Michigan is dire and we just received a 3-week partial shutdown from the Governor.
High schools shut, K-8 still open(I teach in one). Many businesses and other buildings closed.
It will, I think, extend more than 3 weeks. Thanksgiving gatherings will happen and things will worsen.
Moderating
This, and other discussion of visiting old people, doesn’t really belong in the Breaking News thread. Please take this discussion to a different thread.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
I did not bring it up in this thread and you long ago forbade me from discussing it in the thread that it belongs best.
But alrightee. Yo da mod.
Washington State is back to tight restrictions for at least 4 weeks beginning Monday night:
Social, economic and cultural life in Washington will slow to a crawl at 11:59 p.m. Monday night, as Gov. Jay Inslee orders broad restrictions and shutdowns for restaurants, theaters, gyms and all indoor gatherings in an effort to slow the state’s burgeoning coronavirus epidemic.
Inslee on Sunday morning ordered restaurants and bars to shut down indoor service and to limit outdoor service to parties of five or fewer. Indoor gyms and fitness centers must also shut down. Same with movie theaters, bowling alleys and museums. Indoor gatherings with people outside your household will be prohibited unless participants have quarantined for at least a week and tested negative.
(Quick advocacy for my IMHO thread for this and similar topics: How selfish can people be before you consider them morally bad? - #21 by Roderick_Femm)
I’ll quote these as well because I think it’s important:
This is actually less about doctors quitting under the stress of patient load and more about the doctors who have their own practice who are going out of business because there aren’t enough patients and PPE to stay afloat. In some cases, covid plays a part because some medical professionals have retired because they don’t want to get sick.
54,818,004 total cases
1,324,526 dead
38,140,211 recovered
In the US:
11,367,214 total cases
251,901 dead
6,937,236 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
My Doctor has moved from private practice to some sort of group practice/billing company. I do not like the changes. Script refills are delayed, billing is delayed, the temp check thingy you are supposed to use before entering is broken (my temp was 82f) and while patients are wearing masks, none of the front desk staff are. Oh, yeah, no sneeze guard things either.
I know she had to do this to keep afloat, and I know she has been doing her best. She has taken good care of me for the last 20 years, I really don’t want to break up with her now, and I also know that if I did, things would be even suckier.
A few days ago, Austria became the second worst-hit autonomous territory in the world in terms of daily new cases per capita. (The worst was French Polynesia.) This is despite a moderate lockdown imposed by the government about a week before, and which I had covered in an earlier post here.
So on Saturday, the government announced a strict new three-week lockdown, to take effect on Tuesday, 17 November. The terms are almost the same as the original lockdown that was imposed back in March:
Following similar campaigns in Iceland and Slovakia, the government has also announced plans to give the entire population of the country (some 9 million people) coronavirus tests the weekend before Christmas. This will allow asymptomatic carriers to be identified and isolated, and hopefully check further spread of the disease.
This is nuts!
New seven-day average highs in new cases occurring on November 15, 2020
Alaska
New Hampshire
Vermont
Maine
Massachusetts (highest since April 17)
Minnesota
North Dakota
South Dakota
Montana
Washington
Oregon
Nevada
Wyoming
Indiana
Ohio
Pennsylvania
New Jersey (highest since April 4)
Delaware
Maryland
Colorado
Utah
Tennessee
Oklahoma
Alabama
Puerto Rico
Idaho, Kentucky, Arkansas, North Carolina, and West Virginia hit new highs on Nov 14
So over the weekend over half the states (and one territory) reached new highs. I’m especially surprised at New Jersey and Massachusetts, which had been doing very well for quite a while. The current surge has them reaching highs they haven’t experienced since the spring, and they both appear to still be rising exponentially, and will undoubtedly go higher still.
Moderna is releasing the results of its vaccine: 94.5% effective against the virus. And it doesn’t need a super-cold freezer like Pfizer’s does.
Outstanding news.
Key points:
In response to Rivers’ allegations, University Medical Center told local station KVIA-TV in a statement that although it sympathizes with the medical professional, it “cannot fully verify the events expressed.”
“We empathize and sympathize with the difficult, physical and emotional toll that this pandemic takes on thousands of healthcare workers here and throughout our country,” the statement read.
Reading between the lines, I think it’s safe to assume the nurse is telling the truth and the hospital knows it.
My sister-in-law’s brother is a retired doctor who come out of retirement to help out in small city hospital in Nebraska because there wasn’t enough staff there due to positive tests. Hopefully he doesn’t get infected.
But nothing to worry about, it’s fine.
It’s just a hard, hard thing to control.
GENEVA (AP) — The World Health Organization has recorded 65 cases of the coronavirus among staff based at its headquarters, including at least one cluster of infections, an internal email obtained by The Associated Press shows, despite the agency’s past assertions that there has been no transmission at the Geneva site.
The revelation comes amid a surge of cases in Europe, host country Switzerland, and the city of Geneva, in particular, and the email said about half of the infections were in people who had been working from home. But 32 were in staff who had been working on premises at the headquarters building, indicating that the health agency’s strict hygiene, screening and other prevention measures were not sufficient to spare it from the pandemic.
The Moderna vaccine is theoretically the same as the Pfizer vaccine – both use a lipid-encapsulated bit of RNA to prompt some of your cells to produce a slightly damaged “spike protein”. (source: MIT’s class on covid, last week’s lecture, and several news articles about the Pfizer vaccine.) So the odds were they would have similar effectiveness – and it appears they do.
This is excellent news – since they are so similar, it’s sort of like a larger, meta study.
Agreed that it’s excellent news. teelabrown is correct, though, that Moderna’s vaccine has a significant advantage over Pfizer’s:
Pfizer’s vaccine has to be kept at minus 75 degrees Celsius — or about minus 103 degrees Fahrenheit. No other vaccine in the US needs to be kept that cold, and doctors’ offices and pharmacies do not have freezers that go that low.
Moderna’s vaccine can be kept at minus 20 degrees Celsius, which is about minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit. Other vaccines, such as the one against chickenpox, need to be kept at that temperature.
Sincere question: what’s the difference between the two vaccines that one requires a drastically lower storage temperature?
I can’t imagine Pfizer’s would be in widespread use since it requires equipment few facilities have and is no more effective than Moderna’s.