Trump provides some sorely-needed perspective on New Zealand’s failings. He didn’t mention you by name Banquet Bear, but I’m betting he was thinking about you.
In another context its like asking me to temper my disgust and outrage at numerous multi-fatality school shootings, by finding out that my neighbour has just got a parking ticket.
… 
Half of New Zealand twitter were up in arms about this and out in force. The other half were pleading with everyone to “pretend that we didn’t exist, we don’t like to be noticed, please leave us alone.”
22,049,426 total cases
777,439 dead
14,791,860 recovered
In the US:
5,612,027 total cases
173,716 dead
2,973,587 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
I am still doubting the veracity of the US numbers. Yes, I found the recent news stories about poor data reporting somewhat bolstering but I would prefer accurate numbers to being right.
That additional outside of the cold facility cluster one with no direct contact is more than a testament to the virus being sneaky: it implies that there is at least one unidentified transmitter who was between them. That person may have not spread it to anyone other than this identified individual, but could also be the start of a separate cluster to be contained.
I for one say that the first wave has yet to end.
Agreed. Who came up with the zany idea that the first wave is over?
Wishful thinkers.
…today’s latest update: only 6 new cases today. 1 imported, the other 5 linked to the current cluster, the Rydges case seems to be a single case at this stage.
If anyone wants to watch the NZ briefing the live update is here:
…wow. The Prime Minister just announced that they are effectively no longer going to use Private Security Guards at Managed Isolation. They are going to employ them directly and pay them a living wage. That was a huge failing in Victoria, it was a weak-point here: this will help fix it. Defense force staff will be primarily used, but the additional security that they bring in will all be directly employed.
In all the discussion about the ‘security guard’ failures in vic.au, nobody seems to have mentioned that it was common to have on-site living quarters at hospitals and quarantine stations, with on-site laundry and kitchens.
I looked at those pictures of quarantine guards sleeping on the carpet in the hallway, when they should be doing their 12 hour shift sitting in a chair in the hallway, and thought that it wasn’t just the hiring and training practices that were badly implemented.
The death rate of those with COVID has gone down significantly; NY and NJ still have, by far, the most deaths per million in the US even as other states have surpassed them in positive tests per million, I assume this must be due to better treatment. Is this true, and if so, what are these better practices?
I started a thread a few months ago asking what medical professionals do, specifically, to keep COVID patients alive. At that time, there weren’t any responses because perhaps they weren’t known yet. With all the trial-and-error since, I would hope there are some tried and true treatments that work.
22,306,538 total cases
784,353 dead
15,047,779 recovered
In the US:
5,655,974 total cases
175,074 dead
3,011,098 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
I saw a number from New Zealand the other day that surprised me. They were talking about testing all the staff at their managed isolation quarantine facilities, and they mentioned the number of workers is 2100. (I’ve since seen 2800 mentioned in another place.) That struck me as so odd. It’s a country of five million people, with the borders supposedly mostly closed. How many people could there be in quarantine? I wonder what that ratio of staff to resident is.
I also thought it odd when I saw the news this morning about someone visiting Hobbiton or some such tourist destination this month and then testing positive back in his home country. Is there actually a little bit of tourism being allowed in New Zealand, I wonder? (Hence the need for thousands of staff for quarantine facilities?) Or was that someone who had been in the country since March and was only just now heading home? Interesting.
…the numbers currently in managed isolation can be found here: (updated today)
https://covid19.govt.nz/assets/resources/miq-data/miq-daily-update-2020-08-19.pdf
There are an estimated 600,000-to-a-million New Zealanders overseas at any one time, all citizens have a right of return, there are 32 Managed Isolation Facilities up and down the country and there are currently 5400 people in managed isolation. On average between 3 and 500 people return to the country every day. With this new outbreak the Ministry of Health changed procedure: new cases and their family are now taken to Managed Isolation Facilities instead of being left to self-isolate in the community.
So each of the 32 Managed Isolation Facility is typically a hotel, so for starters you need enough staff to run a hotel, including kitchen staff, laundry, reception, and you need to cover 3-4 shifts. Then you add the medical teams, doctors, nurses, support staff, then you add the security layer, typically seconded from the military, aviation security and the police along with private security (who are being phased out) so 2800 sounds about right to me. Its a huge logistical endeavour, and essentially the front line in the fight against Covid-19.
There is no external tourism allowed in New Zealand. Some people have been here since March, most notably the singer Amanda Palmer and Gabe Newell the founder of Valve. There are exemptions to be able to travel to New Zealand, for example they are ramping up production on the movie Avatar, and cast and crew have been allowed into the country for this (as the production adds significantly to the economy) but they have to go through the managed isolation process just like everyone else. Details of that here:
https://www.immigration.govt.nz/about-us/covid-19/border-closures-and-exceptions
With the person (or people, it happened a couple of times) who tested positive back in their home countries, they also stopped in another country prior to getting back home, and it is most likely they picked it up at that stage. Despite that the people who were close contacts with those people in NZ were advised to get tests and/or to self isolate, and casual contacts were advised to seek testing if they developed symptoms.
Also, assume that anything that has to be done 24 hours per day represents three full work shifts and the number of actual positions [as opposed to peope] shrinks quickly.
This is an aspect of COVID that we don’t hear much about, but it is scary as hell and devastating for those who are going through it.
Lauren Nichols has been sick with COVID-19 since March 10, shortly before Tom Hanks announced his diagnosis and the NBA temporarily canceled its season. She has lived through one month of hand tremors, three of fever, and four of night sweats. When we spoke on day 150, she was on her fifth month of gastrointestinal problems and severe morning nausea. She still has extreme fatigue, bulging veins, excessive bruising, an erratic heartbeat, short-term memory loss, gynecological problems, sensitivity to light and sounds, and brain fog. Even writing an email can be hard, she told me, “because the words I think I’m writing are not the words coming out.” She wakes up gasping for air twice a month. It still hurts to inhale.
Tens of thousands of people, collectively known as “long-haulers,” have similar stories. I first wrote about them in early June. Since then, I’ve received hundreds of messages from people who have been suffering for months—alone, unheard, and pummeled by unrelenting and unpredictable symptoms.
…Our understanding of COVID-19 has accreted around the idea that it kills a few and is “mild” for the rest. That caricature was sketched before the new coronavirus even had a name; instead of shifting in the light of fresh data, it calcified. It affected the questions scientists sought to ask, the stories journalists sought to tell, and the patients doctors sought to treat. It excluded long-haulers from help and answers. Nichols’s initial symptoms were so unlike the official description of COVID-19 that her first doctor told her she had acid reflux and refused to get her tested. “Even if you did have COVID-19, you’re 32, you’re healthy, and you’re not going to die,” she remembers him saying. (She has since tested positive.)
Long-haulers had to set up their own support groups. They had to start running their own research projects. They formed alliances with people who have similar illnesses, such as dysautonomia and myalgic encephalomyelitis, also known as chronic fatigue syndrome. A British group—LongCovidSOS—launched a campaign to push the government for recognition, research, and support.
All of this effort started to have an effect. More journalists wrote stories about them. Some doctors began taking their illness seriously. Some researchers are developing treatment and rehabilitation programs.
…It’s not enough, argues Nisreen Alwan, a public-health professor at the University of Southampton who has had COVID-19 since March 20. She says that experts and officials should stop referring to all nonhospitalized cases as “mild.” They should agree on a definition of recovery that goes beyond being discharged from the hospital or testing negative for the virus, and accounts for a patient’s quality of life. “We cannot fight what we do not measure,” Alwan says. “Death is not the only thing that counts. We must also count lives changed.”
Only then will we truly know the full stakes of the pandemic. As many people still fantasize about returning to their previous lives, some are already staring at a future where that is no longer possible.
…A few formal studies have hinted at the lingering damage that COVID-19 can inflict. In an Italian study, 87 percent of hospitalized patients still had symptoms after two months; a British study found similar trends. A German study that included many patients who recovered at home found that 78 percent had heart abnormalities after two or three months. A team from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that a third of 270 nonhospitalized patients hadn’t returned to their usual state of health after two weeks. (For comparison, roughly 90 percent of people who get the flu recover within that time frame.)
These findings, though limited, are galling. They suggest that in the United States alone, which has more than 5 million confirmed COVID-19 cases, there are probably hundreds of thousands of long-haulers.
These people are still paying the price for early pandemic failures. Many long-haulers couldn’t get tested when they first fell sick, because such tests were scarce. Others were denied tests because their symptoms didn’t conform to a list we now know was incomplete. False negatives are more common as time wears on; when many long-haulers finally got tested weeks or months into their illness, the results were negative. On average, long-haulers who tested negative experienced the same set of symptoms as those who tested positive, which suggests that they truly do have COVID-19. But their negative result still hangs over them, shutting them out of research and treatments.
…The physical toll of long COVID almost always comes with an equally debilitating comorbidity of disbelief. Employers have told long-haulers that they couldn’t possibly be sick for that long. Friends and family members accused them of being lazy. Doctors refused to believe they had COVID-19. “Every specialist I saw—cardiologist, rheumatologist, dermatologist, neurologist—was wedded to this idea that ‘mild’ COVID-19 infections last two weeks,” says Angela Meriquez Vázquez, a children’s activist in Los Angeles. “In one of my first ER visits, I was referred for a psychiatric evaluation, even though my symptoms were of heart attack and stroke.”
This “medical gaslighting,” whereby physiological suffering is downplayed as a psychological problem such as stress or anxiety, is especially bad for women, and even worse for women of color. “Doctors not taking our conditions seriously is a common issue, and now we have COVID-19 on top of it,” says Gage, who is Black. When she sought medical help for her symptoms, doctors in two separate hospitals assumed she was having a drug overdose.
…
Vázquez burst into tears after her new primary-care provider instantly believed her. “I went into that appointment armed with my notebook, ready to do battle,” she says. “Just having a doctor who believed that my symptoms were directly related to COVID-19 was transformative.”
…
My bold. This is a short excerpt from a REALLY long article. It will terrify you and break your heart. This virus is one mean, unpredictable m.f.
The Atlantic allows four free articles per month to non-subscribers.
From what I understand, there hasn’t been one big silver-bullet treatment, but there have been a bunch of little things that turn out to help, such as plasma donations from people who have already had the disease, administering anticoagulants, and, amazingly, something as simple as turning patients onto their stomachs. Also, now that they know more about risk factors and early signs of a severe case, they’re better at identifying which patients need to be monitored closely.
A patron who spent hours inside a bar during the Sturgis motorcycle rally in South Dakota, which ended last Sunday, has tested positive for COVID-19, health officials confirmed.
The person spent nearly six hours at One-Eyed Jack’s Saloon on Aug. 11. State officials are encouraging anyone at the bar to monitor themselves for any symptoms of the coronavirus.
The 2020 Rally drew more than 460,000 vehicles during the 10-day event, according to a count South Dakota transportation officials released Tuesday. The event was scaled down, but face coverings were not required during the event.
– Michael Klinski, Sioux Falls Argus Leader
From what I see, treatment for COVID 19 is still
- fluids to reduce the risk of dehydration
- medication to reduce a fever
- supplemental oxygen in more severe cases
- Remdesivir in severe cases (but not for people who are dying anyway)
After that, there are some details on how to handle kidney or lung failure, optimum oxygen therapy, drugs not to use, and lists of stuff with no demonstrated benefit.
New drug coming out on Fox News is Famotidine. Evidence is so poor that it hasn’t even made most “do not use” lists yet. For example, there is a small series where “some of my patients took Famatidine, and after a week or two they got better”
Yeah, it truly is one fucked up virus. I first became aware of cases like this when I read what Nick Cordero and family went through.