This isn’t letting up, either. It sounds completely bonkers in Shanghai, and some people are beginning to protest.
For most residents, the rules are clear: No one can leave their home. Only essential workers are exempted. Whatever you need must be brought to you.
Stuck at home, people have turned to food delivery companies to buy groceries — a delivery person is considered an “essential worker” — but the apps have struggled to keep up with a torrent of traffic. Ordering meals online is common in Shanghai, but companies short of staff due to the lockdowns and covid outbreak have been overwhelmed.
As difficult as being trapped at home has been for all these millions of people, testing positive for covid is even worse.
Since April 1, nearly 250,000 people have tested positive, and even though the vast majority have no symptoms, they are still required to decamp from their homes to isolation facilities — which are not exactly welcoming. The National Exhibition and Convention Center has been converted to hold 50,000 beds, and thousands more have been erected throughout the city. Patients have reported rough conditions — no showers, portable bathrooms overflowing with feces and fights for food.
As with prior lockdowns in China, the undivided attention given to covid has also stripped resources from other pressing medical needs. Harrowing stories have surfaced of the absence of timely care leading to life-threatening illness and even death.
I’m glad she hasn’t had close contact with the President or First Lady, but I’m equally sad that she hasn’t had close contact with the President or First Lady.
Dr. Fauci is riding the line with recent comments to PBS that many headlines today are truncating to “Fauci declares pandemic over”. I do think his overall optimism is in itself good news, especially in consideration of new seroprevalence information released in recent days (mentioned early in link and directly linked in the next post of this thread).
Judy Woodruff:
Dr. Fauci, let me broaden this out and ask you: Here we are. It’s the end of April. It’s the spring of 2022. How close are we to the end of this pandemic?
Dr. Anthony Fauci:
Well, that’s an unanswerable question, for the following reason. And I don’t want to be evasive about it, but let me tell you why I’m giving you that answer, Judy.
We are certainly right now in this country out of the pandemic phase. Namely, we don’t have 900,000 new infections a day and tens and tens and tens of thousands of hospitalizations and thousands of deaths. We are at a low level right now.
So, if you’re saying, are we out of the pandemic phase in this country, we are. What we hope to do, I don’t believe — and I have spoken about this widely — we’re not going to eradicate this virus. If we can keep that level very low, and intermittently vaccinate people — and I don’t know how often that would have to be, Judy.
That might be every year, that might be longer, in order to keep that level low. But, right now, we are not in the pandemic phase in this country. Pandemic means a widespread, throughout the world, infection that spreads rapidly among people.
So, if you look at the global situation, there’s no doubt this pandemic is still ongoing.
Sixty percent of Americans, including 75 percent of children, had been infected with the coronavirus by February , federal health officials reported on Tuesday — another remarkable milestone in a pandemic that continues to confound expectations.
While the numbers came as a shock to many Americans, some scientists said they had expected the figures to be even higher, given the contagious variants that have marched through the nation over the past two years.
There may be good news in the data, some experts said. A gain in population-wide immunity may offer at least a partial bulwark against future waves. And the trend may explain why the surge that is now roaring through China and many countries in Europe has been muted in the United States.
It’s just incredible to me that for two years we can watch case rates go up and down repeatedly, then see the highest daily infection numbers yet in January, in April see rates that are increasing across the nation once again, and yet say with any kind of confidence “this is no longer a pandemic”. I just don’t understand that.
Here’s exactly what he said. It would probably be better if Fauci never said another word, as ANYTHING he says is certain to be misquoted and/or misunderstood.
Fauci says ‘pandemic phase’ is over
When asked about the new infection numbers, Dr. Anthony Fauci said in a television interview yesterday that he “wasn’t terribly surprised.”
Fauci said that infection and hospitalization rates had plummeted and that intermittent boosters would help keep infection rates low.
“We’re not going to eradicate this virus,” he told “PBS NewsHour.”
“But, right now, we are not in the pandemic phase in this country.”
In an interview with The Washington Post, Fauci cautioned that the global pandemic was continuing.
“The world is still in a pandemic. There’s no doubt about that,” Fauci said. “Don’t anybody get any misinterpretation of that. We are still experiencing a pandemic.”
…
My emphasis.
Headlines are truncating his remarks or just plain misquoting him.
The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) board just reinstated the mask mandate aboard their trains and in their stations, through July 18. They are the only transit system in the area to do so.