Covid-19 - Treatments & Vaccines

[birdman]

The more the virus spreads, the more damage it does to EVERYONE. Vaccines and masks help to prevent the spread. You understand this right?

Not masking your child is an incredibly selfish decision because it could directly lead to people getting sick and dying.

Why are you making your child an accomplice to those outcomes? Just to own the libs? To make political point? Do you understand how fucked up that is?

This is exactly the problem with not requiring masks in school. Yes the probability that the children will get severely sick is low, but children with mild cases can spread it to their parents, grandparents, neighbors, etc. The hospitals in FL are already full, any effort to reduce community spread is a good idea. The governor stupidly took away one of the few tools that local leaders have at their disposal, mask mandates, to try and limit the spread of the disease. There is no way that EO makes sense.

 

[PhDeac]

All evidence to the contrary.

They understand. They just don’t care about children’s health and wellness.

 

[BeachBumDeac]

They understand. They just don’t care about children’s health and wellness.

They don’t care about anyone’s health, their own included.

 

[thatguy2016]

DeSantis met with one of the Great Barrington Declaration authors yesterday, so there's that.

 

[ConnorEl]

Only 8 ICU Beds Remain In The Entire State Of Arkansas As Delta Variant Cases Spike

Gov. Asa Hutchison, in a tweet on Monday, said the latest report highlighted “startling numbers.”

"We saw the largest single-day increase in hospitalizations and have eclipsed our previous high of COVID hospitalizations,” the governor wrote. “There are currently only eight ICU beds available in the state.”

“Vaccinations reduce hospitalizations,” he added.

Hospitalization of COVID-19 patients jumped by 103 to 1,376, the report cited by Hutchison shows. It’s the biggest daily jump and total in the state since the start of the pandemic.

"This tells us that the virus is spreading rapidly," Meg Mirivel, Health Department spokeswoman, said, according to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette . "People are getting very sick with it and our hospital systems are strained."

Arkansas has among the lowest vaccination rates in the country, with fewer than 43% of adults fully immunized.

In April, Hutchison signed into law a statewide ban on further mask mandates. However, in a news conference last week, the governor said he regretted signing the measure, which has complicated his state’s efforts to control the spread of the virus.

"In hindsight, I wish that it had not become law,” he said. “But it is the law, and the only chance we have is either to amend it or for the courts to say that it has an unconstitutional foundation.”

Umm...at least he admits it was a mistake.

Great.

 

[OldGoldBeard]

So the problem is not that they didn't take the vaccine and then died from covid, the problem is other people judging them and other unvaccinated people for not getting vaccinated and dying. The problem is not being unvaccinated, the real problem is all those snooty folks looking down on them for not being vaccinated. The thought processes of these people is something to behold.

Is anyone willing and able to post the whole article?

 

[thatguy2016]

Is anyone willing and able to post the whole article?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/n...wn-reassessing-vaccines/ar-AAN4jvS?li=BBorjTa

GREENWOOD, Arkansas—Michael Lejong fully intended to get vaccinated for Covid-19, his wife said, standing in the pavilion that the prominent architect designed for his hometown.

But he was relatively young, very healthy and not overly concerned about the virus. He wanted to get his shots separately from his wife, so he could care for her if she had adverse side effects. She got hers immediately in April and he put his off.

In late June, he began feeling sick and tested positive for Covid-19. A week of mild symptoms turned into extreme fatigue. On July 3, he was admitted to a nearby hospital with low oxygen levels; on the 15th, doctors put him on a ventilator. He died four days later.


The death of the 49-year-old Greenwood native, father of two, community leader, mountain biker and outdoorsman, has rattled this western Arkansas town, where it seems like nearly everyone knew Mr. Lejong. It comes amid a spate of other recent deaths and skyrocketing hospitalizations in a region where many are deeply skeptical of the Covid-19 vaccines, and doctors and political leaders are trying everything to persuade a reluctant populace to take them.

“It’s personal now because he knew so many people,” said his widow, Katie Lejong. “Before, it was happening somewhere else.”

Nearly every corner of Greenwood, population 9,000, bears some mark of Mr. Lejong. The stone and glass pavilion and amphitheater that looks like the product of a much larger city. The new fire station, designed to blend into a residential neighborhood. The police station. The columned high school freshman center. The lakeside bike trails that Mr. Lejong painstakingly designed and tested himself repeatedly on his bike. The sign welcoming visitors to the city and the stone work surrounding a veterans’ memorial in the town square. While the architect designed projects worth tens of millions of dollars around the state and country, much of the work he did for his hometown was as a volunteer, its leaders said.

“I see all this recognition and I just miss my friend,” said Tammy Briley, the city parks director, as she recalled kayaking recently past a $42 million art studio Mr. Lejong’s firm has under way at the University of Arkansas. “I would call him all the time with all these questions, and he made me feel as important as all those national people.”

Sebastian County, which includes Greenwood and the much larger city of Fort Smith, has had 292 Covid-19 deaths since the start of the pandemic and currently has an estimated 737 cases, according to the state department of health, and has been adding about 73 new cases each day. The state overall has been adding more than 2,800 new cases daily and has more than 1,000 patients in hospitals, near the previous high level in January. Deaths, a lagging indicator, have been averaging more than 20 a day, and the percentage of Covid-19 tests returning positive results hit an all-time high last month.

The county had less than 36% of residents 12 and older fully immunized as of last week, compared with 42% in Arkansas overall and 50% in the U.S. overall.

With the Delta variant spreading, today’s Covid-19 isn’t the Covid-19 of last year, Lee Johnson told a roomful of local officials and members of the public at a Greenwood City Council meeting one recent evening. Arkansas hospitalizations for Covid-19 have risen nearly fourfold in just over a month, he told them.

The patients he is seeing are younger and younger. The state children’s hospital now has dozens of children hospitalized with the virus, while it never saw a handful during previous surges. The hospital where he has practiced for 22 years, in nearby Fort Smith, has been struggling to handle rising cases.

“It’s never looked like this,” he said. “We’re full. The hospital is full. The ER is full. Ambulances show up and they’re waiting, sometimes a considerable amount of time, for a bed to open up.”

Dr. Johnson is an emergency room physician, a Republican member of the Arkansas House of Representatives and a Greenwood local, where he grew up with Mr. Lejong. These days, he dedicates much of his long ER shifts, and his time outside the hospital, to talking to patients and constituents about the vaccines and trying to assuage their fears about them.

People bring up fears about blood clots; he provides them with factual information about their rarity. Women ask if the vaccine can impact fertility; he tells them there is no evidence it can and the obstetricians he knows have all vaccinated their daughters. He recommends people talk to other doctors.

“There are some people who just aren’t afraid of Covid,” he said. “I haven’t figured out how to turn that person, but I do know that making them feel defensive for their passionately held opinion isn’t productive.”

Dr. Johnson has also been grappling with statewide decisions, as part of a special session of the Arkansas state Legislature last week to consider whether to rescind a statewide ban on mask mandates by local governments. Dr. Johnson, who voted for the ban when it seemed the virus was declining, was open to changing it but skeptical of leaving the decision to individual school districts. Bills to shift the state’s ban didn’t advance, but a court Friday temporarily blocked the enforcement of the ban against school districts.

Even with rising cases and younger patients, Mr. Lejong’s death caught Dr. Johnson by surprise. It is personal and it is emotional, he said. Dr. Johnson received the Covid-19 vaccine the moment it was available to doctors because, as a physician, he understood its importance and, as an elected official, he thought it important to set an example. But he can imagine an alternate reality in which he didn’t go into medicine and let his good health and propensity for procrastination lead him to put off vaccination.

“That could have been me,” he said of Mr. Lejong.

While the number of Arkansans getting vaccinated in the last couple of weeks has risen, some say they will never be persuaded. Shanda Parish, a nurse who lives in the Fort Smith-Greenwood area, said she won’t get the shot, even after losing both her father and stepmother to the virus in recent weeks.

Robert and Vi Herring, both in their 70s, were lifelong residents of the area, married 34 years with five children between them. They didn’t like the idea of getting the vaccine, their children said. They became sick after attending a 52nd high school reunion and died within three days of each other at a Fort Smith hospital in late July.

Ms. Parish, who considered her father her hero, is devastated, she said, clinging to waves of numbness between grief and anger. The deaths have caused a rift within the family, whose children remain split on their views of the vaccine.

Ms. Parish said she still won’t get it; she simply doesn’t trust a newly created vaccine. She doesn’t regret that her parents didn’t get vaccinated, she said. It was their choice. Instead, she regrets that she was quarantining ahead of a cancer treatment when they fell ill and couldn’t be involved in pushing to get them hospitalized sooner.

Ms. Parish’s last interaction with her father was a voice mail from the hospital, of him moaning and gasping for breath. “It doesn’t even sound human,” she said. “I don’t like hearing it, but I can’t delete it.”

Since the Herrings died, Ms. Parish has felt judgment from friends and acquaintances asking why her parents weren’t vaccinated—why she didn’t make them get vaccinated.

“We didn’t kill them, but some people make us feel like it’s our fault they’re gone,” she said, crying. “No one should try to make you feel guilty because someone died.”

Ms. Parish’s brother David Herring, who lives near Washington, D.C., has had the opposite reaction. He tried unsuccessfully to push his parents to get vaccinated and is now trying to persuade his relatives. He was put off by friends and acquaintances pushing conspiracy theories about the vaccine, even after his parents’ deaths.

“I’m absolutely angry and frustrated,” Mr. Herring said. “Their age and health conditions—they should have gotten vaccinated really early…. And then trying to talk to friends of theirs and hearing these ridiculous things about depopulation and computer chips.”

Greenwood leaders are upping their efforts to promote vaccination, but said it has to happen on a grass-roots level. Ken Edwards, a former mayor who is now editor of the Greenwood Tradition, enlisted Dr. Johnson to write a front-page editorial on the vaccine. The next issue will feature a similar message from another Greenwood native who is now an obstetrician. He is reaching out to other local physicians to do the same.

“We are using whatever influence a small town newspaper has,” Mr. Edwards said. “I don’t remember anyone having a fit about the polio vaccine. We’ve wiped out so many scourges on mankind by getting vaccinated, but now, there’s become a cynicism about government and information…so we are trying to bring physicians they know to show that this isn’t political, it’s science.”

A city Fourth of July celebration featured an Arkansas Department of Health tent offering Covid-19 vaccines. Mayor Doug Kinslow hoped a few hundred people would take advantage of it. Just 39 did. Now, after Mr. Lejong’s death, he is sure another tent would see more interest and is trying to get health officials to set one up.

Mr. Kinslow said he is frustrated by people latching onto political opposition to the vaccines, despite the consequences to their local communities. “It’s called Southern stubbornness,” Mr. Kinslow said.

Greenwood Fire Chief Stewart Bryan, who had been best friends with Mr. Lejong since fifth grade, remembered years of church, Boy Scouts, fixing up old cars and signing up for classes just so they would be together. He is stunned now that the man who regularly biked 20 miles or more could succumb so quickly to Covid-19.

Meanwhile, Mr. Bryan is trying to manage the safety of 33 on-call firefighters and medics, as emergency calls from Covid-19-positive patients rise and hospitals fill up.

When it is over, he would like to go back to Mr. Lejong’s drawings for a third city fire station, hoping it can be his friend’s last project. “Good just seemed to follow him around,” he said of Mr. Lejong.

 

[thatguy2016]

Robert and Vi Herring, both in their 70s, were lifelong residents of the area, married 34 years with five children between them. They didn’t like the idea of getting the vaccine, their children said. They became sick after attending a 52nd high school reunion and died within three days of each other at a Fort Smith hospital in late July.

Ms. Parish, who considered her father her hero, is devastated, she said, clinging to waves of numbness between grief and anger. The deaths have caused a rift within the family, whose children remain split on their views of the vaccine.

Ms. Parish said she still won’t get it; she simply doesn’t trust a newly created vaccine. She doesn’t regret that her parents didn’t get vaccinated, she said. It was their choice.

 

[WakeandBake]

The more the virus spreads, the more damage it does to EVERYONE. Vaccines and masks help to prevent the spread. You understand this right?

Not masking your child is an incredibly selfish decision because it could directly lead to people getting sick and dying.

Why are you making your child an accomplice to those outcomes? Just to own the libs? To make political point? Do you understand how fucked up that is?

dude they will sell out their kids, parents, grandparents, pets. homes, towns, and own self-interests for any chance to defy liberals.

 

[DrG41]

Article said she was quarantining for a cancer treatment when her parents passed. Bet she would try an "experimental" cancer treatment.

 

[WFFaithful]

The more the virus spreads, the more damage it does to EVERYONE. Vaccines and masks help to prevent the spread. You understand this right?

Not masking your child is an incredibly selfish decision because it could directly lead to people getting sick and dying.

Why are you making your child an accomplice to those outcomes? Just to own the libs? To make political point? Do you understand how fucked up that is?

One line of Republican thought says that Covid is never going away so #whybother with mitigation

 

[deactherunner]

No.

Banning mask mandates does not make good sense.

At least not from a public health standpoint.

Politically…? I guess it could make sense for the brain damaged modern GOP.

I wonder how much of the decision was "look at what one asshole governor can do to a public school with the stroke of a pen. Don't support public schools!" As always, Republicans motto is "Be the dysfunction you want others to see in government."

 

[ConnorEl]

“It’s personal now because he knew so many people,” said his widow, Katie Lejong. “Before, it was happening somewhere else.”

I’ve heard some version of this many, many times.

On the one hand, I can understand.

OTOH…

 

[WakeandBake]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/mandatory-vaccinations-triggered-riot-montreal-113751233.html

Though inoculation against smallpox wasn't new, some feared the vaccinations were dangerous. Some didn't understand how contagious the disease was. Some believed rumors that city vaccinators were going into bedrooms and tying down children to be vaccinated.

One anti-vaccination pamphlet read "Stop!! People Driven Like Dumb Animals To The Shambles." Some religious groups called the smallpox shot the biblical "mark of the beast" - the same claim being made by conspiracy theorists about the coronavirus vaccines on the social networks of some Christian groups.

At about 7 p.m., "a howling mob" attacked a branch office of the health department and "wrecked the building," the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The crowd, growing in size, then marched to city hall. A few policemen were on duty, but "the mob drove them out of their way like sheep."

The attack on city hall had eerie similarities to the Jan. 6 assault by Donald Trump supporters on the U.S. Capitol.

"A remarkable feature in the riot was the utter collapse of the police force and the proof of its inability to deal with the mob," the Montreal Gazette reported. "The rowdies went about their work with a nonchalance which showed their indifference to the presence of the police."

The riotous crowd turned next to the central police station. "Revolver shots were freely fired at the police," the Boston Transcript said. "To scare the men, the police fired over their heads only to be received by jeers and laughter."

At a city council meeting, the three French Canadian representatives continued to denounce the vaccinations rather than the rioters. "These are the men who represent the wards where smallpox is most prevalent and take this course to curry favor with their constituents," the New York Times said.

Two weeks later, Dr. Alexander Ross, one of the anti-vaccination city council members who had incited the protesters, was stopped aboard the Chicago Express train from Montreal by a Canadian health inspector, the St. Louis Post Dispatch reported. A search revealed "the great advocate of the ignorant antivaccination party had been vaccinated recently."

Same shit different idiots

 

[PhDeac]

I’ve heard some version of this many, many times.

On the one hand, I can understand.

OTOH…

That’s just people admitting they lack a basic human ability to see other people and relate to their situation.

 

[Highland Deac]

Article said she was quarantining for a cancer treatment when her parents passed. Bet she would try an "experimental" cancer treatment.

What gets me about that article is that she's a nurse, and ought to know better. Would anyone really want her taking care of them, given her anti-vaxx position, even after her parents died from covid while unvaccinated? As a medical worker she certainly doesn't seem to have much faith in medical science. And after reading a number of these articles there unfortunately appears to be a good number of nurses and medical workers who are anti-vaxx and even anti-mask. One of my uncle's daughter-in-laws is a nurse and refuses to get the vaccine (she's also an enthusiastic Trumpite). One depressing thing about this pandemic has been to see how even many medical professionals place conspiracy theories and political tribalism over the medical knowledge they're supposed to have learned and practiced. As the article states "Mr. Kinslow said he is frustrated by people latching onto political opposition to the vaccines, despite the consequences to their local communities. “It’s called Southern stubbornness,” Mr. Kinslow said. It's not just stubbornness, it's stupidity, plain and simple.

 

[06deacon]

Nurses should know better, as everyone should, but many nurses are dumb as shit with little medical expertise and that was apparent pre-covid.

 

[PhDeac]

Nurses should know better, as everyone should, but many nurses are dumb as shit with little medical expertise and that was apparent pre-covid.

Oof. Horrible take.

Saw a tweet thread from a woman about her mom or aunt who is a nurse and went full anti-vax conspiracy theory from watching Fox News. The thread said something like “Fox News destroy 30+ years of medical knowledge in a few years.”

 

[bym051d]

Guys, I have some bad news. I got my teeth cleaned today and my hygienist told me,

1. Kids shouldn’t wear masks because they don’t allow CO2 out (but I guess they’re completely open to the virus?).
2. The vaccine contains graphene oxide that will build up in your system if they make you get boosters.

Of course, the bad news is a medical professional believes these things.

 

[Biff Tannen]

LOL, a dental hygienist is not a medical professional anymore than an orderly. That said, I would have told the dentist that I need new ding-a-ling to clean my teeth in six months