Tag: death

US demonstrates global leadership in healthcare — NOT

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One million people worldwide have now died from confirmed coronavirus cases. It is a staggering toll — greater than the number of people estimated to have died from malaria, influenza, cholera and measles, combined, over the same period. And the real number of coronavirus deaths is almost certainly higher.

The U.S., with 4 percent of the world’s population, has suffered more than 20 percent of deaths.

The impossible question our Fake President can’t answer?

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When – and how – can schools reopen safely?


Riverglades elementary school in Broward county, Florida

Broward county, Florida, is America’s sixth largest school district…When in-person classes ended here on 13 March, there were 11 cases of Covid-19 in the county, according to Johns Hopkins University’s virus tracker. Now, there are more than 23,000 cases, with a curve bending vertically. Covid-19 cases have doubled in 20 days…

Amid this trend, Donald Trump has heaped pressure on educators. He criticized “tough and expensive” guidelines from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which the agency said it would revise after his comments…Trump’s administration has also threatened schools’ funding, at a time when local governments are expected to slash school budgets in response to cratered sales tax revenue. Educators across the country have begged for federal support, but have received none of the $250bn they proposed in a letter to Congress…

“We do not see a path to reopening all district schools with 100% full enrollment every day, as we were before we closed schools due to the coronavirus pandemic,” the Broward county superintendent, Robert Runcie, said in a video message to his district…He also shot down comparisons to other countries, made by Trump, which had reopened their schools and economies.

“These countries have done widespread testing and contact tracing,” he said. “We have not done so, and consequently don’t have the infrastructure and systems in place that are necessary.

“The sad fact is that there is no national plan.”

The incompetent fool sitting in the White House by virtue of an outdated, corrupt and undemocratic election, has a following among the sort of Americans who believed his lies thoroughly enough to vote for him. They are willing to ignore science and reason – and the potential death of thousands of schoolchildren – to support an unfunded, unsafe process to “bring back schools for America” regardless of consequences.

This thoughtless, ignorant army of populist fools are willing to place their faith in the biggest phony in American political history…to achieve nothing more than expanding this pandemic.

NYT asks: How badly is America doing?

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When can schools safely reopen? When will the economy really start recovering? And when will you next eat in a restaurant, go to a movie, watch pro sports or hang out at a friend’s house?

All of these are, in fact, versions of the same question: When will the United States finally start to get the coronavirus under control?

And the answer appears to be: not any time soon.

The U.S. looks ever more like an outlier. Over the weekend, President Trump again played down the coronavirus as a serious threat, falsely claiming 99 percent of cases are harmless…

Much of the rest of the world is taking a very different approach. It is slowly moving back toward more normal functioning, without setting off major new outbreaks.

Trump is an idiot who spent most of his life looking for a village of hs peers to take him in. Unfortunately, the GOP did a skillful enough job at manipulating our out-of-date electoral system to give him a whole country to screw up.

Sooner than predicted, parts of the world already too hot for humans

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Streetside cooling station

Global warming has already made parts of the world hotter than the human body can withstand, decades earlier than climate models expected this to happen.

Jacobabad in Pakistan and Ras al Khaimah in the United Arab Emirates have both repeatedly crossed a deadly threshold for one or two hours at a time, an analysis of weather station data found.

Wet bulb temperature (TW) is a measure of heat and humidity, taken from a thermometer covered in a water-soaked cloth. Beyond a threshold of 35°C TW the body is unable to cool itself by sweating, but lower levels can still be deadly, as was seen in the 2003 European heatwave that killed thousands without passing 28°C TW.

A US-UK team analysed weather station data across the world, and found that the frequency of wet bulb temperatures exceeding temperatures between 27°C TW and 35°C TW had all doubled since 1979. Though 35°C TW is thought of as a key threshold, harm and even death is possible at lower temperatures, so the team included these in their analysis.

Fat cats in their kool-aid kastles and kars ain’t going to be worrying about themselves. Not likely to worry about the rest of us. Question remains the usual: can we, will we, build a movement that threatens political gigs more than the dollar$ that keep politicians in office?

COVID-19 deaths won’t peak in most states for weeks

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The model, which uses data from cellphones to determine the impact of social distancing, provides a daily estimate of fatalities from COVID-19 in the United States for the coming weeks.

The findings indicate the number of deaths almost certainly has not yet peaked and is not likely to peak in many states until after May 1, a finding in contrast to one of the most frequently cited models.

The new model, from the University of Texas at Austin…uses data from the US to estimate the impact of recent social distancing measures within each state…

“On average, there seems to be a three-to-four week lag between when someone gets infected with COVID-19 and when they’re at risk of death,” says Lauren Ancel Meyers, who leads the University of Texas at Austin COVID-19 Modeling Consortium.

“That means we’re just beginning to see the life-saving benefits — and the clear signal in the data — of social distancing that began in mid- to late March.”…

In addition to using local movement data from individual US states to make projections rather than drawing on patterns observed in other countries, another difference in the new model is that it accounts for greater uncertainty further in the future.

Not that our Fake President and his 19th Century advisors pay much attention to models based on scientific studies. Good sense tells us to minimize deaths from this plague. Fearless Leader is more concerned with fund-raising for the next presidential election.