classes have so few kids we’ve been laying off more coworkers, we’ve closed a few more centers. So now we’re at a skeleton crew, which means it’s a bit harder to call in if you get sick, which hopefully no one does because we can't really afford to be short staffed.”

I let another sigh pass my lips and looked up to Shouta before letting out a yawn.

“I’ve been chasing kids who tried running away while outside on the playground, I've had to stop a one year old from hitting a five month old, the kid throws tantrums about it too, so if I upset this kid my hair gets pulled, or they hit me.”

I pause for a moment and shake my head.

“It's worth it though, I'd rather have me get hit by the one year old instead of the infant. But its been getting hard to get the kids to listen because now we have to wear masks, which I understand since we cant practice social distancing with kids since their dependent on us, but I’m basically yelling to be heard, it muffles my voice so much…”

Shouta nodded and began to massage my shoulders.

“You're very tense love, work has been straining you and giving you so much stress. You've been having trouble sleeping too, I'm worried working during this pandemic is going to cause you to burn out. I’m also worried that you're going to catch something, mask or not you're still putting yourself at risk.”

I peered up at his face and smiled softly.     “Well, we are taking everyone’s temperatures before they can enter the building, also cleaning every single touch surface every thirty to sixty minutes throughout the day, though it's more frequent during the pick up and drop off process. So at least you know the shits gonna be clean when you touch it, we also have like three or so containers of hand sanitizer at the entrance so you have clean hands when entering.”

Shouta stopped massaging me, stood up from the couch with me in his arms and placed me onto my stomach, he then began to massage my back and legs, urging me to continue about everything that's been happening.

“Well, as you know I occasionally use a ride-share to get to work, but since this started it takes longer to find a driver because there's no one. I've had to wait over twenty minutes for a car for a five minute drive. That's not even the worst part about that, since it's such a short drive and a low fare sometimes I'll get a close driver and they'll cancel on me and I'll have to wait even longer for them to find me a new driver. By the time I could have just walked in and been at work.”

I let out a sigh and felt my body relax quite a bit, whether it was from the massage Shouta was giving me or it was from telling Shouta my troubles it sure was helping.

“Though I am quite grateful I get to see their amazing faces, these kids are my life...apart from you of course. I wouldn't trade these kids for anything, I love them as if they were my own. The good outweighs the bad, always does, and these kids definitely have a lot of good moments. Plus they all have such understanding parents, the support from them is amazing, I'm always getting praise from them and it makes me feel amazing, it makes me want to do more.”

After a few moments of silence and Shouta giving me a massage he picked me up and carried me to the kitchen.

“Sho...you do know I can walk right? You don’t have to carry me around.”

He mumbled an ‘I know, but I want to’ and placed me onto the counter before he moved a lock of hair out of my face, placing a kiss where it used to be. He then turned away and opened the fridge and pulled out a vanilla cupcake with what looked like a galaxy frosting, but he wasn't done as he pulled out another vanilla cupcake which had a blackish grey colored frosting that had two red dots on it. 

“I know you hated having to celebrate your birthday at home, that it just felt like any other day and even though you and I had a great night It just wasn't exactly how one would want to celebrate their birthday, so I had a friend make these for us. Specialty cupcakes that represent us, they're both vanilla because I know you'd want to try mine and vanilla is your favorite flavour.”

I blinked in surprise, was it really that obvious? Yeah I spent my birthday stuck in doors and I wished that I could have gone out with friends to celebrate, but I didn't think Shouta would have noticed. I felt tears well up in my eyes and pulled Shouta in for a kiss after placing the cupcakes down,and cried silently in his embrace.

“Shouta...You didn't have to do that...I know it kinda sucked but I had your company which is all I will ever need to be happy. You truly are amazing and I don't deserve this from you…”

His laugh boomed in my ears and he cupped my face to look at me with his tired but loving eyes.

“Kitten, you deserve everything and more.You are doing so much for other front line workers during this pandemic...you're more than deserving and I want you to feel loved and appreciated throughout it all. You may not be a nurse, a doctor, or any kind of first responder, but you’re taking care of other essential workers' kids so they can keep everything running smoothly. Especially when some of these kids' parents are those first responders or hospital workers.”

The blush on my face grew and I hugged Shouta tightly, more tears were threatening to spill. He pried himself off me and excused himself for a moment, I watched him leave the kitchen and grabbed my cupcake before taking a bite, I practically screamed in delight. This cupcake is beyond amazing, it was so delicious that I couldn't form any words to describe it, it was the first time a dessert had ever had me at a loss for words. After a few minutes of being gone Shouta returned with a box and placed it on the counter, he mumbled a wait there before disappearing again, this time he came back faster and had only his laptop and a box of tissues.

“Shouta..what is all this? What are you doing?”

He sent me a small smile and turned on the computer, he turned it to face me and pushed the tissue box across the counter over to me.

“You're gonna need that, also no more questions. You're just going to have to wait and see. I promise you're going to love it.”

After making sure he had everything set up he walked over behind me and turned off the lights before pressing a file and full-screening it before pressing play.

Soon, the  black screen filled with color the UA logo appearing on the screen with soft music playing in the background, I looked at Shouta confused, you just pointed to the screen whispering to watch, I turned back to the screen and my eyes widened in surprise. I saw pictures from class 1A, thanking me for continuing my work, I could feel the tears already welling up soon a rather cute bubbly girl filled the screen.

“Hello Aizawa Sensei's wife, my name is Uraraka, Ochako, and we here at class 1A appreciate all you and Aizawa sensei do for us, so, in honor of teacher appreciation week, we have decided to make you guys something, I hope you like it it's really cute!” 

 Once again, the screen turned black pictures and videos from each class 1A student, some of them making multiples, had flashed on the screen, words of encouragement, praise, and adoration fell upon our ears. His students expressed gravely how much they appreciate Shouta for hounding them into shape to become future pro heroes. Also praised me for having to deal with him and also, even though they haven't had me as a teacher or some sort of mentor aspect in their lives, they still sent words of praise for me, due to working in childcare and helping these little kids grow up with good strong morals. 

"Sh-... Di-...I-i… Y-you…"

As hard as I tried, I just couldn't muster up any words to describe how I was feeling I couldn't even ask Shouta if he had planned this, I was a mess. With tears streaming down my face, I couldn't believe the class 1A had made such a beautiful posters and spoke such beautiful words about my Shouta, and then even included me in them, I felt so much love and appreciation coming from those students, I honestly couldn't think of any other way to spend the rest of my evening, then in Shouta's arms watching as his students showered at the both of us with praise. 

“Just enjoy the video before I turn it off...Idiot.”

He gave me a noogie and then kissed me again, before getting up and walking to the kitchen and grabbing two glasses, with his back turned blocking me I couldn't see what he was doing until he handed me one of the glasses, seeing the liquid I sent him a curious look.

“Is this what I think it is? Sho...did you make me one of the drinks I made last summer?”

He nodded and mumbled an ‘I tried too at least..’ before he closed the laptop which had finished playing the videos, he finished his drink and waited for me to finish mine before carrying me to our bed. With the lights all turned off and Shouta snuggling  me and playing with my hair I soon drifted off into a deep and peaceful slumber, a small smile stuck on my face.

I woke up to the sun shining onto my face through the blinds, the absence of Shouta’s warmth was immediately noticed, I sat up groggily and rubbed my eyes. Before I even had the chance to look around the door opened and a tray  of breakfast was placed onto my lap and the bed dipped next to me as Shouta began to comb through my hair.

“Good morning my beautiful kitten. How did you sleep? By the look on your face I assume it was good?”

I merely nodded and ate my breakfast,every so often closing my eyes just to enjoy Shouta's careful way of combing my hair, if I could have gone back to sleep I probably would have. I looked back up to Shouta after a few minutes of our blissful silence when there was a knock at the door, he told me to continue eating and he'd go check it out.

“Sho? You've been gone awhile… Is everything okay?”

I put the empty tray to the side and stretched a bit before hopping out of bed, deciding to put on something fresh. I quickly went into the closet and threw on a black tank with some ripped jean shorts. I carefully walked down the hall, cautious as to not make any sounds to alert anyone that I was coming. My pace quickened as I heard muffled talking, I couldn't place the voices as they were hushed and seemed to be coming from far within the house. As I got closer I could tell one was Shouta but the other one was still a bit too hard to make out, as I neared our study I stubbed my toe on the coffee table, I let out a whimper and fell to the floor clutching my toe. In my state of pain I didn’t notice the talking stop or the running into the room to see what had happened. Within seconds Shouta had me in his arms asking me what happened and Yamada stood a few feet away, a silly mask on his face, which was hiding his stupid grin he always made while trying to hold back laughter as I explained what happened.

“Well, I guess I can show you now instead of later… After all you did hurt yourself being worried about me.”

I looked between the two before Shouta helped me up and then blinded me with his scarf, he led the way to the study, he let small murmurs about how I'm going to love it but he doesn’t want me to cry like his student Izuku always does. I had to bite the inside of my lip to stop myself from laughing out loud and stayed silent as Shouta whispered over to Yamada, there was a bit of shuffling around the room before he finally removed the scarf.

“Happy Teacher Appreciation Week my love. I’m sorry I couldn’t do much more for you today but I know either way you’ll like this.”

I looked around the room and gasped. The room was adorned in pictures of me in my uniform taking care of different kids of the center, there were also pictures of my kids holding heart shaped cards and other pieces of paper. Some of them showing love and affection, also  few expressing how much they miss being at the center and seeing me. I was practically bawling and hugged Shouta tightly, spewing off a handful of thank yous and I love yous.

“That's only the beginning Kitty. Go look in the box on the table.”

I nodded and went over to the box, opening it I saw numerous gifts strewn about, I pulled a few out and read the tags before I squealed in delight, there were gifts from my kids and there were some from kids who were staying home and that I haven't seen since this all started.

“H-How..Shouta? How’d you pull this off?”

He simply smiled before walking over and hugging me close, he fixed my hair and placed a chaste kiss to my forehead.

“You left your laptop open one day when leaving for work, so I used it to email each parent from your classes and asked if they'd be willing to make something for you for Teacher Appreciation Week and either send it to our P.O. box, send photos  or videos, or they could meet me somewhere to give the gifts. They definitely loved the idea, a lot of these parents respect you and they love how you interact with their kids. They wished they could have given them to you in person but decided that this way is easier and more adorable.”

I couldn't stop the tears from streaming down my face after hearing his explanation, he continued to rub my back and whispered about how I was lucky he was able to deal with all my crying, otherwise he’d be agitated.

“This was the best Teacher Appreciation Week ever. Thank you Shouta, this means the world to me, I seriously can not thank you enough for this.”

~~~~~

Tags: @onyxiana-is-obsessed @sweetlikepeppermints @pocket-is-obsessed

A.N: Happy Teacher Appreciation Week to all the teachers of Tumblr! To the Daycare/Childcare providers still working during this time you are appreciated and loved. Stay awesome, stay strong, keep healthy and we love you!

[danyka-fendyr]

Absence of Good - 8

Chapter Eight: Despair and Devotion

I’m so sorry this took so long to get out everyone! I’ve been doing literally a ridiculous amount of traveling lately, what with COVID-19 and all the travel plans I had even before the outbreak. Suffice it to say, I’m extremely exhausted as I post this, and I haven’t edited it at all so I deeply apologize for any spelling mistakes or any other errors. Thank you so much to all of you for being so patient and waiting for me! (Also yes I did just watch Emma and it shows okay?)

Taglist: @dreamwritesimagines @rhabakoli @alwaysadreamingoptimist

AoG Taglist: @pancakefancake @prettyboyspenerrr @youreasnack @alioop3818 @newtslatte @rathersuspiciousbumblebee

Wordcount: 3773

Warnings: None! This is mostly fluff. Some vague references to PTSD.

“A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.” ― Jane Austen 

You rolled over in your bed, trying to fall into the spot of sunlight you knew would be painted over your sheets at this time of morning. Though you were only vaguely aware of what time it was, it was probably about an hour before you were actually supposed to wake up, your mind just starting to stir again. Instead of encountering your usual sunny spot in bed though, you found an entirely different source of warmth.

You cracked your eyes open in confusion. Dr. Spencer Reid was lying in your favorite pool of early morning sunshine, and you felt a brief moment of panic strike its way through your chest before doing an evaluation and realizing that you were both fully dressed and furthermore, had remained sober last night. It came back to you as you looked at him, remembering that he had helped you inside as you broke down crying and a very sleepy, very compromised version of your current self had begged him to stay with you.

Was that bad? It was probably okay to platonically sleep with your coworker, you reasoned. Nothing had happened. You hadn’t even thought about it happening. Maybe under other circumstances you would have thought about what a nice mouth he had or the look he got in his eyes when he was concentrating on something or his hands, which were very nice hands, you had to admit-

Oh gosh. Nope. Nope, nope, nope. This was a terrible idea, and had been a terrible idea before you had even had the idea, before anyone in the history of time had ever had an idea. You had to get out of here, right now.

Except here was your apartment, which was also a problem. Which meant that Spencer had to get out of here right now.

You shook his shoulder, pulling him out of his sleep. You almost felt bad for doing it, having noticed the dark circles under his eyes on more than one occasion. He looked so young and sweet in his sleep too. Spencer always had a boyish quality to him, but in his sleep it only increased, the concerned wrinkle in his brow falling away to a soft little half-smile that made you wonder if he was dreaming, and if he was what about.

That only increased your urgent need to get him out of here and awake though. Your half-asleep mind was still compromised, and your traitor fingers were itching to swipe across the velvet of his mouth, to gently push back the locks of hair falling into his forehead. All of which you had certainly never thought about before.

“Spencer! Wake up!”

It took a moment, but gradually he complied, honey brown eyes emerging only to be lit up by the morning sky.

“Hmmm? Oh, Y/N.” He smiled hazily. “Good morning.”

You suspected he hadn’t forgotten a single detail of what had happened last night, what with his eidetic memory, so you didn’t bother giving him a recap. Instead, you launched plan “Get Spencer out of here immediately” into action.

“We’ve got work in 2 hours. You have to get out of here,” you said, all brisk business to counteract Spencer’s alarming lethargy.

You had never seen the man relaxed, and he chose today of all days to appear pleasantly drowsy, of all things.

“2 hours? I think we have a little bit of time.” Spencer chuckled, raising his arms above his head, the muscles in his arms tugging his rumpled white dress shirt up to reveal the surprisingly toned planes of his stomach.

Which you were not thinking about. Which you were under no circumstances even contemplating contemplating.

“Well, you live 20 minutes from here, and you’ll need clean clothes and-”

Spencer cut your frantic ramblings off, seeming confused by your concern as he sat halfway up.

“I have clothes in my go-bag. What’s the matter?” A look of concern settled into the muddy depths of his eyes, and he reached out to pull you closer, one warm hand wrapping securely around your elbow. “Did you have a nightmare?”

You felt that tugging in your chest again, that longing, that need to just fall into bed with him. To take a sick day. To take 12 sick days. To lay in your bed with Spencer and never ever leave, just stay there running your fingers through his hair, tracing the veins in his arms. All things you absolutely could not do.

“No,” you said quietly, unable to stop staring into his eyes, entranced.

He leaned forward, and you caught a whiff of him, the smell of mostly coffee with something else a little bit woodsy left over from some aftershave or cologne he must wear.

“Then what?”

He tucked a loose strand of hair behind your ear, and your heart did a little tap-dance in your chest.

I need you to leave because I want to kiss you desperately, but I can’t.

“I’m afraid if you stay, I’ll get too attached. You saw how I was last night. I’m…unbalanced. And if you stay, I might start relying on you, and I can’t do that.”

One full truth in exchange for the absence of another.

“Relying on me how? Relying on me for help? Being willing to come to me when you feel ‘unbalanced’? Because I want that, Y/N. I want you to come to me.” His voice was soft, low.

You were so screwed.

“It’s a bad idea,” You whispered, still not looking away.

Then he said the worst thing he could have possibly said to you at that moment, when you were already so weak for him, so tantalizingly on the edge of something equally dangerous for both of you.

“You think I don’t need you too?”

Sometimes I need you so bad I can’t breathe because of it. Right now, right now I need you so bad I can’t breathe because of it.

“We’re not supposed to. We’re not supposed to need each other. What if something happens?” Still, you were leaning towards him, falling forward like gravity was playing some kind of sick game with you.

“It already did. And maybe it makes me selfish, but I’d rather have as much of this as I can get now instead of waiting for something terrible to happen again.”

Did he even know what he was saying? What he was implying? How good his mouth looked when he was saying those kinds of things to you?

Okay. Just kiss me, and I’ll forget everything. I’ll forgive you for every selfish sin you’ve ever committed if we can make this one of them.

“You should go.” You had never sounded less convicted of anything in your life.

Spencer faltered, and immediately you regretted the words when you saw the flicker of pain race through him. The way his hand fell from your face, the way his eyes fell to the sheets to hide how much you had wounded him. And before he could speak, you desperately scrambled to say something, anything to make it better, and said the one thing you probably shouldn’t have, if only because you meant it.

“I don’t want you to, though.” Another correction would be necessary for that kind of truth, and you frantically changed your mind again and tacked on a new amendment. “Which is why you should.”

He was looking up at you with a blazing hope and determination now, though.

“But you don’t want me to?”

Not even a little bit. I’ve never wanted anything less.

“Not even a little bit. I’ve never wanted anything less.”

You shouldn’t be allowed to speak words before 7 AM.

“I know how to make pancakes,” Spencer offered.

“I like pancakes.”

“Okay. Good.”

Then he got up out of your bed which immediately made your life slightly easier because at least he’s no longer just lying there in your bed looking beautiful.

While Spencer made pancakes, you hurried to get dressed, tying your hair up into a bun and abandoning the thought of anything more fashionable. Most of your makeup was just a touched-up version of whatever ended up smeared all over your pillows last night.

“You know, in the U.S., the most pancakes are eaten in the South. They make up 32.5% of pancake consumption in America.”

You laughed a little bit, unable to stop yourself from smiling at him. It was a little bit blissful having him here in your kitchen like this, making you pancakes for breakfast. You were allowed to have this, right? This little bit of platonic intimacy?

“No, I didn’t know that.”

“Well now you do.”

You kind of thought he smiled like an angel.

You stole the finished pancake straight out of the pan from him, and he gave you a playfully disapproving frown.

“Hey! I wasn’t done with that!”

You hopped up on the counter beside him and took a bite out of it, ignoring how hot it was in your hands.

“Tastes pretty done to me,” you responded cheekily.

He reached into the cupboard behind you, knowing in that creepy way that he knows everything exactly where your plates were, procuring one for you to place the pancake on. You set it down, looking up only to find yourself in a very compromising position. He was so close to you, and he wasn’t moving away. He could kiss you if he just leaned a little bit farther forward. You wanted him to kiss you. Does he know that too? Does he know where you keep your secrets just like he knows where you keep your plates?

“We can’t do this again,” you said, your voice coming out pleasantly firm for the first time this morning.

“Can’t do what?” He pushed hesitantly.

“We’re colleagues. You making me breakfast is weird. Besides, we wouldn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea, right?”

His posture went stiff, and he pulled back further away from you, the space between you freezing over.

“Right. I should go get dressed for work. We have to go soon.”

He disappeared and you took another bite of your pancake. It was cold.

 You made a point to arrive separately from Spencer, but the second you walked into the office you knew it was pointless because there he was being cajoled by Morgan about how he was wearing his go-bag clothes and therefore must have gotten laid last night, and then you locked eyes with the very wise Jennifer Jareau and you could see that she knew. She could see the messy traces of your hastily corrected makeup and she knew exactly where Spencer was last night.

You needed to fix this. Now.

“I’m going to go grab some coffee. Missed my usual stop this morning.” You made pointed eye contact with her.

“I could go for some too,” she said, casually following you.

You had been out of hearing range for maybe a second before she asked the obvious question.

“Did you and Spencer sleep together?”

“Sleep? Yes. Anything else? No.”

“So, he stayed at your place but nothing romantic happened.”

“Why do you sound so skeptical?” You scoffed, pouring coffee into the Styrofoam cup you had grabbed.

Jennifer grabbed your arm, making direct eye contact with you.

“I sound skeptical because I’ve known Spencer for years and I’m a profiler, which means I know that he’s in love with you, and you’re in love with him.”

It was a shot in the dark, and it just happened to hit you right in the heart.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” you said, adding cream to your coffee now.

“Cut the crap, Y/N. If you can’t be honest with him at least be honest with me.”

“Fine. I think I might love him. He’s the best man I’ve ever met. I am absolutely not allowed to love him. Are you happy now?”

“Why aren’t you allowed to love him? I mean, there are the obvious reasons, of course, but there are ways to get around those. Those are just excuses. So, what’s stopping you?”

“An interrogation over my morning coffee. How lovely.” You forced your voice to be breezy, light.

It didn’t work on JJ, though. She just waited, knowing that sooner or later you would break the silence.

Your hands were shaking as you stirred the cream in your cup.

“I’m not in a good headspace for that kind of thing right now JJ. I’m all messed up, and I don’t want to mistake feelings of being grateful to him for feelings of love. He’s helped me more than anyone can know but I don’t want to get it all mixed up. I can’t love him like this.”

Another moment of silence lingered between the two of you before JJ spoke, solemn and quiet.

“Are you afraid you can’t love him like this or are you afraid he can’t love you like this?”

Your hands locked up around the stirring stick at her words, jaw clenching around the truth. Maybe she was right, but that didn’t mean you didn’t hate it.

“I’ve seen the way you look at him, Y/N. I know that you cared about him before this. All I’m saying is…don’t let something bad ruin something good. I know what it’s like to think your trauma defines you. To feel like you’ll never get past what he did to you. But if you let him stop you from doing what makes you happy, he’s still winning.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” you spat. “You have a husband and 2 sons who love you that you go home to. You have a life and a family and friends.”

“You have friends too. You’re not alone in this. We love you. All of us, not just Spence. Just…don’t stop yourself from being happy just because you’re afraid.”

You took a deep breath. Willed yourself to relax, to listen to her words. You knew that she did know something of what you had gone through, had endured her own torture over the years. Unbidden, an image of Spencer smiling at you, flipping pancakes over your stove popped into your head, and you felt that increasingly familiar jump in your chest.

“What if he can’t love me like this?” You whispered.

“Then the rest of us will.” With that JJ squeezed your hand, poured herself a black coffee and walked away.

You stood there for a moment longer, a bit frozen as you stared down into your cup, something that didn’t escape Spencer’s notice.

“Hey, you okay?” He said, approaching you.

“Remember how this morning I said that we shouldn’t do breakfast anymore because we’re colleagues and it’s weird?”

“I have an eidetic memory, Y/N. Yeah, I think I remember,” he joked, though you could tell it pained him a little bit to do it.

“Do you agree with that? Do you think it’s weird?”

“Well…I’ve never really been what people call normal, so I guess I’m not a good gauge of what’s weird or not,” he said, dodging the question.

“Did you disagree with me when I said it?” You wanted so badly for him to say that he did.

“I…no. I know most colleagues don’t have breakfast together. I mean, not in that sense. Plenty of professional relationships involve various different meetings over food, breakfast being slightly more casual than, say, a lunch meeting-”

“But did you want to do it again anyway?” You interrupted.

He paused to think, chewing on his lip nervously.

“Yeah. Yeah, I did. It was nice.”

“It was, wasn’t it?” You smiled at him.

“You…you thought it was nice too?” His doe eyes went wide with surprise.

“Yeah. Can I uh…can we take this somewhere a little less crowded?” Your eyes darted around the bullpen.

“Uh, yeah,” Spencer said, his voice doing that nervous thing where it jumped up an octave, making you hide a smile behind your hand. “I think Garcia’s office might be available?”

“If it isn’t I’m sure she’ll make it available. She owes me a favor since I let her eat all my Red Vines.”

“Do you even like Red Vines?” Spencer asked.

“That’s for me to know and Penelope Garcia never to find out,” you said, setting a quick pace towards her office.

Spencer had no trouble keeping up, his long legs tripping over themselves less than usual as he followed you. His body could never seem to decide whether it was going to have the grace of a gazelle or the clumsiness of a newborn foal, but today he strode with purpose across the less than pristine tiles of the Quantico floors.

You threw open the door to Garcia’s office without ceremony.

“Garcia we’re appropriating your office, leave now and do not breathe a word of this to anyone or I swear I will steal all of your candy until the end of time and also tell Hotch about that thing you texted me last week.”

Garcia froze in her desk chair. “You wouldn’t. Not the thing!”

“Yes. The thing. Now get out!” You gave her a stern look, then softened. “Please.”

“Alright, alright, it’s all yours. Just be quick about it why don’t you?” She poked her head back through the door even as she was closing it, neon headband a glaring indicator of her continued presence. “Oh, and also? I knew it!”

You could hear her cheering as she closed the door, and you groaned.

“So…you wanted to talk?” Spencer prompted.

“Ummm…yes.” You looked up at him, suddenly regretting your impulsive urge to tell him anything.

What had you been thinking?

He stepped closer to you, and for a minute your heart beat far faster than could possibly be healthy before he sat down in Garcia’s desk chair. The light of the computer monitor glinted off of his hair, and you got the overwhelming urge, not for the first time, to run your fingers through it. Taking this under consideration, you realized JJ was right. This was not a new thing. Truth be told you had been attracted to Spencer for forever and a day, you had just been…afraid. But if you could survive a near-death experience you could survive a little rejection, right?

“I’m going to say some very crazy things now very fast and I want you to listen before I lose my nerve. The truth is I was so nervous this morning because I was trying really, really hard not to kiss you and I was still definitely thinking about doing it. You have this like, aura about you, do you know that? Like, “hello, yes, I’m your friendly neighborhood sexy genius here to make your life harder by not only being smart and hot but also, to top it all off, nice!” Which is very rude of you, in case you were wondering. And so like, naturally I’ve had a crush on you since basically I met you, but then last night you were just…so good to me, and you’re just such a genuinely kind person, and it sort of hit me that I never want you not in my life? And then I woke up next to you this morning and I was like, ‘holy crap, I think I’m in love with him,” which I’m sure you realize was a very startling realization for me, and super not allowed with our jobs and everything, so…I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m in love with you and I’m really sorry about it.”

Spencer had been staring up at you with something that resembled awe as you made your way through your rushed confession, but when you finished, he smiled.

“Sorry? Why are you sorry?” He stood from Penelope’s chair, stepping towards where you were leaning against her desk.

“Because that was all kind of fast and uncalled for and I know you don’t feel the same, so this was sort of a really crappy thing to do to you.”

He slipped a finger under your chin, tilting your head up to make you look at him. “How do you know I don’t feel the same?”

You could feel his warm breath on your face, brushing against your lips, and you fought the urge to kiss him once again.

“I just…assumed?”

“Well, you assumed wrong, because the second I realized there was a chance you might not be in my life because some psycho took you away, I also realized that I never wanted you not to be in my life. I wish I could explain it better, but I’ve never been very good with words that didn’t involve statistics or oddly specific information. You like Jane Austen, right?”

He knew, of course, that you did, because he knew everything you had ever told him about you. You nodded anyway though.

“’I cannot make speeches, Emma…If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.’”

You kissed him then, unable to resist it. Sunk your fingers into the twining grasp of his curls and tasted him, breath wild and heart running rampant. His hands wrapped around your waist dug into your hips and pulled you flush against him, where you stayed even after you broke off the kiss.

“Maybe it makes me selfish, but I want as much of this as I can get,” he whispered, paraphrasing his words from earlier.

“Okay,” you breathed, indulging your earlier thoughts. “Just kiss me, and I’ll forget everything. I’ll forgive you for every selfish sin you’ve ever committed if we can make this one of them.”

He did, kissing you hard and heavy, something frenzied to the way he held you like any moment now, something would try to rip you away.

“That’s what I wanted to say,” you murmured against his lips. “This morning, when you said that. That’s what I wanted to say.”

“I wish you had. Then I could have had this sooner.” His grip on you loosened, allowing him to pull away to smile softly at you.

“Yes, but we never would have made it out of my apartment,” you said casually, before slipping out of his grasp and out of Garcia’s office, a smug little grin on your face.

Spencer was left to watch you walk away, looking like the cat that ate the canary. It was going to be a long workday.

“In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.” ― Jane Austen

[news-update-covid-19-usa]

NEWS UPDATE USA !!! A Missouri couple says they dragged their feet on getting the Covid-19 vaccine. Then they got sick

Louie Michael and his wife, Pattie Bunch, were both hospitalized last month with Covid-19 in Springfield, Missouri.

An ambulance first had rushed her, with respiratory failure, to an emergency room one day; he was admitted the next night. "You may not make it through the night," she recalls a physician telling her. Michael remembers the doctor asking him about possible intubation: "Do you want us to fight for you? Do you want us to do anything we can to save your life?" Bunch, now recovery at home, says she felt helpless. "You have no control." Coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and deaths are rising again in Missouri, with the federal government deploying a Covid-19 surge team to provide public health support. The state's health department estimates that more than 70% of the virus in the state is the more infectious -- possibly more dangerous -- Delta variant. That variant, first identified in India, accounted for 51.7% of all new Covid-19 infections in the country over the two weeks that ended Saturday, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated. State health officials push vaccination efforts Robert Knodell, acting director of the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, on Friday acknowledged significant outbreaks of the Delta variant in north-central Missouri and a similar surge in southwest Missouri. Vaccination, Knodell told reporters, "is now, and remains the number one most effective mitigation step that every Missourian age 12 and over can take to protect themselves, to protect their families, and their neighbors." Dr. George Turabelidze, a state epidemiologist, said Missouri had "vulnerable hot spots" where not enough people were vaccinated and warned the state is "heading towards widespread infection with Delta."

Over the past week, Missouri's Covid-19 caseload was second highest in the country, with 15.5 new cases per 100,000 people daily, or 108 cases per 100,000 people over seven days, according to Johns Hopkins University data. Arkansas had the highest rate at 15.7 new cases per 100,000 people each day, the data showed. At Springfield's Mercy Hospital, the rapid spike in hospitalizations left administrators scrambling to borrow ventilators from other hospitals. At the city's CoxHealth hospital system, 90% of coronavirus patients had the Delta variant. "We are seeing a tremendous increase in the number of Covid patients in our emergency department over the past several weeks," said Dr. Howard Jarvis, medical director of the emergency department at CoxHealth. He added, "We are going to get worse over the next couple weeks. Certainly people are out doing a lot more things. I think there's a lot of people that have less concern about the virus. Now we don't have a very high percentage in this area of people who are vaccinated." Breeding grounds for more deadly Covid-19 variants Missouri is not alone. More than 9 million people live in 173 US counties with Covid-19 case rates at or more than 100 cases per 100,000 people in the last seven days and with vaccination rates lower than 40%, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the CDC, said at a White House briefing on Thursday. More than 90% of those counties also have a vaccination coverage of less than 40%, according to Walensky.

"Many of these counties are also the same locations where the Delta variant represents the large majority of circulating virus," Walensky said. "Low vaccination rates in these counties, coupled with high case rates -- and lax mitigation policies that do not protect those who are unvaccinated from disease -- will certainly, and sadly, lead to more unnecessary suffering, hospitalizations and potentially deaths." In fact, a new data analysis has identified clusters of unvaccinated people, most of them in the southern United States, who are vulnerable to surges in Covid-19 cases and could become breeding grounds for even more deadly variants. The analysis by Georgetown University researchers identified 30 clusters of counties with low vaccination rates and significant population sizes. The five most significant clusters cover large swaths of the southeastern US and a smaller portion in the Midwest. The clusters are largely in parts of eight states -- from Georgia to Texas and southern Missouri. About one-third of Americans have not received a Covid-19 shot. About 39% of Greene County residents fully vaccinated Katie Towns, acting director of the Springfield-Greene County Health Department, said the county -- population about 300,000 -- had 240 Covid-19 cases just on Wednesday and 17 deaths in the last two weeks. About 39% of its residents are fully vaccinated, according to health department website. "We're not a huge community," she said of the 240 cases. "That's a really large number and we haven't seen these numbers since we had a surge back in December and January." About 56% of adults in Missouri have received at least one Covid-19 vaccine dose and 39.4% of residents are fully vaccinated, according to CDC data. In Taney County, where the southwestern Ozark city of Branson is a huge tourist draw, about 25% of its roughly 56,000 residents are vaccinated. "It runs the gamut," Lisa Marshall, director of the Taney County Health Department, said of the hesitancy to the vaccine. "Maybe they just want to wait and see or ... it's not quite ready yet. Maybe they're just not someone that vaccinates. We've also heard a little bit of concern over how quickly the vaccine was developed." Overall, data shows that Covid-19 is expected to swell in less vaccinated communities, especially as the Delta variant continue to spread in those areas. In Missouri, a federal surge team deployed there is to include an epidemiologist, research assistants, a health communication specialist, contact tracers and others who will help with vaccination and outreach, according to the health department. The teams include members of CDC, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency "We have a CDC representative helping us with ... investigating the (Delta) variant and its presence here in our community," Towns said. "But we just have ... one representative right now. We'll gladly accept the additional resources."

At the 500-bed CoxHealth hospital system, Jarvis said nearly all of the new Covid-19 admissions have been unvaccinated younger patients. "This is going to keep happening," he said of the latest surge in cases. "It may peak here and then it's going to spread to other places. If we don't get enough vaccinated there's going to be another variant that's probably worse. It's just that's the way viruses work." Couple, sick with Covid-19, holds hands in the ICU In Rogersville, Louie Michael said he and wife Pattie Bunch, a nurse, had been "dragging our feet" since the spring about getting a Covid-19 vaccine. In mid-June, Bunch got sick. "It felt like a bomb dropped on me," said Bunch, who is still recovering less than a month later. "I just wasn't feeling good at all. And I thought, 'Oh, no.'" An ambulance rushed her to the hospital with respiratory failure on June 17. The next night, Michael, an entertainer, had to be rushed to the same emergency room in Springfield. A nurse eventually put them in the same ICU room, where Michael took a snapshot of them holding hands. "We didn't know how it was going to turn out," said Michael, who along with Bunch urges people to get vaccinated. "We didn't know if we'd get to go back home." "Or see our kids again, or our family or grandson," she said. "It could have just ended that night," said Michael, who has been with Bunch for 30 years. "It made me mad. I didn't want it to end that way. It's not supposed to end that way ... and unfortunately, it's ending for a lot of people that way."

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[phroyd]

HOUSTON — Over the past week, Dr. Aric Bakshy, an emergency physician at Houston Methodist, had to decide which coronavirus patients he should admit to the increasingly busy hospital and which he could safely send home.

To discuss questions like these, he has turned to doctors at hospitals where he trained in New York City that were overwhelmed by the coronavirus this spring. Now their situations are reversed.

Thumbing through a dog-eared notebook during a recent shift, Dr. Bakshy counted about a dozen people he had treated for coronavirus symptoms. His colleagues in Houston had attended to many more. Meanwhile, friends at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens told him that their emergency department was seeing only one or two virus patients a day.

As Houston’s hospitals face the worst outbreak of the virus in Texas, now one of the nation’s hot zones, Dr. Bakshy and others are experiencing some of the same challenges that their New York counterparts did just a few months ago and are trying to adapt some lessons from that crisis.

Like New York City in March, the Houston hospitals are experiencing a steep rise in caseloads that is filling their beds, stretching their staffing, creating a backlog in testing and limiting the availability of other medical services. Attempts to buy more supplies — including certain protective gear, vital-sign monitors and testing components — are frustrated by weeks of delays, according to hospital leaders.

Methodist is swiftly expanding capacity and hiring more staff, including local nurses who had left their jobs to work in New York when the city’s hospitals were pummeled. “A bed’s a bed until you have a staff,” said Avery Taylor, the nurse manager of a coronavirus unit created just outside Houston in March.

But with the virus raging across the region, medical workers are falling ill. Dr. Bakshy was one of the first at Methodist to have Covid-19, getting it in early March. As of this past week, the number of nurses being hired to help open new units would only replace those out sick.

Methodist, a top-ranked system of eight hospitals, had nearly 400 coronavirus inpatients last Sunday. Nearly a week later — even as physicians tried to be conservative in admitting patients and discharged others as soon as they safely could — the figure was 575. The flagship hospital added 130 inpatient beds in recent days and rapidly filled them. Now, administrators estimate that the number of Covid-19 patients across the system could reach 800 or 900 in coming weeks, and are planning to accommodate up to 1,000.

Other Houston hospitals are seeing similar streams of patients. Inundated public hospitals are sending some patients to private institutions like Methodist while reportedly transferring others to Galveston, 50 miles away.

“What’s been disheartening over the past week or two has been that it feels like we’re back at square one,” Dr. Mir M. Alikhan, a pulmonary and critical care specialist, said to his medical team before rounds. “It’s really a terrible kind of sinking feeling. But we’re not truly back at square one, right? Because we have the last three months of expertise that we’ve developed.”

Houston’s hospitals have some advantages compared with New York’s in the spring. Doctors know more now about how to manage the sickest patients and are more often able to avoid breathing tubes, ventilators and critical care. But one treatment shown to shorten hospital stays, the antiviral drug remdesivir, is being allocated by the state, and hospitals here have repeatedly run out of it.

Methodist’s leaders, who were planning for a surge and had been dealing with a stream of coronavirus patients since March, pointed to the most important difference between Houston now and New York then: the patient mix. The majority of new patients here are younger and healthier and are not as severely ill as many were in New York City, where officials report that over 22,000 are likely to have died from the disease.

But so far, the death toll has not climbed much in Texas and other parts of the South and West seeing a surge.

“We are having to pioneer the way of trying to understand a different curve with some very good characteristics versus the last curve,” said Dr. Marc Boom, Methodist’s president and chief executive.

But he cautioned, “What I’m watching really closely is whether we see a shift back in age — because if the young really get this way out there and then start infecting all of the older, then we may look more like the last wave.”

Dr. Sylvie de Souza, head of the emergency department at Brooklyn Hospital Center, which on Friday reported no new coronavirus admissions and no current inpatient cases, said that she was receiving distressing text messages from doctors elsewhere in the country asking for advice. “It’s disappointing,” she said. “It sort of brings me back to the end of March, and it’s like being there all over again.”

One of the most worrisome trends, hospital administrators said, is the increased politicization of public health measures against the virus. The hospitals in Houston are operating in a very different environment now compared with during New York’s peak in the spring, when federal, state and local leaders agreed to a national pause.

Here in Texas, political leaders have been at odds with one another, and residents sharply disagree about the danger the virus poses and what precautions are necessary. At some Houston hospitals, visitors and patients have refused to wear masks, creating conflicts with security guards at entrances.

As the Fourth of July holiday approached, Methodist spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a public information campaign — including full-page ads wrapped around a local newspaper, social media efforts and billboards. “Stay Safe and Stay Home This July 4th,” the signs say. Methodist also sent a text message to about 10,000 patients providing safety tips. In response, the hospital system received some angry phone calls and texts. “How about you stay at home and quit telling me what to do,” was how one hospital official described them.

The economy in Texas remains open, with only bars shuttered, but Gov. Greg Abbott on Thursday issued an order requiring Texans to wear face coverings in public after long opposing such a mandate.

“There is a glimmer of some optimism,” Dr. Boom told the health system’s physicians this past week, reporting that county testing figures showed some signs of improvement.

Many hospitals in New York during the earlier crisis essentially became all-Covid units and endured billions of dollars in losses.

But Methodist and some other private Houston institutions are trying to operate differently now after taking a financial beating from shutting down elective surgeries and procedures this spring.

With safety protocols and expansion plans in place, they are trying to maintain as many services as possible for as long as possible while contending with the flood of coronavirus cases. “No one’s ever done that before,” Dr. Boom said. “We were seeing all the harm from patients delaying care.”

Doctors and nurses have combed through lists of surgical patients, choosing whom to delay. The easiest surgeries to maintain are those that do not require a hospital stay, like treatment for cataracts. Some surgeons who used to keep patients overnight after knee and hip replacements are now allowing them to leave the same day.

The most agonizing decisions concern the hospital’s robust transplant program, in part because its recipients often require a stay in intensive care. Dr. A. Osama Gaber, the program’s director, spoke with a dialysis patient whose kidney transplant had been postponed from March. “She was in tears,” he said. “She almost wanted me to swear to her we’re not going to put her off again.” For now the surgeons plan to continue cautiously.

A key strategy to maintain services is increasing what hospital officials call throughput — discharging patients as quickly as is safely possible. Yet it is not always clear who is ready to leave. Alexander Nelson-Fryar, a 25-year-old treated for coronavirus pneumonia at Methodist, was discharged from the hospital this past week. Hours after he left, he said, he began laboring to breathe and an ambulance sped him back to Methodist. By the end of the week, he was in intensive care receiving a high dose of pressurized oxygen.

As cases began rising in New York, some overwhelmed emergency departments sent home coronavirus patients only to see them return gravely ill or die. “We realized there was no way of predicting which direction a patient would go,” said Dr. de Souza, the emergency department director in Brooklyn. As a result, she said, she came to believe that any patient aside from those with the mildest symptoms should be admitted to the hospital or otherwise monitored.

But doctors in Houston are tightening criteria for admission. Dr. Bakshy, the Methodist emergency room doctor, who trained at Bellevue and Mount Sinai in New York, said that he was conferring with his former colleagues.

“We all have questions about who truly needs to be hospitalized versus not,” he said. “If we had unlimited resources, of course we’d bring people in just to make sure they’re OK.”

Now, he said, a patient has to have low oxygen levels or serious underlying conditions “to really justify coming into the hospital,” although exceptions can be made.

Another challenge in New York and Houston has been determining who is infected and needs to be isolated from others. Nearly 40 percent of all emergency room patients at Methodist are now testing positive; some of them lack symptoms.

Because test results are sometimes delayed by more than a day, Dr. Bakshy and his colleagues have had to make their best guesses as to whether someone should be admitted to a ward for coronavirus patients.

Hospitals in New York tended to move patients within their own systems to level loads. In Houston, the wealthier institutions have joined together to aid those least able to expand capacity.

This past week, Methodist sent a team to a nearby public hospital to accept transfer patients. Top officials from Methodist and the other flagship hospitals that make up the Texas Medical Center, normally competitors, consult regularly by phone. They have been coordinating for days with the county’s already overwhelmed safety-net system, Harris Health, taking in its patients. The private institutions have also agreed to take turns, with others in the state, accepting patients from rural hospitals.

Better Treatments

One morning this past week, Molly Tipps, a registered nurse, brought some medications to an older patient at the Methodist ward outside Houston. “I have the dexamethasone for your lungs,” she told the patient, Dee Morton. Preliminary results of a large study, released last month but not yet peer-reviewed, showed that the drug, a common steroid, saved lives among those who were critically ill with Covid-19 or required oxygen.

Ms. Morton, 79, said she was confident she would recover. “I’m going to make it to 80,” she said. A much lower proportion of patients have been dying from the virus locally and nationally than they were several months ago.

The ward where Ms. Morton is being treated is inside a long-term acute-care facility and is known as the Highly Infectious Disease Unit. Created to treat Ebola several years ago, it now serves as a safety valve for the Methodist system. It takes in coronavirus patients who are improving but for various reasons — from lacking housing to living in a nursing home that will not accommodate them — cannot go home. In Ms. Morton’s case, she was too weak, and after transferring to the unit, some signs of infection, including a fever, rebounded.

At Methodist’s flagship hospital in central Houston, Rosa V. Hernandez, 72, a patient in the intensive care unit, has pneumonia so severe that if she had fallen sick several months ago, she would probably have been put on a ventilator and made unconscious.

But doctors, based on the experiences of physicians in New York and elsewhere, are avoiding ventilators when possible and are maintaining Ms. Hernandez on a high flow of oxygen through a nasal tube. She is on the maximum setting, but can talk to the clinical team and exchange text messages with her daughter, who is also a Methodist inpatient with the coronavirus.

“I took it seriously,” Ms. Hernandez said of the virus. But she joined a small party of eight people for her granddaughter’s birthday, a decision she now described with regret. “Just a birthday cake. What’s a birthday cake without health?”

She is getting remdesivir, an antiviral that was tested in clinical trials in New York and Houston, among other cities, and a new experimental drug.

Methodist was part of two remdesivir trials. But because the research has ended, it and other hospitals now depend on allotments of the drug from the state. As virus cases increased, the supplies ran short, said Katherine Perez, an infectious-disease specialist at the hospital. “In Houston, every hospital that’s gotten the drug, everyone’s just kind of used it up,” she said.

The hospital received 1,000 vials, its largest batch ever, a little over a week ago. Within four days, all the patients who could be treated with it had been selected, and pharmacists were awaiting another shipment.

A new chance to test remdesivir in a clinical trial in combination with another drug may provide some relief. As cases rise, Methodist researchers are being flooded with offers to participate in studies, with about 10 to 12 new opportunities a week being vetted centrally. Without solid research, “your option is to do a bunch of unproven, potentially harmful, potentially futile, interventions to very sick people who are depending on you,” said Dr. H. Dirk Sostman, president of Methodist’s academic medicine institute.

Convincing the Public

Dr. Boom, the Methodist chief executive, said if he could preserve one thing from the New York experience in March, it would be how the country came together as it had in previous disasters.

When cases began rising again in Texas, hospital officials here spent close to a month trying to educate the public about the risks of contagion. “It didn’t work,” Dr. Boom said.

“How do you get the message out there when certain people just don’t hear it and then you’re dealing with quarantine fatigue and it’s summer and I’m done with school and I just believe I’m 20 and I’m invincible?” he asked. “We told everybody this is all about the sick, vulnerable population, which was the truth, but they heard the message of ‘Well, therefore I’m fine.’ And now we’re doing the re-education on that.”

But even some of Methodist’s physicians, like many Texans, take issue with measures promoted by most public health experts. “A lot of the masks that people are wearing in public don’t do very much,” said Dr. Beau Briese, director of international emergency medicine, contradicting studies that point to a substantial benefit with universal face coverings.

Dr. Briese, 41, believes the soundest approach is to keep opening businesses but have the population at highest risk, including older people, stay apart from the broader public. Some of Methodist’s patients find even those measures objectionable.

One patient on Dr. Bakshy’s emergency room shift, Genevieve McCall, 96, came to the hospital with a satchel full of nightgowns because her legs had swollen, a sign of worsening heart failure. Dr. Bakshy asked about any exposure to the coronavirus. She said her caregiver had been out since the previous day with a fever and a sore throat.

Born five years after the 1918 flu, Ms. McCall, a retired nurse, said that until the coronavirus, she told people she thought she had seen everything. “I question a lot of things,” she said of the safety restrictions. “They’ve been too tight about it. And every time that there is a little bit of a spike, then we’re restricted more.”

Ms. McCall, who tested negative for the virus, added: “This is a political year. I think that politics has a lot to do with the way this has been handled. And I think it’s been mishandled.”

She said that it was difficult to be stuck in her apartment in an independent-living complex that was prohibiting visitors, canceling many activities and delivering meals to rooms instead of serving them in the dining room. “It’s very depressing,” she said. “Until this afternoon, when my daughter walked in the door to come and pick me up and bring me here, I had not been able to see her or touch her for three months, more.”

[thesevenseraphs]

Bungie Weekly Update - 4/9/2020

This week at Bungie, the final bunker opened.  

A third and final Seraph Bunker has opened on Io. The new Bunker points players to partake in the Seraph Tower event and new Legendary Lost Sectors on the Jovian moon. Guardians also made a new discovery in the bunker about Rasputin’s efforts to track our enemies.  We’re one month into Season of the Worthy and we’re not done yet. Grandmaster Ordeal is only a few weeks away, but before we share more on that, let’s talk about a new charity initiative coming up next week.

MAKING A DIFFERENCE

As the world responds to the outbreak of COVID-19, many of us have been urged by our local governments to stay home. Containing the spread of the virus is one of the best things we can do to protect our fellow humans. If you’re a gamer, you’ve been training for this moment for your whole life. If you possess the heart of a Guardian, however, you might be wrestling with the urge to do more!   This is the question we’ve been asking ourselves at Bungie:  

Is there something more we can do to help the real-world heroes who are confronting this crisis head on?

 We’ve arrived at an answer that we think is very exciting. We’d like to share it with you – and even welcome you to join us in helping to make the world a better place. On Monday, you’re invited to join us in our game rooms to talk about it.  

Bungie’s COVID-19 Fundraiser

www.twitch.tv/bungie

Monday, April 13

10:00 AM Pacific

 Players of Bungie games have never backed down from a fight. We’ve banded together to support the survivors of floods, earthquakes, and wildfires. You may even have a memento to commemorate the role you played in some of those initiatives. On this occasion, when it seems like the world needs help more than ever, we have an emblem to mark the Guardians in our community who choose to throw their lot in with our efforts.  

On Monday, we’ll reveal how you can earn this emblem to display proudly in game. We’ll talk about this charitable call to action, who will benefit, and the impact that we will have together.  Join us for the conversation. Join us to make a difference.

GRANDMASTER

In a few weeks, we’ll debut a new difficulty selection for The Ordeal called Grandmaster. It will test your fireteam’s coordination, communication, builds, and skill like no other activity in Destiny to date.    Here’s a look at a few of the goals we had when approaching Grandmaster after we saw how the rest of The Ordeal was received:

Grandmaster should build on Master difficulty, but be significantly more challenging.

Once you reach a certain bar, the challenge should be found completely in perfecting your builds, communication, and execution.

The primary rewards should be doled out on initial completion.

Completion should be the primary metric for success, rather than score or time or another in-activity metric like ‘killing all Champions’

Grandmaster should stress the top end of build crafting.

Grandmaster should be watchable.

To attempt Grandmaster, you will need to be Power Level 1025 which is 15 Power above the Pinnacle cap but will be 25 Power below the activity which will be set at a Power Level of 1050. We’re also going to have something similar to the Contest mode we introduced for Crown of Sorrow. You will gain no extra advantage for being higher than 1025. We wanted to require a mixture of pinnacle rewards and artifact power to get you prepared for this, but not make you feel like you had to put in a ton of extra hours over-leveling the activity. We’re introducing some new modifiers along with some familiar ones, including

Extinguish (if your team wipes, it sends you back to orbit) and Limited Revives (you start with a small pool of shared team revives and you get more every time you kill a Champion). We don’t want to spoil everything, so there are a few other wrinkles we’ll let you discover when it goes live.  

Does this sound like a worthy challenge so far? We hope it does, and as a reward, you’ll have increased chances of being awarded Exotic armor and Masterworking materials. But the main draw of the mode is the new Seal and title available for beating each of the Grandmaster Ordeal Strikes once during the Season: Conqueror. We want this to be one the most challenging titles to get, but we want it to be approachable for anyone to try who puts in the time and dedication with their team during a given Season.  

Grandmaster Ordeal will begin on April 21.

The second coming of Iron Banner for this Season is already upon us. Lord Saladin will be setting up shop at the top of the Tower and you’ll have another shot at finishing the quest and earning the new Bow.  Bonus Valor gains are also enabled throughout the week.

Iron Banner and bonus valor begins at 10 AM PDT on April 14, running through 10 AM on April 21.

WEEKLY CHALLENGE ACCEPTED

Pleas welcome in the Player Support team with the latest on known issues we’re tracking.  This is their report.

TRIALS WEEKLY CHALLENGE UPDATE

Last week, we released Destiny 2 Hotfix 2.8.0.2. As part of the hotfix, we resolved an issue where Trials of Osiris Weekly Challenges were not being reset properly. We believed the issue would be resolved later that week when Trials of Osiris went live, but the issue persisted, causing players who didn’t have their Weekly Challenge to not receive any rewards on their third, fifth, or seventh win.

Starting this Friday, April 10, all players are expected to have their Weekly Challenge available to them when Trials of Osiris becomes active.

CLAN CREATION AND EDITING

Players may notice that they are unable to create or edit their clans in Destiny 2. While we investigate this issue, players can still join or leave Destiny 2 clans at any time.

PC CRASHING UPDATEO

n Tuesday, we worked with Valve to issue a small update to Destiny 2 on Steam that should resolve a crashing issue players have been receiving. This small update is also helping us to determine what is causing the BEAVER error code to appear more frequently.

BEAVER ERROR CODES

Since Season of the Worthy began, we have been seeing a significant increase in the following error codes: ANTEATER, BEAVER, BEETLE, and WATERCRESS. While we continue to investigate the cause of these error codes, we have implemented fixes that have helped reduce the number of BEAVER errors on Steam, which you can see illustrated in the chart below. We understand how frustrating and painful it can be to receive this or any error code, and we’re working intensely on further mitigations. KNOWN ISSUES

While we continue investigating various known issues, here is a list of the latest issues that were reported to us in our #Help Forum:

Fully upgrading any Seraph Bunker sometimes doesn't unlock the associated Warmind Security Triumph. This issue is expected to be resolved in our next update.

Warden of Nothing doesn't give platinum rewards if one of the Unstoppable Champions is killed by a train.

The Dynamic Charge perk doesn’t activate on Symmetry if shot through Citan's Ramparts assisted Assault Barricade.

For a full list of emergent issues in Destiny 2, players can review our Known Issues article. Players who observe other issues should report them to our #Help forum.

[sciencespies]

How Doctors Are Using Artificial Intelligence to Battle Covid-19

https://sciencespies.com/nature/how-doctors-are-using-artificial-intelligence-to-battle-covid-19/

How Doctors Are Using Artificial Intelligence to Battle Covid-19

When the Covid-19 pandemic emerged last year, physician Lara Jehi and her colleagues at the Cleveland Clinic were running blind. Who was at risk? Who were the patients likely to get sicker? What kinds of care will they need?

“The questions were endless,” says Jehi, the clinic’s chief research information officer. “We didn’t have the luxury of time to wait and see what’s going to evolve over time.”

With answers urgently needed, the Cleveland Clinic turned to algorithms for help. The hospital assembled 17 of its specialists to define the data they needed to collect from electronic health records and used artificial intelligence to build a predictive treatment model. Within two weeks, the clinic created an algorithm based on data from 12,000 patients that used age, race, gender, socioeconomic status, vaccination history and current medications to predict whether someone would test positive for the novel coronavirus. Doctors used it early in the pandemic when tests were at a premium to advise patients whether they needed one.

Over the past year, the clinic published more than three dozen papers about using artificial intelligence. Jehi and her colleagues created models that identified those with the virus likely to need hospitalization which helped with capacity planning. They built another model that helped alert doctors to a patient’s risk for an intensive care unit and prioritized those at higher risk for aggressive treatment. And when patients were sent home and monitored there, the clinic’s software flagged which patients might need to return to the hospital.

Artificial intelligence had already been in use by hospitals, but the unknowns with Covid-19 and the volume cases created a frenzy of activity around the United States. Models sifted through data to help caregivers focus on patients most at-risk, sort threats to patient recovery and foresee spikes in facility needs for things like beds and ventilators. But with the speed also came questions about how to implement the new tools and whether the datasets used to build the models were sufficient and without bias.

At Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, geneticist Ben Glicksberg and nephrologist Girish Nadkarni of the Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Health and the Mount Sinai Clinical Intelligence Center, were asking the same questions as doctors at the Cleveland Clinic. “This was a completely new disease for which there was no playbook and there was no template,” Narkarni says. “We needed to aggregate data from different sources quickly to learn more about this.”

At Mount Sinai, with patients flooding the hospital during the spring epicenter of the outbreak in North America, researchers turned to data to assess patients’ risk for critical events at intervals of three, five and seven days after admission to anticipate their needs. Doctors decoded which patients were likely to return to the hospital and identified those who might be ready for discharge to free in-demand beds.

Nearly a year into looking to machine learning for help, Glicksberg and Narkani say it’s a tool, not an answer. Their work showed the models identified at-risk patients and uncovered underlying relationships in their health records that predicted outcomes. “We’re not saying we’ve cracked the code of using machine learning for Covid and can 100 percent reliably predict clinically-relevant events,” Glicksberg says.

“Machine learning is one part of the whole puzzle,” Nadkarni adds.

For Covid, artificial intelligence applications cover a broad range of issues from helping clinicians make treatment decisions to informing how resources are allocated. New York University’s Langone Health, for instance, created an artificial intelligence program to predict which patients can move to lower levels of care or recover at home to open up capacity.

Researchers at the University of Virginia Medical Center had been working on software to help doctors detect respiratory failure leading to intubation. When then pandemic hit, they adapted the software for Covid-19.

“It seemed to us when that all started happening, that this is what we had been working toward all these years. We didn’t anticipate a pandemic of this nature. But here it was,” says Randall Moorman, a professor of medicine with the university. “But it’s just the perfect application of the technology and an idea that we’ve been working on for a long time.”

The software, called CoMET, draws from a wide range of health measures including an EKG, laboratory test results and vital signs. It projects a comet shape onto a patient’s LCD screen that grows in size and changes color as their predicted risk increases, providing caregivers with a visual alarm, which stands out among the beeping alarms of a hospital unit. The software is in use at the University of Virginia hospital and is available to be licensed by other hospitals, Moorman says.

Jessica Keim-Malpass, Moorman’s research partner and a co-author of a paper about using predictive software in Covid treatment, says the focus was on making the model practical. “These algorithms have been proliferating, which is great, but there’s been far less attention placed on how to ethically use them,” she says. “Very few algorithms even make it to any kind of clinical setting.”

Translating what the software does into something easy for doctors, nurses and other caregivers to use is key. “Clinicians are bombarded with decisions every hour, sometimes every minute,” she says. “Sometimes they really are on the fence about what to do and oftentimes things might not be clinically apparent yet. So the point of the algorithm is to help the human make a better decision.”

While many models are in place in hospitals, there’s potential for more in the works. A number of applications have been developed, but have not yet rolled out. Researchers at the University of Minnesota have worked with Epic, the electronic health record vendor, to create an algorithm that assesses chest X-rays for Covid and takes seconds to find patterns associated with the virus. But it has not yet been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use.

At Johns Hopkins University, biomedical engineers and heart specialists have developed an algorithm that warns doctors several hours before patients hospitalized with Covid-19 experience cardiac arrest or blood clots. In a preprint, researchers say it was trained and tested with data from more than 2,000 patients with the novel coronavirus. They are now developing the best way to set up the system in hospitals.

As hospitals look to integrate artificial intelligence into treatment protocols, some researchers worry the tools are being approved by the Food and Drug Administration before they have been deemed statistically valid. What requires FDA approval is fuzzy; models that require a health care worker to interpret the results don’t need to be cleared. Meanwhile, other researchers are also working to improve the software tools’ accuracy amid concerns they magnify racial and socioeconomic biases.

Researchers at the University of California in 2019 reported that an algorithm hospitals used to identify high-risk patients for medical attention showed that black patients with the same risk “score” were significantly sicker than white patients because of the data used to create the model. Because the pandemic disproportionately affects minorities, creating prediction models that do not account for their health disparities threatens to incorrectly assess their risk, for instance.

An August article in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, researchers from Stanford University wrote that small data samples were not representative of overall patient populations and were biased against minorities. “There is hope that A.I. can help guide treatment decisions within this crisis; yet given the pervasiveness of biases, a failure to proactively develop comprehensive mitigation strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic risks exacerbating existing health disparities,” wrote the authors, including Tina Hernandez-Boussard, a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine

The authors expressed concern that over-reliance on artificial intelligence—which appears objective, but is not—is being used for allocation of resources like ventilators and intensive care beds. ”These tools are built from biased data reflecting biased healthcare systems and are thus themselves also at high risk of bias—even if explicitly excluding sensitive attributes such as race or gender,” they added.

Glicksberg and Nadkarni, of Mount Sinai, acknowledge the importance of the bias issue. Their models drew from the Manhattan location with a diverse patient population from the Upper East Side and Harlem, but then were validated using information from other Mount Sinai hospitals in Queens and Brooklyn, hospitals with different patient populations that were used to make the models more robust. But the doctors acknowledge some underlying issues are not part of their data. “Social determinants of health, such as socioeconomic status, play an enormous role in almost everything health-related and these are not accurately captured or available in our data,” Glicksberg says. ”There is much more work to be done to determine how these models can be fairly and robustly embedded into practice without disrupting the system.”

Their most recent model predicts how Covid-19 patients will fare by examining electronic health records across multiple servers from five hospitals while protecting patient privacy. They found that model was more robust and a better predictor than those based on the individual hospitals. Since limited Covid-19 data is segregated across many institutions, the doctors called the new model “invaluable” in helping predict a patient’s outcome.

Jehi says the Cleveland Clinic database now has more than 160,000 patients with more than 400 data points per patient to validate its models. But the virus is mutating and the algorithms need to continue to chase the best possible treatment models.

“The issue isn’t that there isn’t enough data,” Jehi says. “The issue is that data has to be continuously reanalyzed and updated and revisited with these models for them to maintain their clinical value.”

#Nature

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Six weeks ago, when Sen. Bernie Sanders dropped out of the presidential race, it seemed like the Democratic Party’s left wing suffered a major and potentially long-lasting defeat. Not only had Sanders lost, but former Vice President Joe Biden had won while casting many left-wing ideas as both unrealistic and detrimental to Democrats’ chances of winning elections.

But if Biden is elected in November, the left may get a presidency it likes after all — or at least one it hates less than anticipated. The coronavirus outbreak and the resulting massive surge in unemployment has moved American political discourse to the left: Ideas that would have been considered too liberal for most Democrats a few months ago are now being proposed by Republicans. And if American politics is moving left, expect Biden to do the same. Biden was often cast as a centrist or a moderate during the Democratic primaries, but those labels don’t really describe his politics that well — he doesn’t really seem to have any kind of set ideology at all.

Instead, Biden’s long record in public office suggests that he is fairly flexible on policy — shifting his positions to whatever is in the mainstream of the Democratic Party at a given moment. So if Biden wins the presidency and his fellow Democrats are still clamoring for more government spending to help the pandemic recovery, Biden is likely to be a fairly liberal president, no matter how moderate he sounded in the primaries.1

Biden positions himself in the center of the Democratic Party

Biden is a centrist in a certain way — he has historically positioned himself in the center of the Democratic Party, between the party’s most liberal and most conservative members. (And he does that positioning generally on foreign policy, economics and social issues.) The center of the party is a moving target of course.

“The best way to understand Biden is as a reflection or reaction to the party’s main planks throughout the last 40 years, rather than leading or shaping it,” said Lily Geismer, a history professor at Claremont McKenna College who has written extensively about the Democratic Party and liberalism. “I don’t see Biden as embodying any of the ideological terms or positions of centrist or liberal, certainly not center-left and not really neoliberal either. Instead I see his ideology as first and foremost a Democrat. He has throughout his career toed the party line rather than an ideological one.”

Serving in the Senate from 1973-2009, Biden was always more liberal than at least 44 percent of his Democratic colleagues but always less liberal than at least 43 percent of his colleagues, according to DW-Nominate scores of his Senate votes. Put another way, he ranged between the 44th and 57th percentile in terms of liberalism among Democratic senators in his Senate years — smack dab in the middle of the party.2

Liberal Democrats have been sharply critical of some of Biden’s votes in the Senate, mostly notably his support for the 1994 anti-crime bill that increased penalties for some offenses and the 2002 resolution to authorize war with Iraq. But on both issues, Biden was within the Democratic Party consensus at the time. Nearly all Senate Democrats (54 of 56) backed the crime bill, as did 188 of the 252 House Democrats who voted on the measure, which was signed into law by a Democratic president (Bill Clinton). A majority of House Democrats (126 of 207) opposed the Iraq War resolution, but the majority of Biden’s Senate Democratic colleagues were in favor of it (28 of 49).

Biden’s tenure as vice president also suggests that he would govern from the middle of the Democratic Party. There is not a clear record — akin to Senate roll call votes — of the positions Biden took in internal policy debates within the Obama administration. And the role of a vice president essentially requires him to publicly praise whatever decision the president ultimately makes. But Biden has described himself as an “Obama Democrat” and strongly defended the administration’s record. And while Obama himself and the Obama administration are somewhat hard to categorize ideologically, the former president and his team generally took approaches that did not satisfy the most liberal elements of the party but were fairly liberal.

When Biden did publicly separate himself from the Obama administration, it was to stake out a position that was within the Democratic mainstream. Take Biden’s announcement in 2012 that he supported same-sex marriages — though Obama had not yet come out publicly for legalizing same-sex unions, the majority of Democratic voters already held this position. And Biden also supported the Obama’s administration push for more lenient criminal justice policies, even as Sen. Biden had been a key figure in the Democrats’ tough on crime posture in the 1980s and 1990s.

That willingness to change with the times was also evident in Biden’s 2020 primary platform. Biden adopted fairly liberal policies — not as liberal as those of Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, but more liberal than his pre-campaign record suggested. The Democratic Party is more liberal now than it was when Bill Clinton took office, or even when Obama was inaugurated, and Biden’s platform reflects that shift. Some of Biden’s 2020 policy proposals are notably to the left of the Obama administration’s stances when it left office in early 2017, including Biden’s support for the abolition of the death penalty, halting nearly all deportations of undocumented immigrants in his first 100 days as president and free four-year college for Americans in households with incomes up to $125,000 a year.

The Democratic Party’s center is moving left

It’s hard to measure the precise center of American politics and how it has changed over the last few months. But it’s certainly moved left in response to the COVID-19 crisis — toward way more federal spending. Sen. Mitt Romney, a Republican, recently proposed using federal dollars to temporarily boost the pay of grocery store clerks and others in “essential” jobs by $12 per hour. Republicans in Congress supported a $2 trillion economic stimulus provision, which gave many Americans a one-time payment of $1,200 and boosted unemployment benefits by $600 per week. More moderate House Democrats, usually wary of being cast as too liberal, backed the $2 trillion bill and a subsequent $3 trillion economic stimulus bill .

Mirroring the shift in his party, Biden and his advisers are now reimagining his candidacy and presidency — rolling out more liberal policy plans, speaking in increasingly populist terms and joining forces with the most progressive voices in the party. Biden himself has invoked the idea that he might be entering the Oval Office facing a crisis on the scale of the Great Depression.

He recently told Politico that he supported a stimulus that was “a hell of a lot bigger” than the $2 trillion provision passed in March and that he was annoyed with Wall Street firms because “this is the second time we’ve bailed their asses out.” The former vice president is also reportedly considering Warren as a potential running mate more seriously than before because of her experience on economic issues. Last week, he appointed some of the party’s most prominent liberal figures, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal, to a team advising him on policy.

“What I’ve heard the vice president say over and over again is this crisis is shining a bright, bright light on so many systemic problems in our country, and so many inequities. It is exacerbating and shining a light on environmental-justice issues, racial inequalities, so many other problems,” Stef Feldman, a top Biden policy adviser, recently told New York magazine.

“It seems clear that Biden gets the seriousness of the moment and the need to change directions in an American economy that was systemically unfair even before it was broken to pieces by a pandemic,” said Jeff Hauser of the left-leaning Center for Economic and Policy Research, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank whose proposals are generally more in line with Sanders and Warren than Biden.

But don’t expect Biden to move too far left

We should note three important caveats here. First, some of these shifts leftward from Biden are probably best explained by his need to woo Sanders’s supporters, rather than as a response to COVID-19. Sanders handily won “very liberal” voters and voters under the age of 45 during the Democratic primary — and Biden probably wants those two blocs to be enthusiastically behind him in the general election. It’s likely that Biden, for example, would have tried to appeal to Ocasio-Cortez in some way even if the coronavirus outbreak had never happened.

Secondly, it’s not clear how notable or long-lasting these shifts are. You could argue that Biden is calling for a bigger federal response to a massive pandemic and elevated unemployment levels, and that this leftward shift isn’t particularly striking. And since the former vice president often calibrates his views to match the current consensus, you could see him backtracking from his newfound liberalism when the crisis recedes and/or if polls start showing a majority of Americans are leery of more government intervention to help with the COVID-19 recovery. Those are two fairly unlikely scenarios right now, but at some point more moderate Democrats might shift away from supporting more federal spending in the wake of the coronavirus. If a big bloc of Democrats shifted right, I would expect Biden to follow suit.

Thirdly, Biden’s leftward shifts will likely be constrained by both his own instincts and those of his top advisers. Both Biden and his inner circle are perpetually worried that the Democrats will move too far left on policy issues and scare off swing voters. Some of his top advisers, electoral politics aside, are just somewhat centrist and wary of liberal ideas. Biden himself seems deeply invested in the idea that he can cut deals with Republicans and tamp down the partisan divide in Washington, a vision that is probably in tension with a more leftish presidency.

“Does he stay on the 50-yard line, splitting the difference between anti-government conservatism and progressive populism, and cutting bipartisan deals,” David Dayen of the left-leaning The American Prospect wrote recently. “Or does he surge toward the end zone with ‘Roosevelt’ written on it, transforming the nation through ‘bold, persistent experimentation’ that fills in all the cracks the coronavirus exposed?”3

“Joe Biden is running on the most progressive platform of any Democratic nominee in recent history. But given the pandemic, he has to look at the New Deal and Great Society traditions in the Democratic Party and go bigger,” said Waleed Shahid, the communications director for Justice Democrats, a left-wing group aligned with Ocasio-Cortez and other very progressive Democrats.

All that said, it seems fairly likely that Biden, if he wins, will enter the Oval Office with Americans struggling through a recession and the public and his party clamoring for the federal government to do more to help those who are struggling. In that scenario, we might look back at how Biden won the Democratic primary — by emphasizing his moderation — and marvel that he became the most liberal president in recent history.

[newstfionline]

Thursday, November 19, 2020

Most expensive cities (CNBC) Zurich and Paris have displaced Singapore and Osaka in a recent report on the world’s most expensive cities. The two Asian cities previously joined Hong Kong at the top of the rankings. That’s based on The Economist Intelligence Unit’s latest Worldwide Cost of Living index which shows how the coronavirus pandemic has affected the prices of goods and services in more than 130 cities as of September 2020. According to the report, Zurich and Paris’ jump to first place was due to the strengthening of the Swiss franc and the euro. “The Covid-19 pandemic has caused the weakening of the U.S. dollar while western European and north Asian currencies have strengthened against it, which in turn has shifted prices for goods and services,” said Upasana Dutt, head of Worldwide Cost of Living at The EIU. New York City is used as the base city in the index. The top ten: Zurich, Paris, Hong Kong, Singapore, Tel Aviv, Osaka, Geneva, New York, Copenhagen, Los Angeles.

U.S., Canada, Mexico to extend border restrictions until late December (AP) U.S. land borders with Canada and Mexico are expected to remain closed to non-essential travel until Dec. 21 at the earliest amid a rising number of U.S. coronavirus cases, officials in Washington and Ottawa told Reuters on Wednesday. Mexico’s Foreign Ministry confirmed the decision later on Wednesday in a post on Twitter. The restrictions were first put in place in March to control the spread of the virus and have been extended on a monthly basis ever since. In Ottawa, a Canadian government source said the travel restrictions in place at the Canada-U.S. land border would remain in effect for at least another month.

Recession With a Difference: Women Face Special Burden (NYT) For millions of working women, the coronavirus pandemic has delivered a rare and ruinous one-two-three punch. First, the parts of the economy that were smacked hardest and earliest by job losses were ones where women dominate—restaurants, retail businesses and health care. Then a second wave began taking out local and state government jobs, another area where women outnumber men. The third blow has, for many, been the knockout: the closing of child care centers and the shift to remote schooling. That has saddled working mothers, much more than fathers, with overwhelming household responsibilities. “We’ve never seen this before,” said Betsey Stevenson, a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan and the mother of a second grader and a sixth grader. Recessions usually start by gutting the manufacturing and construction industries, where men hold most of the jobs, she said. The triple punch is not just pushing women out of jobs they held, but also preventing many from seeking new ones.

U.S. to Drop Case Against Mexican Ex-Official to Allow Inquiry in Mexico (NYT) The Justice Department has asked a federal judge to drop drug trafficking and corruption charges against a former Mexican defense minister to allow Mexican officials to investigate him, Attorney General William P. Barr announced Tuesday in an abrupt reversal a month after the official was arrested in Los Angeles. The official, Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda, had been Mexico’s defense minister from 2012 to 2018 and was accused of taking bribes in exchange for protecting cartel leaders. But Mr. Barr and Mexico’s attorney general, Alejandro Gertz Manero, stopped short in a statement of promising any charges in Mexico. In a court filing, prosecutors acknowledged that the Trump administration had determined that preserving its relationship with Mexico prevailed over pursuing the case. “The United States has determined that sensitive and important foreign policy considerations outweigh the government’s interest in pursuing the prosecution of the defendant, under the totality of the circumstances, and therefore require dismissal of the case,” they wrote in asking a judge to dismiss the charges.

Biden’s DIY transition proceeds without Trump assistance (AP) President Donald Trump’s refusal to cooperate with his successor is forcing President-elect Joe Biden to seek unusual workarounds to prepare for the exploding public health threat and evolving national security challenges he will inherit in just nine weeks. Blocked from the official intelligence briefing traditionally afforded to incoming presidents, Biden gathered virtually on Tuesday with a collection of intelligence, defense and diplomatic experts. And as the worst pandemic in a century bears down on the U.S. with renewed ferocity, the current administration is blocking Biden from collaborating with its response team. Biden’s representatives instead plan to meet directly with pharmaceutical companies this week to determine how best to distribute at least two promising vaccines to hundreds of millions of Americans, the biggest logistical challenge to face a new president in generations. The moves reflect how Biden is adjusting to a historically tense transition. With no sign that Trump is prepared to facilitate soon a peaceful transfer of power, Biden and his team are instead working through a series of backup options to do the best they can to prepare for the challenges he will face as soon as he takes office in January.

When Trump Goes, Can the Democrats Hold It Together? (NYT) The Democratic Party is struggling with internal contradictions, as its mixed performance on Election Day makes clear. Analysts and insiders are already talking—sometimes in apocalyptic terms—about how hard it will be for Joe Biden to hold together the coalition that elected him as the 46th president. The intraparty dispute burst out full force on Nov. 5 during a three-hour House Democratic Caucus telephone meeting. Moderates angrily lashed out at liberals, accusing them of allowing divisive rhetoric such as “defund the police” and calls for socialism to go largely unchallenged. Those on the left pushed right back, accusing centrists of seeking to downgrade the demands of minorities, including those voiced at Black Lives Matter protests. Abigail Spanberger, who represents the 7th Congressional District in Virginia—which runs from the suburbs of Richmond through the exurban and rural counties in the center of the state—voiced her instantly famous critique of the liberal wing of her party during the phone call: “We have to be pretty clear about the fact that Tuesday—Nov. 3—from a congressional standpoint, was a failure,” she told her Democratic colleagues. “The number one concern that people brought to me” during the campaign “was defunding the police.” And “We need to not ever use the words ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again because while people think it doesn’t matter, it does matter. And we lost good members because of that.” Representative Rashida Tlaib, whose Michigan district is among the poorest in the country, and who is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America—directly countered Spanberger and other moderates: “To be real, it sounds like you are saying stop pushing for what Black folks want.” Other Democrats who describe themselves as democratic socialists, including the former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, have become a substantial Democratic constituency.

Pandemic media syndrome? (Scientific American) According to Claudia Wallis, of Scientific American, recent studies have shown that the pandemic’s toll on mental health has been even worse than experts expected, especially among young adults. Roxane Cohen Silver, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, found that “increased engagement with media coverage of the outbreak” is a major driver of anxiety among people of all ages. “If people are engaged with a great deal of media, they are more likely to exhibit and report distress, but that distress seems to draw them further into the media,” Silver says. “It’s a cyclical pattern from which it is difficult to extricate oneself.”

Sweden’s coronavirus strategy (Washington Post) Even Sweden appears to be abandoning the Swedish model. On Monday, the country’s authorities banned gatherings of more than eight people as they grappled with the second coronavirus wave surging through much of Europe. The new restrictions followed other protocols coming into effect this week, including protective measures around nursing homes and bans on alcohol sales at restaurants and bars after 10 p.m. The shift in tone is noteworthy given Sweden’s notorious light-touch approach to the pandemic. “It is a clear and sharp signal to every person in our country as to what applies in the future,” Prime Minister Stefan Lofven said during a news conference Monday. “Don’t go to the gym, don’t go the library, don’t have dinner out, don’t have parties—cancel!” Hospitalizations are rising faster in Sweden than any other European country, and Sweden’s per capita death rate is several times higher than those of its Nordic neighbors Finland, Denmark and Norway.

Amid pandemic, Belgrade street kids find comfort at refuge (AP) In a small, brightly-colored backstreet house in Belgrade a teenage girl is drying her hair, while two others eat lunch in the kitchen. A group of boys are having their temperatures checked at the entrance as a precaution against coronavirus. It’s another busy day for Svratiste, or Roadhouse, Belgrade’s first daily drop-in center for street kids that for years has been a rare oasis of warmth and comfort for the Serbian capital’s most vulnerable inhabitants. Since opening in 2007, Svratiste has welcomed hundreds of children—some as young as five—who have come here to warm up, wash or eat. With social isolation growing and the economic situation worsening in the pandemic, the center’s role has become even more significant. Apart from providing food and clothes, the Svratiste team has also sought to help the children socialize and get to know their town by visiting playgrounds, cinemas and theaters. A key effort has been to include them in the education system and make sure they stay. During the pandemic, the center helped with online classes that most children have no means of following. One of their success stories has been Bosko Markovic, now 18, who first came to Svratiste five years ago. With the center’s help, Markovic has finished high school and now has his eyes set on becoming a policeman, he told the Associated Press. “They (Svratiste) have made me a better person,” he said proudly.

Pompeo To Visit Israeli West Bank Settlements During Farewell Tour (Foreign Policy) U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is in Israel today as he continues his whistle-stop tour of U.S. allies. Before he heads to the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia, he is planning on making history. Pompeo will visit two Israeli settlements both considered in violation of international law, one in the Golan Heights and one in the West Bank. By doing so, he becomes the first U.S. Secretary of State to visit either site. His de facto endorsement of the Israeli occupation stands in contrast to the outgoing Obama administration’s moves in 2016, allowing passage of a United Nations Security Council resolution declaring Israeli settlements on Palestinian territory illegal by abstaining from (rather than vetoing) the vote. His visit also comes as Israel plans to expand a settlement in East Jerusalem, despite outcry from the United Nations and European Union.

Reassured by Biden Win, Palestinians Will Resume Cooperation With Israel (NYT) The Palestinian Authority said Tuesday that it was resuming its cooperation with Israel, ending six months of financial hardship for tens of thousands of West Bank residents and signaling relief over the election of Joseph R. Biden Jr. It was one of the first clear signs that anticipation of a new administration in Washington is having an effect on international relations. The Palestinian announcement undid a set of stringent measures imposed by Mahmoud Abbas, the authority’s president, in May in a desperate protest against plans by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to unilaterally annex large portions of the occupied West Bank. The Trump administration had indicated it would support some form of annexation, which would have imposed Israeli sovereignty over land that the Palestinians have counted on for a future state. Mr. Abbas cut off security coordination with Israel, raising fears that attacks might go unprevented. He also severed civilian ties, including those that help Palestinians travel into Israel for work or medical treatment. Most painful of all to his own people, Mr. Abbas stopped accepting routine transfers of more than $100 million a month in taxes that Israel collects on the Palestinians’ behalf, funds that account for more than 60 percent of the authority’s budget. The lack of funds forced salary cuts for tens of thousands of public-sector employees, compounding what was already a devastating economic crisis because of the pandemic. “Praise God, I feel so relieved,” Rami Kitaneh, 35, a nurse at the Hugo Chavez Ophthalmic Hospital in the central West Bank, said Tuesday night. “I gave up so much since the start of the crisis, but now I can breathe.”

Security officials worry Israel and Saudi Arabia may see the end of Trump as their last chance to go to war with Iran (Business Insider) European intelligence officials are alarmed about the possibility of military action towards Iran in the waning days of the Trump administration. Concern that Trump—who has pushed for maximum pressure on Iran—or a combination of Israel or Saudi Arabia creating a military confrontation in the waning days of the administration has been a concern for over a week, according to three European intelligence officials who spoke with Insider. The news that last week the president requested a list of military options from his military and diplomatic advisors has sent these concerns into overdrive. One fear is of unilateral action by the US to force a military clash that might make it impossible for the incoming Biden administration to return to the 2015 joint nuclear agreement that traded sanctions relief on Iran for an end to its nuclear weapon programs, all three officials said. They declined to speak on the record in exchange for their candid views on the situation.

People go hungry in Ethiopia’s Tigray as conflict marches on (AP) People are going hungry in Ethiopia’s rebellious northern Tigray region as roads are blocked, airports are closed and the federal government marches on its capital in a final push to win a two-week war. “At this stage there is simply very little left, even if you have money,” according to an internal assessment by one humanitarian group, seen by The Associated Press. The assessment, based on a colleague who managed to get out, said people “will stay where they are, there is no place in Tigray where the situation is any different and they cannot cross over into the other regions of Ethiopia because of fear of what would be done to them.” For more than a week, the United Nations and other aid organizations have been warning of disaster. Long lines formed outside shops within days of the Nov. 4 announcement by Ethiopia’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed that a military offensive had begun in response to an attack by Tigray regional forces on a military base. Trucks laden with food, fuel and medical supplies have been stuck outside the region’s borders. Banks in Tigray were closed for days, cutting off humanitarian cash transfers to some 1 million people. And even before the fighting, a locust outbreak had been destroying crops. Over 27,000 Ethiopians have fled into neighboring Sudan, burdening villages that have been praised for their generosity, though they have little to give.

[dr-archeville]

INDY Daily - First as Tragedy, Then as Farce

Everything you need to know this morning

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It’s Tuesday, December 8.

Hey y’all,

Thanks to everyone who emailed me yesterday recommending movies with particularly unhinged lead performances. Looks like I’m adding John Huston’s Wise Blood, Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King, William Friedkin’s Bug, and Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal to my list. To the person who said I should watch every Nic Cage movie: I see you, I hear you, and you are completely correct. Also, if anyone ever wants to watch an unhinged director directing an unhinged lead actor, allow me to recommend Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, directed by Werner Herzog and starring Nic Cage. Truly a match made in heaven. On to the news!

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"The First Time as Tragedy, The Second Time as Farce"

I’ve been thinking about this Karl Marx quote a lot as the pandemic’s second wave washes over us. It appeared in Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire while discussing France succumbing to the allure of the authoritarian Napoleon Bonaparte in the wake of the French Revolution, and then less than 50 years later handing power to his nephew, Louis Napoleon, following the revolutions of 1848. (I’m getting to COVID soon, I promise.) The tragedy is that France already had one Napoleon; the farce was that they voted to make the guy’s nephew the president without expecting he’d carry out a coup and pronounce himself Emperor. Given that Louis Napoleon was who he was and that he’d already tried and failed to pull two coups before becoming president, everybody really should have seen that one coming.

See where I’m going here? The first spike in COVID cases felt like being in a life raft on the open ocean. We were just trying to hold on and figure out how to navigate a crisis as the crisis was actively happening to us. But now, despite knowing all the ways to prevent and/or mitigate another nationwide coronavirus outbreak, we’re right back where we were six months ago.

North Carolina is averaging about 5,000 new coronavirus cases a day, we’ve got more hospitalizations than ever, and our positive COVID test rate is above 10 percent. Yet North Carolinians are about to lose pandemic unemployment benefits. We’re reopening schools in some places. And rather than expanding Medicaid so that uninsured people won’t have a freakishly high bill after they catch coronavirus at the fast-food job they had to get because their unemployment benefits ran out, we’re… starting a "Bipartisan North Carolina Council for Health Care Coverage" to… "developing principles to guide policymakers in increasing coverage in the state"????

"I really feel we're going the wrong direction and people are dying," Dr. David Wohl of UNC-Chapel Hill’s Division of Infectious Diseases told ABC 11. He continued, "We know how to flatten [the curve]. We did it here in North Carolina beautifully. We can do it again."

More than that, North Carolina has a really big pile of cash laying around — about $6 billion between its reserves and cash on hand, minus the money it owes to local governments. Why is that money not going towards paying people to stay home and limit their potential exposure to COVID? This really should not be that hard.

But the fact that we’re not putting our knowledge of how to flatten the curve to good use, well, that’s the farce.

More farce, this time vaccine-related: After all the hullabaloo about getting a coronavirus vaccine up and out the door, North Carolina is only getting 85,000 doses of it and it will be distributed to merely 11 hospitals throughout the state. I realize that these doses are just the first round of vaccines and meant for a relatively small number of North Carolinians, but still — 11 hospitals? For comparison’s sake, there are 22 hospitals in North Carolina that start with the letter "A," so 11 hospitals really feels like not enough hospitals.

To be fair, this is not necessarily the fault of anyone in the state government. Would you believe it if I told you that the Trump administration declined to buy more doses of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine over the summer when the company offered them the chance? Because that’s exactly what happened, and now a bunch of Pfizer’s supply will be going to the U.K. and the European Union.

At the time that I’m writing this, there isn’t much more information to the story than what I’ve written above, I can almost guarantee that this happened because Trump personally did something extremely stupid.

After all, the first time was a tragedy, and this time is a farce.

Statewide COVID-19 by the numbers: Monday, December 7

4,372 New lab-confirmed new cases (399,362 total; seven-day average trending up)

40,541 Completed tests (5.63 million total; most recent positive rate was 10.5 percent)

2,240 Current hospitalizations reported (seven-day average trending up; 5,560 total deaths)  

Quick Hits

Our local NPR affiliate has a wonderful audio story on the past, present, and future of grocery stores in North Carolina, which has produced both large chains such as Harris Teeter and Food Lion, as well as beloved independent grocers like Durham’s very own Food World. [WUNC]

In today’s sign of the looming apocalypse, Wall Street is now trading California water futures. Another way of putting that: Wall Street traders are now betting on whether California will run out of water. [Bloomberg]

The tastemaking music publication Pitchfork has released its list of the top 100 songs of the year. As someone who wrote for them this year, I was invited to cast a ballot, and I think that six of the 50 songs I voted for ended up making the list, which is probably for the best, as I have terrible taste. [Pitchfork]

Headline of the day: "Why Are Pandas Covering Themselves With Horse Manure?" This article, which is very fun, gets bonus points because it quotes Dr. Aleah Bowie, an animal behavior expert at Duke University. [New York Times]

Today’s weather: Did y’all see those little snow flurries yesterday? I did not, and I probably won’t see their remnants today, since it’s going to be 48 degrees and sunny during the day. Tonight it’ll be clear with a low of 27 degrees.

Song of the day: "hand crushed by a mallet (remix)" by 100 gecs featuring Fall Out Boy, Craig Owens, and Nicole Dollanganger

I can’t find my actual Pitchfork ballot, but I’m pretty sure that I had this as my number-one song of the year. I like it because it sounds like every genre of music at once, presented in a way that collapses the space-time continuum.

— Drew Millard — Send me an email | Find me on Twitter

If you’d like to advertise your business to the Daily's 33,000-plus subscribers, please contact John Hurld at jhurld@indyweek.com.

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[localbizlift]

What Readers Want During COVID-19: Content Ideas for Every Niche

Posted by amandamilligan

This is a stressful time to say the least. Everything is impacted by COVID-19 in some way, including our work.

Once we’ve taken time to acknowledge how lucky we are to work in digital, it’s time to assess if our current content strategy needs any adjusting based on current events.

Many marketers are finding themselves:

Wanting to write about something topical

Needing to add more content to their calendars

At a loss for how to contribute at a time like this

So, I spent hours using Ubersuggest, putting myself in the shoes of various Americans. I tested a variety of keywords to see which ones have exhibited a trend during the COVID-19 outbreak and might warrant some attention from content marketers.

The results below are for the term “Coronavirus,” so for the other keywords identified, I looked for a noticeable spike in the months of January, February, and March to make sure they matched up accordingly.

My findings reveal potential topic ideas for several primary industries. See if any provide inspiration for high-quality content you can create in the coming months.

Travel

I’ll start with one of the industries hardest hit by this pandemic: travel. This was a tough one, as more and more people are understandably opting for driving, walking, or biking to get around, and are no longer relying on air travel or public transportation as trips and work get cancelled. However, I identified a few key opportunities.

Travel insurance

While it had an increase in the summer months, interest in the topic of travel insurance has risen back up again. Perhaps those who have to travel want to make sure they’re covered if they get sick, or maybe those who canceled travel want to see what their insurance covers.

In either case, people are looking for information about travel insurance and how it can help them.

Train travel

It seems that train travel falls into an ambiguous category that people are asking about. I’m not here to say whether it’s safe or not (as that is obviously not my area of expertise). As we’ve all heard, it’s best not to travel at all, but perhaps your brand can offer some clarity in this regard and offer alternatives.

Virtual travel

For everyone stuck at home but still grappling with wanderlust, how can they still explore from the couch? Virtual travel seems to be gaining popularity as more people find themselves stuck at home.

Work and education

In some cases, companies and schools have gone from in-person to virtual nearly overnight. It’s been a huge shakeup across the board, and relevant topics are trending accordingly.

Homeschooling

Many kids are home from school, and their parents are suddenly and unexpectedly in the position of teaching them. They’re sure to have a lot of questions! Note how the search level now is the same as the summer months, when kids are also home.

Free online courses

With all plans essentially cancelled as a result of “social distancing,” people are looking for ways to spend their time at home. If you offer online courses, consider amplifying them and explaining their value. If you don’t, consider whether it makes sense to create one.

Working from home tips

Executives and staff alike are looking for advice on how to improve productivity while working from home, perhaps for the first time. Consider creating content with suggestions on how to set up a home office or maintain a schedule while dealing with at-home distractions.

How to stay focused

Whether it’s because people are working or studying at home for the first time or because they’re anxious and distracted by the developing events, more and more people are struggling to stay focused. Can your brand offer anything by way of motivation or tools for focus and efficiency?

Entertainment

Everyone’s at home either trying to distract themselves from the stressful reality of the world or looking to cure their boredom. As a result, online entertainment is on the rise. Can you offer the entertainment itself, or maybe guides on how to choose the best entertainment?

Free streaming

We’re stuck with digital for now, and people are looking for new media to consume. What can your brand provide? Also trending: “cheap digital games” and “best multiplayer video games”.

Learn to play piano online

Some folks are using their newfound free time to work on hobbies and skills they haven’t had the chance to pursue in the past. Can your brand teach them anything?

Best online shopping deals

This is particularly interesting to me. Keyword rates for this term are as high as they were over the holidays. I’m wondering if people who still have disposable income will pass the time online shopping, while others who are more financially impacted will cut back, leaving things at a net equal?

Finance

Aside from the health and safety of the population, finance cuts most to the emotional core of this pandemic. Many people are laid off or can’t work, and financial worry is skyrocketing. What can you do to provide guidance or relief?

Unemployment

Many people are unexpectedly looking to file unemployment, and plenty of those people have no idea how to do it, how much money they’ll get, or how to get that information. Informative guides and tips could be hugely helpful in this area.

Budgeting tips

With layoffs and pay cuts, people are scrambling to find new ways to save money. Also trending with the same graph results: “How to invest money wisely” -- most likely because of the fluctuating stock market. Can you provide insight?

Relationships

When tensions run high, it’s important to pay attention to all the relationships in your life, meaning several subtopics in this vertical can be of vital importance.

At home date ideas

Couples stuck inside are looking for ways to keep up their romantic lives. Does it make sense for your brand to provide dating or relationships tips at an unprecedented time like this?

Reconnecting with friends

Physically, we’re all practicing social distancing, but we shouldn’t be virtually disconnecting from the people in our lives. It looks like people are wondering if they should take advantage of this free time to reconnect with old friends. Can your brand offer advice on the topic, or possibly a forum for those connections to happen?

How to make your parents understand how you feel

There are a lot of jokes going around about Gen Zs and Millennials trying to convince their Boomer parents to stay inside. But the jokes are for a reason: Many people are having tough conversations for the first time with family that they aren’t entirely sure how to navigate. Could you provide some helpful tips to approach these conversations?

Health and fitness

Health is, unsurprisingly, a vital category right now. Rather than getting into some of the most obvious things (like hand washing, hand sanitizer, etc.), I’ll try to cover some other popular topics that might be useful.

How to get health insurance

Similar to “unemployment” above, this is probably a response to people losing their jobs who are now unsure how they can get health insurance. What other concerns might these people have that you can help with?

Indoor workouts

People might have to stay home, but they’re also trying to stay healthy. How can you assist them in this endeavor?

Also trending: “how to start running”, indicating that solitary outdoor exercise is key, too.

How to strengthen immune system

People are concerned about their health and want to do whatever they can to protect themselves from COVID-19. However, only dive into this subject matter if your brand is a legitimate medical expert. False information can damage lives.

Also trending: “healthy diet”.

Journaling

Don’t forget about mental health, which is also being affected by the pandemic. People are stressed, anxious, worried, and, well, scared. Does it make sense for your brand to provide guidance on how to emotionally or mentally approach this day and age?

Also trending: “meditation”.

Home and family

In many cases, entire families are at home, every day, for the first time since the kids were old enough to be in school. That can lead to some interesting challenges.

Natural cleaning products

In an effort to keep the house clean, people may be looking for guidance on the best type of supplies to use. Could you make a list of the most effective products?

Also trending: “organic cleaning products”.

Family recipes

Everyone’s at home for all their meals and trying to avoid restaurants, so they probably need more recipes in their arsenal. Maybe your employees have favorite family recipes you could share with your readers.

Games to play with kids

Parents are used to this over the summer, but not when it’s sprung on them for an indefinite period of time. How can your brand give them ideas and tools to entertain their kids while they’re home?

Also trending: “family conversation starters”.

Conclusion

To round out this study, I want to show the results for “uplifting stories.”

If you’re not responsible for delivering breaking news or important COVID-19 updates, look for opportunities to amplify joy, gratitude, hope, or any other positive emotion. People are looking for health and safety updates, but they’re looking for inspiration, too.

Consider how any of these topics might apply to your brand, do some further exploring in the Moz Keyword Explorer, and focus on creating a content plan you feel confident in.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

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What Are The Best Materials for Making DIY Masks?

Update 9th April: We’ve had hundreds of requests from people looking for data on more materials for making face masks. We are working hard to provide MORE data on MORE materials for DIY masks.

To help with this, we have created a campaign on Fundly.com where you can vote and recommend what materials we should test. Please support this campaign and help us use data-backed science to fight Covid-19!

With masks sold out during the coronavirus outbreak, many people will have to make do with what some scientists have called “the last resort”: the DIY mask.

Data shows that DIY and homemade masks are effective at capturing viruses. But if forced to make our own mask, what material is best suited to make a mask? As the coronavirus spread around China, netizens reported making masks with tissue paper, kitchen towels, cotton clothing fabrics, and even oranges!

The Best Material for Making a Homemade DIY Mask

Researchers at Cambridge University tested a wide range of household materials for homemade masks. To measure effectiveness, they shot Bacillus atrophaeus bacteria (0.93-1.25 microns) and Bacteriophage MS virus (0.023 microns in size) at different household materials.

They measured what percentage the materials could capture and compared them to the more common surgical mask.

Not surprisingly, the surgical mask performed best, capturing 97% of the 1-micron bacteria. Yet every single material filtered out at least 50% of particles. The top performers were the vacuum cleaner bag (95%), the dish cloth (“tea towel” in the UK! 83%), the cotton blend shirt fabric (74%), and the 100% cotton shirt (69%).

Homemade Masks vs. Viruses

The test above used bacteria that were 1 micron large, yet the coronavirus is just 0.1 microns – ten times smaller. Can homemade masks capture smaller virus particles? To answer this question, the scientists tested 0.02 micron Bacteriophage MS2 particles (5 times smaller than the coronavirus).

On average, the homemade masks captured 7% fewer virus particles than the larger bacteria particles. However, all of the homemade materials managed to capture 50% of virus particles or more (with the exception of the scarf at 49%).

Are some materials missing from the list?

We are working on more comprehensive tests with more materials. Check out our ‘Best Mask Materials’ Campaign for more info.

Are Two-Layered DIY Masks More Effective?

If the problem is filtration effectiveness, would the masks work better if we doubled up with two layers of fabric? The scientists tested bacteria-size particles against double-layered versions of the dish towel, pillow case, and 100% cotton shirt fabrics.

Overall, the double layers didn’t help much. The double-layer pillowcase captured 1% more particles, and the double-layer shirt captured just 2% more particles. Yet the extra dish cloth layer boosted performance by 14%. That boost made the dish cloth as effective as the surgical mask.

Looking at the data, the dish towel and vacuum cleaner bag were the top-performing materials. However, the researchers didn’t choose these as the best materials for DIY masks:

Instead, they concluded the pillowcase and the 100% cotton t-shirt are the best materials for DIY masks. Why?

What DIY Mask Materials Are The Most Breathable?

The answer lies in breathability. How easy it is to breathe through your mask is an important factor that will affect how comfortable it is. And comfort isn’t merely a luxury. Comfort will influence how long you can wear your mask.

Fortunately, in addition to particle effectiveness, the researchers tested the pressure drop across each type of fabric. This gives us a good indication of how easy it is to breathe through each material. As a benchmark, they compared breathability of each DIY mask material to the surgical mask.

Although the dish cloth and the vacuum bag captured the most particles, they were also the hardest to breath through. With two layers, the dish cloth was over twice as hard to breathe through as the surgical mask. In contrast, the pillow case, t-shirt, scarf, and linen were all easier to breathe through than the surgical mask.

  Researchers’ Pick for Best-Performing Homemade Mask Material

Based on particle capture and breathability, the researchers concluded that cotton t-shirts and pillow cases are the best choices for DIY masks.

Are there any other materials we can use? The Cambridge researchers left out one common material: paper towel. We tested how well paper towel masks capture sub-micron particles.

Making DIY Masks with Household Materials

Bottom line: Test data shows that the best choices for DIY masks are cotton t-shirts, pillowcases, or other cotton materials.

These materials filter out approximately 50% of 0.2 micron particles, similar in size to the coronavirus. They are also as easy to breathe through as surgical masks, which makes them comfortable enough to wear for several hours.

Doubling the layers of material for your DIY mask gives a very small increase in filtration effectiveness, but makes the mask much more difficult to breathe through.

  Here’s What Else You Should Know About DIY Masks

Still not sure if DIY masks really work? See the real-world test data on the effectiveness of homemade DIY masks.

Some health authorities claim that masks are only to keep sick people’s germs in, but do masks actually prevent healthy people from getting infected? Randomized studies say “yes.”

Get the latest clean air tips!

Get updates on masks, air purifiers and air quality delivered straight to your inbox.

[alchemyofe]

Geo’s Everyman Guide to COVID-19

We need to be Rational about this disease in both directions. We need good, simple and reliable baselines, and we need to both react emotionally, and not overreact emotionally. Emotionless is death, as we are emotional creatures. Fake control of ones emotions is achieved through lies to oneself, not through enlightenment! Everyman's Guide to "How to Think About COVID-19"

Data Analysis is hard, especially given the vast systemic bias in our testing response. This is my compressed analytical toolkit, built from mostly simple arithmetic, so its is easily accessible. And a general picture of what we are aiming for and why.

***

By my take, the most reliable datasets we have available to us to analyze are the Diamond Princess & South Korea. Based on my preferred source of worldometer.info/coronavirus/ We get a CDR of 1.8% to 2% known from these examples respectively, and a hard minimum of 0.35% CDR from the total population of Diamond Princess, assuming they were all exposed.

In my opinion percentage is not a good framework to understand these statistics, as our brains do not process it well. A better analytic model is to use fractions for the impact.

We can translate percentage easily; 1 in 55 to 1 in 50 expected range, with a hard minimum of 1 in 285 dead if exposed to the disease.

On Diamond Princess there were 3,711 passengers, 712 known to be infected with COVID-19, 13 deaths so far, with 7 people still in critical or serious condition. (I expect additional deaths.) Now, since the initial exposure aboard the ship from February 1st. 76 days to this writing, April 17th, have passed.

This CDR (Crude Death Rate) calculation has large error bars, as all the data is poor. But by itself it is simple math: [infected/dead] from a dataset. CDR isn't a hard number, but a variable which can change based on human interventions, overall its a good place to ground ones understanding of the disease, but not of a specific outbreak scenario as it doesn't provide universal extrapolation. Another number to be deeply concerned with is hospitalizations. The hospitalization rate is best conceptualized as “People who would likely die if they don't receive treatment.” An extreme risk if hospitals become overburdened, don't have enough resources and must begin triage.

Frustratingly, this number as a total is not as well tracked, but the peak hospitalizations number for the Diamond Princess was 35. So we know roughly how many needed treatment. Using the Diamond Princess Dataset we get; 4.9% of known sick (1 in 20). 0.9% of total population (1 in 106) needed hospitalization & could likely die without it.

Please understand that there are large error bars here, my data-analysis is framed from being as conservative as possible without being irrationally low, i.e. assuming risk. The ship was quarantined early, reducing the likelihood of exposure, but also a cruise-ship is something of a unique environment. However, it is less age and otherwise confounded than the memes around cruise-ships and disease would imply. As it can be considered an Optimistic & Definitive Cohort overall, I consider the Diamond Princess dataset the best available for extrapolation to population wide impacts.

Using this dataset, we can very simply extrapolate to populations, to give a rough idea of the risks we are facing. Framing the pandemic with different paradigms, we can develop a more fully realized understanding of why this disease is so concerning.

Note: We should be considered when assessing calculations results, as any extrapolation is fraught with potential problems, which is why there are far more complicated pandemic math models than what I am presenting.

A Range of Paradigms:

Good Case: If we assume everyone aboard the Diamond Princess was fully exposed, the most optimistic assumption possible, and extrapolate that to the US it means 1,000,000 people will die from this disease, if it spreads and isn't pushed into active spread extinction. From that frame, this is a minimum possible assessment of the outcome. This assumption produces 22,500,00 dead globally. This assumption however does not account for hospital overburdening, but the CDR in consideration is low enough that overburdening isn't and order of magnitude consideration. The right way to think about this analytical frame is that it is fully irrational to believe that the disease can be less bad than this analysis.

Bad Case: Using our data it is not hard to do an conservative bad case scenario, where the disease as we know it from CDR does its worst grounded in the data, we do nothing. But it is not a true worst case analysis where catastrophic systemic collapse is triggered, which is beyond the scope of our consideration.

Everyone gets the disease over the course of a relatively short (months-year) time-span, hospitals are overburdened, and the data from DP is roughly representative. 4.9% Death Rate after hospital overburdening. 1 in 20 Americans Die. In total 16 million Americans die. 382 million dead globally. Someone you know very personally die, you will possibly attend multiple COVID-19 related funerals.

Expected: We can do an Expected Case Analysis based on the Diamond Princess Infected CDR of 1.8%. We manage the catastrophic health aspects of the disease, and can ensure some form of effective treatment for all people who are infected, but the disease still saturates the population eventually. We assume the Dataset from Diamond Princess is roughly representative. 1 in 55 Americans dead. 6 million dead in the US. 140 million dead globally. This is close to the #FlattenTheCurve scenario over a full timespan.

Best Case: The #CrushTheCurve Best Case Scenario. Reaching an Extinction Timeline. Exponential Decrease in deaths, due to stopping the spread before saturation. We can't easily calculate the total timeline death rate for this approach, the variables are too human choices dependent. However we can see the benefit of this approach immediately and consider its long term implications as well.

To make a best case example explicit: South Korea has effectively stopped the virus, if their data is to be believed. They've had 217 dead, there will be some number more as those who are infected go through hospital and recovery. This is a tiny number compared to their population as a whole. South Korea is a living example of a best case scenario as events unfold. By contrast their Good case is 153,000 dead, their Bad case would be 2,500,00 dead, Expected 765,000.

This is the kind of radical difference every single, person, institution and government should all have been fighting for since the beginning.

As we stretch this into long term thinking, the dynamics get far more complicated. I can't elegantly factor all of it. However, important considerations are that as time goes on our ability to respond to the disease improves. We know more about it, and can scale our response capacity to better handle it. The CDR framings will all gradually reduce as we develop the capacity to better treat the disease on every level of analysis.

A huge boon is that if we can reach extinction timelines locally, life can return to near normal, locally, within weeks. With certain provisions, this near return to normalcy can be maintained, at a local level, regardless of the extinction timeline propagating globally. If any secondary outbreak restarts, we already have the collective consciousness to react to it efficiently with minimal social impact. The Lockdowns are only essential & necessary because we are so unprepared. South Korea, didn't need full lockdowns, because they were well prepared due to previous infectious outbreaks in SE Asia.

***

Risk Management Path Forward: There is too much to consider to get  a complete and detailed picture into a single post. This is to set out the general picture so there is a clear understanding to being from, each layer needs to be considered for specifics and context.

Government and Business:

We've talked extensively about Testing and About Contact tracing, Scaling PPE and Medical Resources. These are all fundamentally essential to a governmental and broad scale response. We need to know who is sick and who is exposed, so those people can be cared for and avoid spreading the disease further. Then have protection for those treating them, the society at large, and have the ability to treat people beyond the paltry capacity we have in place for peak loads.

A competent government response is very subject to particulars of a region; namely, population density & demographics, compliance, socio-economics, climate, response capacity and leadership competence. There is no universal response paradigm that is also optimal everywhere. 5 Week Lockdowns are our core message, as this is the simplest implementation, and the most impactful, but it by itself isn't the solution. This 5 Weeks of Lockdown is time bought to react and extinct the virus in community spread, so life can return to near normal, and resources can be focused to locales where the disease is not extinct.

Impact at a Personal Level:

Wearing mask, any filter medium, up to and including a mere bandana, if washed regularly, reduces spread [you can fold in a [salted] shop towel to increase filtering effectiveness]. Any barrier reduces spread both from you, if you are infected, and to you, if someone who is near you is infected. Both directly, in your viral load exposure & transmission numbers in any viral particle encounter, and in the R0 doubling rate, reducing your general probability of exposure.

An N95 mask is roughly 89% effective against the virus, significantly reducing viral load, whereas the average DIY Mask is in the 50-70% range. Also there is evidence a salt based treatment to a filter medium can reach 100% effectiveness, as salt has anti-viral properties on a filter medium. tinyurl.com/saltmask

Super Spreaders Events: If eliminated, radically reduce the total spread. A few people spread the disease to huge numbers of others, most people take actions that reduce their spread effect, like wearing a mask and staying home if they feel unwell. If door-knobs are sanitized regularly, and other surface vectors are sanitized as well, an region that has achieved extinction can maintain it's low spread rate without an extensive burden.

We know the disease doesn't survive long on cardboard, 24hr. But we also know it can survive a long time on plastic 3+ days (up to 9 days depending on plastic type iirc). So with manageable quarantines local areas can still have trade with areas with a higher infection rate. Soap and Bleach spray are two powerful tools of disinfection. Also Alcohol and Hydrogen Peroxide.

Beyond hand-washing a powerful protectant is to make your household a secure space, #safecircle, as background stress itself is a risk factor for infection & lowered immune system. This means upon returning home yo do such as; disinfectant spray your shoes and bottom of shoes, launder clothes, shower with soap, shampoo & body wash, & wear PPE when out. Quarantining all packages that enter the home for 24 hours, along with using disinfectant spray on plastic packaging. Along with appropriate additional precautions.

General Health, Self Protection and Prophylactics: Reducing the likelihood a low viral load exposure becomes an infection, also taking precautionary steps that can help in reducing the severity of an infection. We know confidently that Vitamin C & Citrus is beneficial if sick with COVID-19. Zinc has a known history of helping fight viral infection. Vitamin D is known to be beneficial during respiratory stress, as is fresh air, so going outdoors, and supplements are both hugely beneficial, also green nature itself has a strong anti-stress load experiential effect.

Reports of various forms of Chloroquine being helpful in treatment means that highly available Tonic Water just might have a beneficial disease fighting and also protective effect, it is known to do this for Malaria.

***

Key Takeaways:

It is far easier to manage disease risk in a local area after the disease is extinct in the population, regardless of details. Once we “Extinct” life gets back to near normal, but we can also respond much more effectively to a subsequent outbreak, as we share a collective consciousness about the disease and its danger.

There is a lot that you & those you know and can contact personally can do to reduce the disease & its impact, personally and at scale. #Masks4All #CrushTheCurve #5WeekLockdown

Note: I am a team lead at endcoronavirus.org run through NECSI.edu, founded by Yaneer Bar-Yam in collaboration with Nassim Taleb 

[epacer]

State of California

California to soon begin 'endemic' approach to pandemic

California health officials next week will outline a new approach to dealing with the coronavirus that assumes it's here to stay, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Wednesday, while condemning organized disinformation efforts that limit vaccinations critical to California entering the next stage.

A disease reaches the endemic stage when the virus still exists in a community but becomes manageable as immunity builds.

“We’re looking back at the last two years — what worked, what didn’t, what we’ve all learned on the journey we’ve been on together,” Newsom said. That includes reviewing the impact on people and businesses from California's rules, regulations and requirements, he said.

The World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic on March 11, 2020. While still considered a pandemic, health experts have been expecting the coronavirus to eventually become endemic.

Newsom imposed the nation's first statewide stay-home order that largely shut down the most populous state's economy in the early months of the pandemic, followed by occupancy, masking and vaccination requirements that California is only now beginning to ease.

The new approach, he said, “allows for the kind of flexibility of thinking that is incumbent upon all of us as it relates to dealing with any endemic, particularly one as stubborn ... as COVID.”

It will still include quarantines, testing of those who don't show symptoms and other precautions, but those safeguards will vary based on what he said are more than a dozen “guideposts and measurements” designed to spot new surges and virus variants.

It also will include a continued emphasis on vaccinations and booster shots that can prevent serious illness, hospitalization and death, he said. About 700,000 Californians got their shots in the last seven days, he said, which is “not insignificant, but it’s not where we want to be.”

“We still have a lot of work to do to convince people that they should still get vaccinated, let alone boosted,” he said.

Nearly 74% of Californians age 5 and up are fully vaccinated and another nearly 9% are partially vaccinated. About 55% have had booster shots.

Another part of the approach will confront not only misinformation about the virus and vaccinations, but what he called “overt disinformation that continues to be perpetuated ... by individuals, organizations, networks in this country that continue to put people’s lives at risk."

Newsom said California health officials will also outline their revised approach to school mask-wearing requirements no later than Monday, after negotiating with school officials and teacher unions. Governors in New Jersey and other states this week moved to ease those mandates.

Newsom spoke after signing a series of bills into law, including one that requires larger companies to give workers up to two weeks of paid time off if they get sick from the coronavirus. The requirement was coupled with billions of dollars in business tax cuts and other assistance approved by state lawmakers on Monday.

Encouraging people to stay home when they are sick through things like paid leave is one of the keys to limiting the spread of an endemic virus, said Dr. Monica Gandhi, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of California, San Francisco.

“I feel like this is utterly the question of the day” as officials worldwide struggle for answers, she said: "What does endemic management look like?”

Health officials could track coronavirus cases by testing wastewater for evidence of disease, she said, with increased genomic analysis if they spot a spike to see if a new variant has surfaced.

State officials could continue recommending vaccinations and more effective masks, particularly for those who are vulnerable. But an endemic approach likely means no more masking or vaccination mandates for entering businesses, schools or entertainment venues, and an increased emphasis on antibody, antiviral and other treatment options for those who cannot or will not be vaccinated.

And Gandhi expects the pandemic will leave a permanent emphasis on improved ventilation systems in buildings and the importance of leaving windows open even in winter.

Coronavirus vaccines are likely to be just one more routine childhood shot, and it will be rare for a child to avoid exposure to COVID-19 by age 5, when symptoms generally are mild, said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, an epidemiologist at the University of Southern California.

Health officials will mainly direct their emphasis to controlling outbreaks in congested areas, like schools, nursing homes and prisons.

“We’ll be moving to a place where we have vaccines, we have treatments and it will become more normalized into our medical system and will not cause this kind of public health response where people felt society had to be shut down and people had to be required to be distanced or wear masks,” Klausner said.

There will continue to be regional and county variations, as evidenced already in both the San Francisco Bay Area and Southern California. That will inevitably cause confusion and increase pressure on health officials like those in Los Angeles County who said they may keep masking requirements through April, he said.

“We’ll live with the availability of COVID tests. Where people get a flu test, now they’ll get a COVID test as well. We’ll live with the availability of COVID treatments. We’ll live with people who are at very high risk for severe disease — whether they be older or unvaccinated or immunocompromised — will have to continue to work to protect themselves," Klausner said.

“But I think that the general population, many things will recede into the rearview mirror in terms of the day-to-day,” he said. *Reposted article from KPBS by Don Thompson of the Associated Press, February 10, 2022