The border isn't the issue. Those saying it is are being political and distorting facts. Lack of vaccinations and mask usage is the issue. Florida, Mississippi, Missouri and Louisiana are not border states. Texas is a border state, but it also has low vaccinations and minimal use of masks. High infection rates are throughout the state and not just the border. If the border was the issue we would see New Mexico and Arizona in bad shape. Currently those aren't states in trouble. Those blaming the border for the Covid problems are just showing their racist tendencies.

Quote
daspyknows
The border isn't the issue. Those saying it is are being political and distorting facts. Lack of vaccinations and mask usage is the issue. Florida, Mississippi, Missouri and Louisiana are not border states. Texas is a border state, but it also has low vaccinations and minimal use of masks. High infection rates are throughout the state and not just the border. If the border was the issue we would see New Mexico and Arizona in bad shape. Currently those aren't states in trouble. Those blaming the border for the Covid problems are just showing their racist tendencies.

Yeah I've heard this come up as the excuse and it's pathetic. But I agree with one thing he said which was COVID was here to stay. Now we just have to learn to manage to live with it. Eventually all the antivaxxers will get it and either become immune or...well you know the other outcome.

Hopefully there won't be too many really bad variants before we get to that point, and new types of vaccines.

MSNBC right now...in Orlando Florida residents asked to conserve water...BECAUSE they need it to convert to medical grade oxygen for COVID patients.

Holy crap!

The people taking this are horse's arses. Just stoopid. Maybe it works when mixed with hydrochroquine and Clorox bleach. Volunteers?

Health officials warn people not to treat COVID-19 with a drug meant for livestock

Ivermectin, an anti-parasitic drug commonly used for livestock, should not be taken to treat or prevent COVID-19, the Food and Drug Administration said Saturday.

The warning came a day after the Mississippi State Department of Health issued a similar statement in response to reports that an increasing number of people in Mississippi were using the drug to prevent a COVID-19 infection.

Some studies last year spurred use of the drug against COVID-19, especially in Latin America, and Fox News has promoted some of those studies’ findings on air.

But the National Institutes of Health said in February that most of the studies related to Ivermectin and the coronavirus “had incomplete information and significant methodological limitations,” including small sample sizes and study outcome measures that were often unclear.

In Mississippi, where only 37% of the population is fully vaccinated, more than two-thirds of recent calls placed to the state’s poison control center were related to “ingestion of livestock or animal formulations of Ivermectin purchased at livestock supply centers,” the state department of health said in a news release.

Of those who called about ingesting Ivermectin, 85% had mild symptoms and one person was told to “seek further evaluation” because of the large amount they were reported to have taken, the state’s health department said.

Ivermectin, which is also formulated for use by people to treat parasitic worms, had been controversially promoted as a potential COVID-19 treatment earlier in the pandemic, but recent studies found that the drug’s efficacy against the coronavirus is thin, and the FDA has not approved the drug for COVID-19 treatment.

On Twitter, the FDA was more declarative in its warning.

“You are not a horse,” the agency said. “You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.”

The FDA said it has received multiple reports, including some in Louisiana, of people who have “required medical support and been hospitalized after self-medicating with Ivermectin intended for horses.”

“Taking large doses of this drug is dangerous and can cause serious harm,” the FDA said.

The Mississippi State Department of Health alerted its residents that “animal drugs are highly concentrated for large animals and can be highly toxic in humans.”

Some of the symptoms associated with Ivermectin toxicity include rash, nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, neurological disorders and potentially severe hepatitis that could require hospitalization, Mississippi health officials said.

Mississippi, which has seen a surge in cases recently, reported 5,048 cases Friday. Hospitalization and death rates have also been rising.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

US hospitalizations of people under 50 at highest levels since start of pandemic
Largest increases among those in their 30s and under 18 as US urges world leaders not to attend UN meeting in person

"Many overwhelmed hospitals, with no beds to offer, are putting critically ill Covid-19 patients on planes,
helicopters and ambulances and sending them hundreds of miles to far-flung states for treatment".


Corona

Hospitalizations of people under the age of 50 with Covid-19 are now at the highest levels seen in the US since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, the latest government data shows. The largest increases in hospitalizations was among those in their 30s and the under-18s, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The previous peak in coronavirus patients under 50 needing to be hospitalized was in January this year. The vast majority of Americans being hospitalized are unvaccinated and rates of people taking the vaccine decline with age – the youngest eligible Americans also tend to be the least vaccinated. Children under 12 are not yet eligible to get the shots. Hospitalizations could reach a new height across all ages within a month if the latest surge of the disease, with infections currently being driven by the Delta variant, is not curbed, the CDC noted.

Just over half of Americans are fully vaccinated and at least 70% have had one shot at this point, and Biden administration leaders on Wednesday again urged people to get the shot “This remains a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” the White House pandemic response coordinator, Jeff Zients, said. Many overwhelmed hospitals, with no beds to offer, are putting critically ill Covid-19 patients on planes, helicopters and ambulances and sending them hundreds of miles to far-flung states for treatment. The surge in the Delta variant of the virus, combined with low vaccination rates, has pushed hospitals to the brink in many states and resulted in a desperate scramble to find beds for patients. The issue is that large hospitals in urban areas were already running short of space and staff with non-Covid procedures like cancer biopsies and hip replacements when the summer surge started. That means they have very few free beds to offer to patients from small rural hospitals without intensive care units (ICUs) or from medical centers in virus hotspots. “Just imagine not having the support of your family near, to have that kind of anxiety if you have someone grow acutely ill,” said Steve Edwards, CEO of CoxHealth, whose hospital in Springfield, Missouri, is treating patients from as far away as Alabama.

Hospitals across the US had more than 75,000 coronavirus patients as of last week, a dramatic increase from a few weeks ago but still well below the winter surge records. However, Florida, Arkansas, Oregon, Hawaii, Louisiana and Mississippi all have set pandemic records for Covid hospitalizations in recent weeks. Meanwhile, the US is urging the more than 150 countries planning to send their leaders or government ministers to New York next month to speak in person at the UN’s annual general assembly meeting to consider giving a video address instead so it wouldn’t become “a super-spreader event”. A note from the US mission to the UN, obtained on Wednesday by the Associated Press, sent to the 192 other UN member nations, also called for all other UN-hosted meetings and side events to be virtual. It noted that the meetings draw travelers to New York and will “needlessly increase risk to our community, New Yorkers and the other travelers” and high-level gatherings were expected to discuss the climate crisis, Covid vaccines, food systems, energy and the 20th anniversary of the UN world conference against racism. The US said the pandemic “continues to pose a significant health risk around the world”. The general assembly brings much of the east side of midtown Manhattan to a halt, with heavy security and long parades of vehicles ferrying world leaders and their entourages between meetings, accommodations, restaurants and consulates. All counties in New York City are currently rated as having “the highest level of community transmission” of coronavirus, the US note said. Further south, in Florida, one of the current centers of the surge of the Delta variant, Hillsborough and Miami-Dade counties became the third and fourth school districts in Florida to adopt stricter mask mandates on Wednesday, a day after school boards in Broward and Alachua counties faced threats of severe penalties for defying the ban on mask mandates issued by the Republican governor, Ron DeSantis.

_____________________________________________________________
Rip this joint, gonna save your soul, round and round and round we go......

Beating Back Delta Will Take Extra Covid Shot for Privileged Few

Coronavirus

The roll out of a third dose of Covid vaccine has sparked debate on ethical and political grounds, since a large swath of the human population is yet to receive any inoculation. But the case for boosters on scientific grounds is building. The reason is delta. The most-infectious coronavirus variant to emerge so far is in a race with the human immune system, and there’s mounting evidence that delta is winning -- at least initially. Fully vaccinated individuals infected with the variant have peak virus levels in the upper airways as high as those lacking immunity, a large study from the U.K. showed last week. That suggests people with delta-induced breakthrough infections also may be capable of transmitting the virus, frustrating efforts to curb the Covid pandemic.

Waning antibody levels in some highly vaccinated populations such as Israel have prompted calls to offer boosters to blunt fresh waves of hospitalizations. “The science is the boosters work, and they will definitely help,” said Shane Crotty, a virologist and professor at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology’s Center for Infectious Disease and Vaccine Research in California. In fully vaccinated, healthy adults, booster shots from Moderna Inc. as well as Pfizer Inc. and its partner BioNTech SE cause antibodies to rebound to peak levels, if not well beyond, Crotty said in a Zoom interview Friday. Those antibodies are also likely to be more durable and adept at fighting a wider range of SARS-CoV-2 strains, he said. That’s especially helpful in fighting delta. Researchers in China found the strain is detectable in patients four days after picking up the virus -- two days earlier than was previously observed -- indicating the strain makes individuals infectious sooner.

People infected with delta were also found to have significantly higher amounts of virus in their upper airways compared with infections caused by other strains. “It’s inherently tougher to stop with antibodies because there’s more of it and it’s a tougher challenge for the immune system,” Crotty said. Bolstering antibody levels with an extra dose of vaccine may enable the immune system to swiftly block delta on its arrival in the nose and throat, preventing the coronavirus from not only infecting cells and causing illness, but also stopping it from spreading, he said. A slower antibody response, on the other hand, may increase infectiousness and worsen symptoms. “It’s a race between the virus and your immune system,” Crotty said. The faster the virus replicates, the less time antibodies have to block an infection. Still, even when a delayed antibody response does lead to infection, immunity generated by either vaccination or a natural infection is usually enough to prevent it causing severe illness in an otherwise healthy person, he said. Most pediatric vaccine regimens are administered over three shots, Crotty said. “A lot of that is about the mechanics of immune memory generation -- that it’s frequently taken three exposures to get that,” he said.

Delta Concern

Three studies published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week showed that although delta may be hastening a decline in the effectiveness of the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech shots at preventing SARS-CoV-2 infections, including among nursing home residents, the vaccines remained a reliable shield against hospitalization over a six-month period. Delta can cause breakthrough infections and illness in people with lower antibody levels, said Andrew Pekosz, a professor of molecular microbiology at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. “The good news is that vaccine efficacy against severe disease is still maintained,” he said. In addition, fully immunized people infected with delta may be infectious for a shorter period compared with individuals lacking immunity, reducing their propensity to transmit the virus, Pekosz said. It’s possible the infectiousness of vaccinated individuals could be further reduced with third shots using a different inoculation, delivery via a nasal spray, or using smaller amounts of the same vaccine, he said. “We are still working out the mechanics of how best to use these vaccines for maximum protection,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. “Our challenge is going to be how to continue to use these vaccines to maximize the most important aspect of public health: preventing infections.” Curbing spread is also key to preventing the emergence of variants even more dangerous than delta, he said.

Vaccine Equity

That goal must be sought globally with equity and solidarity, Osterholm said. “It’s a worldwide epidemic that will continue until you take care of it around the world,” he said. “From a humanitarian standpoint, this is obviously critical.” In the U.S., unvaccinated people are now swamping medical institutions in large swaths of the country, Johns Hopkins’ Pekosz said. “Vaccination would keep people out of the hospital, and that is the most important thing that vaccinations can do.” La Jolla’s Crotty estimates that more than 90% of SARS-CoV-2 transmission is from unvaccinated people. “In the U.S., we’ve got so many of those,” he said. “If you have two doses of vaccine, it’s way more valuable for those two doses to go to an unvaccinated person than people getting boosters if you want to talk about transmission,” Crotty said. “But if you can’t convince the people to get the damn things and somebody else wants them now, will it actually help the other person? Yeah, it will help them.”

_____________________________________________________________
Rip this joint, gonna save your soul, round and round and round we go......

Phil Valentine, a radio host who scoffed at Covid, then urged his followers to get vaccinated, dies.

By Traci Carl
Aug. 21, 2021

[www.nytimes.com]

Quote
bye bye johnny
Phil Valentine, a radio host who scoffed at Covid, then urged his followers to get vaccinated, dies.

By Traci Carl
Aug. 21, 2021

[www.nytimes.com]

stupidity and ignorance can be deadly

Wow...and another COVID denier down:

Ex-Newsmax Host Who Attacked ‘Lying Freak’ Dr. Fauci Over ‘Scamdemic’ Has Died Of COVID

Get vaccinated, Dick Farrel told friends before he died.


[www.huffpost.com]

Quote
daspyknows
The people taking this are horse's arses. Just stoopid. Maybe it works when mixed with hydrochroquine and Clorox bleach. Volunteers?

Health officials warn people not to treat COVID-19 with a drug meant for livestock

Ivermectin, an anti-parasitic drug commonly used for livestock, should not be taken to treat or prevent COVID-19, the Food and Drug Administration said Saturday.

The warning came a day after the Mississippi State Department of Health issued a similar statement in response to reports that an increasing number of people in Mississippi were using the drug to prevent a COVID-19 infection.

Some studies last year spurred use of the drug against COVID-19, especially in Latin America, and Fox News has promoted some of those studies’ findings on air.

But the National Institutes of Health said in February that most of the studies related to Ivermectin and the coronavirus “had incomplete information and significant methodological limitations,” including small sample sizes and study outcome measures that were often unclear.

In Mississippi, where only 37% of the population is fully vaccinated, more than two-thirds of recent calls placed to the state’s poison control center were related to “ingestion of livestock or animal formulations of Ivermectin purchased at livestock supply centers,” the state department of health said in a news release.

Of those who called about ingesting Ivermectin, 85% had mild symptoms and one person was told to “seek further evaluation” because of the large amount they were reported to have taken, the state’s health department said.

Ivermectin, which is also formulated for use by people to treat parasitic worms, had been controversially promoted as a potential COVID-19 treatment earlier in the pandemic, but recent studies found that the drug’s efficacy against the coronavirus is thin, and the FDA has not approved the drug for COVID-19 treatment.

On Twitter, the FDA was more declarative in its warning.

“You are not a horse,” the agency said. “You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.”

The FDA said it has received multiple reports, including some in Louisiana, of people who have “required medical support and been hospitalized after self-medicating with Ivermectin intended for horses.”

“Taking large doses of this drug is dangerous and can cause serious harm,” the FDA said.

The Mississippi State Department of Health alerted its residents that “animal drugs are highly concentrated for large animals and can be highly toxic in humans.”

Some of the symptoms associated with Ivermectin toxicity include rash, nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, neurological disorders and potentially severe hepatitis that could require hospitalization, Mississippi health officials said.

Mississippi, which has seen a surge in cases recently, reported 5,048 cases Friday. Hospitalization and death rates have also been rising.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

It's MISSISSIPPI, where tomorrow is always 1963.

You ain't gon done tell me how ta live mah lieff. Got the heavy trank, gon git this vieruss kilt.

In India, the number of infected people is now down to the 30,000 mark per day.
The number of people who have received two doses of vaccine is still about 10% of the population.
In spite of this, why has the number of infected people dropped so dramatically?

Dr. Amit, a member of the Indian government's expert panel, is saying,
"The overall antibody prevalence rate in India is 70%.
This means that India has acquired 'herd immunity'. This is one of the reasons for the sharp decline in cases."

It is reported that 400,000 people have died in India so far. However, the actual death toll is unknown. It is likely that there were more deaths.
It is very likely that the number was much higher than reported.
In fact, a U.S. research institute has said that the death toll from the coronavirus in India is likely to range from 3.4 million to 4.9 million, about ten times the official figure.

I have to say that the cost of acquiring herd immunity is so high.

Protesters outside the local Government Center/Courthouse today and yesterday waving flags, banners, and signs protesting various mandates, and demanding personal freedom, etc.
And then there was this story fromout in Newhall about 45 miles east from where I live...it's like the wild west out here.

Car drives through Newhall COVID vaccine clinic, strikes worker

Covid

A car drove through a Newhall vaccine clinic Saturday, knocking over displays and injuring a worker, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
The car began knocking over signs and cones at the vaccine clinic in the 22900 block of Market Street shortly after 4:30 p.m., according to the Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff’s Station.
The vehicle, believed to be a dark gray sedan, also intentionally struck a clinic worker using the car’s side mirror, police said. The clinic worker suffered minor injuries and was not transported to the hospital.
Deputies have not yet determined a specific motive or established any verbal exchanges between the driver of the car and the clinic workers. The driver fled the scene after striking the worker, according to police.
The investigation is ongoing, and police are treating it as a case of assault with a deadly weapon.

_____________________________________________________________
Rip this joint, gonna save your soul, round and round and round we go......

Black Market for Fake COVID-19 Vaccination Cards Flourishing

FAKE

People hoping to get around pandemic restrictions related to vaccination status are having an easy time securing fake cards, experts say.

As the COVID-19 delta variant spreads and the pandemic shows no signs of slowing down, experts say that people across the world are now having an easier time getting around restrictions related to vaccination status – by purchasing fake vaccine cards online. "It's a dire problem, and it's only increasing," says Ekram Ahmed, a spokesman for Check Point Software Technologies, a cybersecurity company based in California and Israel. Recent research published by Ahmed's company shows the progression of the black market for these fraudulent COVID-19 vaccination cards. Earlier this year, fake certificates were being sold mainly on the dark web for $250 on average, according to a previous report from Check Point. But Ahmed notes in an interview that because people need to be "somewhat tech-savvy" to access services on the dark net, the audience wasn't "for everyone" at the time. The market has since shifted. Check Point research released earlier this month shows that fake cards are now being sold through messaging apps such as Telegram – which Ahmed notes is sourced mainly from Russia – and WhatsApp for anywhere between $100 and $120. The volume of online groups advertising the services has multiplied since early 2021, according to the report. "The affordability has completely changed," Ahmed adds.

The market is burgeoning months after international officials warned the world about possible scams related to the vaccines. Interpol in December 2020 issued a global alert to law enforcement agencies in its 194 member countries "warning them to prepare for organized crime networks targeting COVID-19 vaccines, both physically and online." The FBI put out its own alert specifically about fake vaccination cards in late March, according to The Pew Charitable Trusts' Stateline. Fake vaccination certificates are not the only types of forgeries available. An Interpol spokesperson said in an email that some member countries "are seeing an increasing number of people attempting to travel with fake negative COVID test results." Examples were provided out of Africa, Europe and Thailand. "We are seeing a direct correlation between countries requiring negative COVID tests and increased criminal activity in producing fakes and forgeries," said the spokesperson, who spoke on condition of not being identified. Similarly, Ahmed says the proliferation of the certificates could be tied to the increasing number of governments who have started mandating COVID-19 vaccination in order to access goods or services. He says online advertisements use language "specifically for people who do not want to take the vaccine."

In the United States, 45 state attorneys general recently joined together to call on Twitter, Shopify and eBay to stop the sale of false and stolen vaccine cards, according to The New York Times. That pressure led these larger platforms to start blacklisting certain keywords, according to Saoud Khalifah, the founder and CEO of Fakespot, a company that uses artificial intelligence to detect fraudulent product reviews and third-party sellers online. Meanwhile, colleges and universities in the U.S. are growing concerned about how easy it is becoming for students to cheat the system related to vaccine mandates, The Associated Press reported. Khalifah says that in July, when music festivals such as Lollapalooza returned and students across the country started preparing to go back to school, online stores selling fake vaccination cards appeared in bigger numbers. "The problem is that there's a demand for these services, otherwise they wouldn't be appearing," he says. "They are targeting specific user bases, because when you look at the language that these websites are using, they are actually mentioning college students, they are actually talking about, 'If you want to travel, but you don't want to get vaccinated, what do you do? You buy this service from us.'" Ahmed notes, however, that the fake vaccination cards are not only an issue in America. Rather, "it's very ubiquitous," he says. "I can see cards or fake (vaccine) passes or fake (vaccine certificates) for nearly every country on the planet," Ahmed says, while adding that the "heat of action is coming from Europe." Khalifah says websites generally support fake vaccination proof for 20-30 countries – usually the more populous ones. There have also been specific reports of scams out of China, Pakistan and Russia, according to Sharona Hoffman, a professor and the co-director of the Law-Medicine Center at Case Western Reserve University. But Hoffman pinpoints the market for these scams in the U.S. compared to other countries. "In this country, we may have even more resistance to vaccines than elsewhere," she says. "So it's fertile ground because it's become so politicized here."

With the U.S. and many other countries continuing to mainly use paper vaccination cards that Ahmed notes are "so easy to copy," it's possible that the black market for fake cards will keep growing. But one concerning wrinkle, according to Khalifah, is that scammers are now selling – for a higher price – the ability to enter someone into government or private databases to "prove" inoculation. "It's kind of bringing this element of hacking to the public, which we've never seen before," he adds. With more vaccine mandates being "just right around the corner," according to Ahmed, there might not be an end in sight for these scams. "The more pressure that people feel in terms of taking the vaccine, the more the black market, I expect, to proliferate and transact at a higher volume," he says. "And so it's sort of like there's this seesaw effect kind of going on … I just expect the problem to get worse."

_____________________________________________________________
Rip this joint, gonna save your soul, round and round and round we go......

Quote
Toru A
In India, the number of infected people is now down to the 30,000 mark per day.
The number of people who have received two doses of vaccine is still about 10% of the population.
In spite of this, why has the number of infected people dropped so dramatically?

Dr. Amit, a member of the Indian government's expert panel, is saying,
"The overall antibody prevalence rate in India is 70%.
This means that India has acquired 'herd immunity'. This is one of the reasons for the sharp decline in cases."

It is reported that 400,000 people have died in India so far. However, the actual death toll is unknown. It is likely that there were more deaths.
It is very likely that the number was much higher than reported.
In fact, a U.S. research institute has said that the death toll from the coronavirus in India is likely to range from 3.4 million to 4.9 million, about ten times the official figure.

I have to say that the cost of acquiring herd immunity is so high.

Very sad outcome.

The interesting part is that India is sometimes pointed to as a 'success story' insofar as the Delta variant has an early 'peak' and then peters out.

We'll never know the actual number of deaths in that country, plus the stats for those suffering a 'long COVID'.

UK is another country that was afflicted early on with Delta variant, and held out as success story but they're currently still at over 30000 cases per day.

That's a lot of cases for it's population size.

Quote
MAF
Wembley Euro 2020 final was a covid ‘superspreader’

Crazy days...even with various precautions in place, things can get "out of control"...

_____________________________________________________________
Rip this joint, gonna save your soul, round and round and round we go......

This will definitely move the needle.
Many employers have been waiting on this to enact mandates.

The Pentagon has already announced they will require vaccines in the military as a result.
May be what the airlines have been waiting on for mandates as well.

FDA NEWS RELEASE

FDA Approves First COVID-19 Vaccine
Approval Signifies Key Achievement for Public Health

Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first COVID-19 vaccine. The vaccine has been known as the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, and will now be marketed as Comirnaty (koe-mir’-na-tee), for the prevention of COVID-19 disease in individuals 16 years of age and older. The vaccine also continues to be available under emergency use authorization (EUA), including for individuals 12 through 15 years of age and for the administration of a third dose in certain immunocompromised individuals.

“The FDA’s approval of this vaccine is a milestone as we continue to battle the COVID-19 pandemic. While this and other vaccines have met the FDA’s rigorous, scientific standards for emergency use authorization, as the first FDA-approved COVID-19 vaccine, the public can be very confident that this vaccine meets the high standards for safety, effectiveness, and manufacturing quality the FDA requires of an approved product,” said Acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock, M.D. “While millions of people have already safely received COVID-19 vaccines, we recognize that for some, the FDA approval of a vaccine may now instill additional confidence to get vaccinated. Today’s milestone puts us one step closer to altering the course of this pandemic in the U.S.”
[www.fda.gov]

In British Columbia, our provincial government is pushing back Stage 4 opening from Sep. 7...though no official date for review at this point. I expect they'll review it month by month, so Oct. 7 maybe.

In other news, we'll be the second province to be issuing vaccine passports (after Quebec), which will be required in all 'non-essential' businesses ie restaurants, bars, events...more details this afternoon.

We currently have just under 84% with first vax, just over 75% with both. (over 12 years of age).

Cases have been on a steady rise since July and now hospitalizations and ICU are starting to increase as well. Mostly in one or two regions of the province, with traditionally lower vaccination rates.

Maybe a glimmer if good news? Though it's not clear how this will affect to the rest of the country:

Delta Has Peaked in the South?

There is still the possibility of a nightmarish mutant strain.
According to Professor Morse, a former professor of virology at Rockefeller University, there is a chance that the virus could evolve toward a more severe and highly infectious form,
as can be seen in the infectivity of the delta mutant strain.

Virologists agree that the best way to control such a possibility is through vaccination.
Professor Racaniello of Columbia University says
"The key is to control the infection.
If 80 percent of the population were vaccinated,
the number of infections would be greatly reduced and the number of mutated strains would be reduced.
But that's not an easy number."

According to "Our World in Data," a website run by researchers at the University of Oxford, only 24% of the world's population is currently fully vaccinated.
Most of this is concentrated in wealthy countries, with only 1.3% of the population in low-income countries having received at least one dose.

Quote
kovach
Maybe a glimmer if good news? Though it's not clear how this will affect to the rest of the country:

Delta Has Peaked in the South?

He also said this just ten days ago:

“This is a big country and the delta wave is going to sweep across the country in a regionalized fashion.
By September, hopefully you’ll see the other side of that curve in the South very clearly, but cases will be picking up in the Northeast, the Great Lakes region, maybe the Pacific Northwest.”

---------------------------------------------------

Meanwhile in Nashville:

Nearly 400 Metro Nashville Public Schools students tested positive for COVID-19 last week

Tennessee

After just nine days of school, more than 3,000 Metro Nashville Public Schools students and staff are in quarantine or isolating due to COVID-19
From Aug. 16 to Aug. 22 — the district’s first full week of the new school year — 395 students were confirmed positive for COVID-19, according to Metro Schools' data.
During the same time frame, 67 staff members were confirmed positive. As of Monday, 2,879 students are quarantined or isolated and 143 staff members. The district has about 80,000 students.
This is nearly triple the number of students and staff in quarantine after just the first four days of school. The district reported 980 students and 95 staff were in quarantine or isolating as of Aug. 16.

_____________________________________________________________
Rip this joint, gonna save your soul, round and round and round we go......

[/quote]

What worries me about this is there are no new variants the last 8 months. I would expect them to be popping up like Atlantic hurricanes.

Quote
daspyknows

What worries me about this is there are no new variants the last 8 months. I would expect them to be popping up like Atlantic hurricanes.[/quote]

Fair point. I think there probably are several that have come up but haven't been as virulent so were subsumed by the existing "lot of latins".

That doesn't mean though there isn't one or a few right now that are just taking hold and so far unnoticed because too early. This fall I think we'll know better whether this is going to be an ongoing problem next year or whether we can finally wind things down.

As I'm typing this though I'm realizing that most of the lower income countries barely have anyone vaxxed yet. This isn't going away any time soon.

Some people never learn. Sturgis was the stupid spreader event that precipitated the summer wave last year. I guess this must be a southern border problem too.

South Dakota Leads U.S. in Largest COVID Case Increase, With 312 Percent Rise in 14 Days

[www.newsweek.com]

South Dakota has seen a 312 percent increase in COVID-19 cases over the past two weeks, according to The New York Times COVID tracker, nearly double the rate of the second most infectious state, West Virginia.

The state averages 221 new cases a day and 118 hospitalizations. Forty-eight percent of people are vaccinated in the state which has declined to implement indoor mask mandates.

South Dakota's rising rates come just over a week after the state concluded it's 10-day Sturgis Motorcycle Rally that attracted an estimated 525,000 people. The event featured concerts, parties, bike shows, and bar crawls and rakes in an estimated $800 million for the state. Last year's rally was called a "super spreader event" and resulted in an almost 200 percent uptick in the South Dakota's two-week case average.

Despite the case surge, Republican Governor Kristi Noem told the Associated Press she does not plan to ramp up messaging encouraging vaccination. When asked about issuing mask mandates, Noem told the AP such actions go beyond what she sees as the governor's scope of power.

"Any other governor that took a stronger mitigation measure, they broke their oath to the Constitution," she told the AP. "Every governor that closed a business could be sued for the taking of that business."

Some see Noem as a potential candidate for the GOP's 2024 presidential nomination if former President Donald Trump declines to run. While she told the AP she's not currently looking toward anything beyond the governorship, she's rallied crowds with her anti-regulatory messaging at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Iowa and gained national attention for her hands-off handling of the pandemic.

The state's drop-off in cases following the 2020 Sturgis Rally surge has been touted by Noem as a success. However, that situation and her anti-regulatory messaging has not stopped her from completely shunning vaccination efforts. In March, Noem released a video crediting Trump for leading development of the vaccine, saying there would be no "heavy hand" government mandating but that state would instead "trust our people to do the right thing."

Since this video though, Noem has double-downed on her hands off approach. Encouraging vaccination continues to prove unpopular with segments of the Republican party, with Trump being booed at a recent Alabama rally for encouraging his supporters to get the shot.

Noem believes her messaging around vaccination has been sufficient, telling the AP that any more announcements could read "a saturation level where people start to tune you out."

National Geographic:

How does COVID-19 affect the brain? A troubling picture emerges.

Researchers find that people who only suffered mild infections can be plagued with life-altering and sometimes debilitating cognitive deficits.

Coronavirus

Hannah Davis contracted COVID-19 in March 2020, the early days of the pandemic. At the time, the New Yorker was a healthy, 32-year-old freelance data scientist and artist. But unlike many people who come down with the disease, Davis’s first sign of infection wasn’t a dry cough or fever. Her first symptom was that she couldn’t read a text message from a friend. She thought she was just tired, but the fuzziness she felt didn’t go away after a full night’s sleep. More neurological issues followed. She developed sudden and severe headaches. Her attention span suffered. She couldn’t watch TV or play video games. She had trouble concentrating on everyday tasks like cooking. She’d leave a pot on the stove and forget about it until she smelled food burning. She failed to look both ways while crossing the street, narrowly missing traffic. She’d never had any of these issues before COVID-19. Davis is among a large portion of COVID-19 patients—possibly as high as 30 percent, according an estimate from the National Institutes of Health—who suffer some type of neurological or psychiatric symptoms. Even more troubling is that for many of these individuals, like Davis, these cognitive issues can linger for weeks or months after the initial infection.

Last year, dozens of hospitals and healthcare systems across the country opened post-COVID clinics to help patients who had been admitted to intensive care units with severe COVID-19. But as the pandemic has dragged on, those clinics have filled with people who were never hospitalized but suffer lingering symptoms, including brain fog and other cognitive issues. “The expectation was that all these people in the ICU were going to have really long protracted recovery periods,” says Walter Koroshetz, director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, part of the National Institutes of Health. “The big surprise was the people who never required hospitalization that are having persistent trouble.” Koroshetz is co-leading a study at NIH to understand why some COVID-19 patients recover faster than others and to learn the biological reasons why others don’t get well even months later. A picture is starting to emerge of how COVID-19 causes these cognitive issues. What’s less clear is how many people will eventually recover and how many will be left with devastating long-term effects. A year and a half later, Davis can only work a few hours a day because of lingering brain fog, short-term memory loss, and other cognitive issues. She’s seen a dozen or so medical specialists and has been diagnosed with post-viral dysautonomia, a nervous system disorder that causes dizziness, rapid heartbeat, and fast breathing when rising from sitting or lying down. It’s sometimes treated with fludrocortisone, a corticosteroid, or midodrine, a blood pressure drug. “I’ve never experienced anything like this in my life,” Davis says. “Your body just it feels like it's breaking down. You lose your sense of self.”

The Great British Intelligence Test

Before the pandemic began, cognitive neuroscientist Adam Hampshire and his colleagues at Imperial College London were planning a large, nationwide survey called the Great British Intelligence Test. Their goal: to understand how cognitive ability varies among the population and how factors like age, alcohol consumption, or occupation might affect cognition. The test, which is anonymous and takes about a half hour to complete, involves a questionnaire and exercises to measure planning and reasoning skills, working memory, and attention span. With the help of the BBC, the team launched the survey in January 2020. As the pandemic began to unfold in the U.K., Hampshire and his colleagues realized they had a unique opportunity to capture cognitive data on both coronavirus patients and healthy people. In May 2020, they updated the test to include questions about experiences with COVID-19. Out of more than 81,000 participants who took the questionnaire and test between January and December 2020, nearly 13,000 people reported COVID-19 infections varying from mild to severe. Among those, results revealed that they had cognitive issues compared with a group that not suffered from COVID-19. “On the worst extreme of the spectrum, people who had gone to hospital and been put onto a ventilator showed the largest underperformance cognitively speaking,” Hampshire says. These individuals had more trouble with reasoning, problem solving, and spatial planning on the test compared to people of their same age group and educational backgrounds who hadn’t been hospitalized with COVID-19. The difference was similar to the average cognitive decline seen over 10 years of aging. The findings were published in The Lancet on July 22.

The ICU brain

Though Hampshire’s findings sound startling, it’s fairly common for patients admitted to the ICU to suffer lasting cognitive issues. Megan Hosey, a rehabilitation psychologist at Johns Hopkins Medicine, says about a third of ICU patients who have acute respiratory failure have symptoms that are similar to those of traumatic brain injury. One reason is because patients are often sedated in the ICU to reduce anxiety and discomfort, such as that caused by mechanical ventilators. Sedatives slow down brain activity and in doing so can cause delirium, a sudden change in mental status that leads to confusion and disorientation. Patients have trouble focusing or they may not know where they are; it’s a condition that can last hours, days, or even weeks. “What we know is that the longer somebody is delirious, the worse their cognitive picture will look in the long-term,” Hosey says. But sedation doesn’t explain all cases of neurological and cognitive issues in long-COVID patients, she says. Many COVID-19 patients don’t need ventilators, and others, like Davis, are never hospitalized. Some previously hospitalized COVID-19 patients have such severe neurological and cognitive problems that they can’t participate in follow-up phone screenings about how they feel, says Jennifer Frontera, a neuro-critical care specialist at NYU Langone Health. In a study published July 15, Frontera and her colleagues screened for neurological problems in patients admitted to the hospital with severe COVID-19. Of 382 patients, 50 percent reported that they had impaired cognition and a diminished capacity to carry out daily activities, walk, or take care of themselves six months after being discharged. Of those who worked prior to being hospitalized, 47 percent could not return to their jobs six months later. The researchers also found that a subset of the 382 COVID-19 patients who had no previous neurological syndromes experienced strokes and seizures while in the hospital. At the same time, individuals with a history of neurological problems were at higher risk for developing new ones while hospitalized with COVID-19, Frontera says. The findings underscore just how much damage COVID-19 can do to the nervous system, especially those who develop severe disease.

Unexpected effects

In the U.K. cognition survey, a portion of those who had a confirmed case of COVID-19 but were not hospitalized had cognitive deficits as well, though not as severe as the hospitalized group. Other studies confirm that people who experienced “mild” or “moderate” COVID-19 can have lingering cognitive issues that have a profound impact on daily life. Davis and others like her have formed the Patient-Led Research Collaborative, a self-organized group of long COVID-19 patients who are collecting data on neurological and other lasting symptoms. In a peer-reviewed paper published on July 15, Davis’s group found that out of nearly 3,800 people surveyed who suffered from long COVID, 85 percent reported “brain fog” — which the authors define as poor attention, problem-solving, executive-functioning, and decision-making. Only a small portion of those—317 people—were previously hospitalized with severe COVID-19. In one post-COVID-19 clinic at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, researchers found that many individuals with long COVID were never hospitalized yet had neurologic symptoms lasting longer than six weeks. Out of 100 patients, the most common neurologic manifestations were brain fog, and numbness and tingling, which affected 81 percent and 60 percent of patients respectively, according to a study published in March. These individuals also performed worse in attention and working-memory cognitive tasks compared to people their age who hadn’t gotten sick with COVID-19.

Probing the brain

Other viruses like West Nile, Zika, herpes simplex, and the virus that causes chickenpox and shingles are known to directly infect the brain. When COVID-19 patients first started reporting cognitive and neurological side effects last year, scientists wondered if SARS-CoV-2 might do the same thing. Researchers started probing the brains of people who died of COVID-19 looking for traces of the virus. But brain tissue is hard to come by. Few people donate their brains to research, and strict protocols for handling potentially infectious brain tissue make studying it even more difficult. As a result, these studies are small, often involving just a handful to a few dozen patients. While a few studies have detected the presence of the virus in neurons and their supportive glia cells, which hold neurons together like glue, scientists now think it’s unlikely that SARS-CoV-2 infects brain cells, at least in large enough quantities to cause neurological damage. If the virus is present there at all, it’s likely in very small amounts or is contained within the brain’s blood vessels. A Columbia University study of 40 people who died of COVID-19 found no evidence of viral RNA or proteins in samples of patient brain cells. The results were published in April in the journal Brain. The authors suggest that previous reports of virus detected in brain cells may be due to contamination during the autopsy. “The fact that SARS-CoV-2 is potentially causing these cognitive effects at a distance makes it a bit unusual,” says Christopher Bartley, a postdoctoral fellow in immunopsychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, who wasn’t involved in the Columbia study.

Biological mechanisms

If SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t infect brain cells, how is so destructive to cognition? There are two leading hypotheses. The first is that the infection somehow triggers inflammation in the brain. Some COVID-19 patients have suffered encephalitis, or swelling of the brain, which can cause confusion and double vision, and in serious cases, speech, hearing, or vision problems. If left untreated, patients can develop cognitive problems. Viruses like West Nile and Zika can cause encephalitis by directly infecting the brain cells, but how COVID-19 may lead to brain inflammation is less clear. An immune response run amok, known as autoimmunity, might be to blame for some instances of inflammation throughout the body, including the brain. When the immune system is fighting a disease like COVID-19, it unleashes antibodies to do battle against the infection. But sometimes a person’s immune system becomes hyperactive and instead starts making self-attacking antibodies, known as autoantibodies, which can contribute to inflammation and blood clots. These autoantibodies have been found in the cerebrospinal fluid of COVID-19 patients with neurological symptoms. In the Columbia study, researchers found clusters of microglia—special immune cells in the brain whose job is to clear out damaged neurons—that appeared to be attacking healthy neurons. The phenomenon is called neuronophagia. Most of these rogue microglia were in the brain stem, which regulates heartbeat, breathing, and sleeping. The researchers think these microglia may get activated by signaling molecules called inflammatory cytokines found in patients with severe COVID-19. These molecules are supposed to help regulate the immune system, but some people’s bodies release too many inflammatory cytokines in response to a viral infection. When researchers at Stanford looked at brain tissue from eight patients who died of COVID-19, they also observed signs of inflammation compared to 14 control brains. Using a technique called single-cell RNA sequencing, they found that hundreds of genes associated with inflammation were activated in brain cells from COVID-19 patients compared to controls. They also noted molecular changes in the cerebral cortex, the part of the brain involved in decision-making and memory that suggested signaling imbalances in neurons. Similar imbalances have been seen in patients with Alzheimer’s disease. The results were published in Nature in June. A second explanation for cognitive issues is that COVID-19 may restrict blood flow to the brain and deprive it of oxygen. In patients who have died of COVID-19, researchers have found evidence of brain tissue damagecaused by hypoxia, or the lack of oxygen. “The brain is an organ that requires a lot of oxygen to do its job,” says Billie Schultz, a physiatrist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, who specialized in rehabilitating stroke and traumatic brain injury patients before COVID-19 hit. Other symptoms that accompany post-COVID-19 syndrome—pain, fatigue, and shortness of breath—can negatively affect cognition too, Schultz says. “It’s not just a brain issue; it's a multi-system body issue that needs to be addressed.”

The next health crisis

Schultz is hopeful that many people experiencing persistent cognitive issues from COVID-19 will eventually improve. Many stroke and traumatic brain injury patients experience spontaneous recovery, in which the brain heals itself within three to six months. But others worry that cognitive issues caused by COVID-19 may lead to dementia. At the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in July, scientists presented research showing that hospitalized COVID-19 patients had similar blood biomarkers, neurodegeneration, and inflammation to those with Alzheimer’s disease. The research has not yet been peer-reviewed. Heather Snyder, vice president of medical and scientific relations at the Alzheimer's Association, cautions that the findings don’t necessarily mean someone who gets COVID-19 is more likely to develop Alzheimer’s or another type of dementia. “We’re still trying to understand those associations,” she says. For now, there are no specific treatments for COVID-related brain fog, memory loss, and other cognitive effects. Instead, doctors are using cognitive therapy, occupational therapy, or speech-language pathology to treat symptoms. Many studies, like the NIH one, are trying to understand the underlying mechanisms of cognitive dysfunction in long COVID patients in hopes of identifying potential treatments. “We and others are collecting anecdotal data from patients on what has helped them, but we are far from definitive therapeutics,” Frontera says. In the U.S. alone, millions of people have developed lasting cognitive and neurological problems long after an initial COVID-19 infection. Some of these patients may be permanently disabled and need long-term care. “My concern is that we're going to have huge numbers of the population who aren't able to function at their cognitive baseline. They can't go back to work, or at least not to what they did before,” Frontera says. “We haven’t even thought of the long-term implications. It could be an incredible blow to the economy.” Davis says the scariest part about COVID-19’s cognitive effects is that people of all ages and health status are affected. “This is something everyone is at risk for, and it's completely debilitating.”

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Rip this joint, gonna save your soul, round and round and round we go......



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2021-08-24 07:11 by Hairball.

^ That article is so scary. I feel so lucky my only long term side effect involves my hair growing.

Miraculously, we didn't have super spreader at the Tokyo Olympics 2020 due to no spectators.
The 2020 Tokyo Paralympics start tonight without spectators.
I hope Paralympics and Paralympians will be also safe and secure.

Study finds N95 masks more effective than surgical, cloth coverings against COVID-19

Heavy duty N95 and KN95 masks are best at warding of COVID-19, while commonly worn surgical and cloth face coverings filter only about 10 percent of exhaled aerosols, according to a new study.

“The results show that a standard surgical and three-ply cloth masks … filter at apparent efficiencies of only 12.4% and 9.8%, respectively,” according to the University of Waterloo study’s conclusion.

New York Post

Thanks for sharing that N.G. article Hairball. We focus on the mortality rate numbers but some of the long term effects for survivors as Daspy says is pretty scary.