🤮 Coronavirus (Community Thread)

dragonfly9 · August 6, 2020, 6:16am

Nothing like more shocking news affecting kids coming at us…

@anon95374541 @MissJava - Would you move to Coronavirus please? THanks!

Windthin · August 6, 2020, 7:05am

The U.S. Is Repeating Its Deadliest Pandemic Mistake

More than 40 percent of all coronavirus deaths in America have been in nursing homes. Here’s how it got so bad, and why there might still be more to come as cases surge in the Sun Belt.

In early April, Melvin Hector, a geriatrician in Tucson, Arizona, went into Sapphire of Tucson Nursing and Rehabilitation to check on one of his patients, who had been sent to the hospital the previous day. Hector found the woman in her room, wearing a surgical mask. She had been tested for COVID-19, but the results had not yet come back. When Hector asked for a mask for himself, he says a nurse responded, “We don’t have any.”

“I say to her, ‘You’re going into the room; the other staff are going in the room. She just went out to the hospital for a respiratory disease. And we don’t have any masks in the building?’” Hector recalled in a recent interview.

“They’re on order,” Hector remembered the nurse replying.

When Hector reported the situation to the Arizona Department of Health Services, he said Sapphire ended their working relationship. (In an email to me, Sapphire claimed that it had never suffered shortages of personal protective equipment, or PPE, and that the nurse said she didn’t know where to find more masks, not that there were none. In response to Sapphire’s statement, Hector said, “They lie.”)

To Hector, the episode was a microcosm of the myriad reasons why the United States has suffered so many COVID-19 deaths among nursing-home staff and residents. “Arizona is just one manifestation of a nationwide policy, an administrative policy to ignore this pandemic until it couldn’t be ignored,” Hector told me.

Few places represent the awful consequences of this neglect more than nursing homes. Of the country’s nearly 130,000 coronavirus deaths, more than 40 percent have been residents or employees of nursing homes and long-term-care facilities. One in five facilities has reported at least one death. In just one New Jersey nursing home, at least 53 residents died after the sick were housed with the healthy and staffers had little more than rudimentary face shields for protection.

Like so many other effects of the pandemic, the U.S.’s nursing-home COVID-19 crisis is hitting communities of color especially hard. According to research by Tamara Konetzka, a health economist at the University of Chicago, nursing homes with more residents of color were more likely to have a coronavirus case or death.

And yet, state and federal officials seem to be doing little to protect the elderly from further devastation. Coronavirus cases are now surging in Sun Belt states. In recent weeks, deaths in nursing homes have continued to climb in Florida, Georgia, Texas, South Carolina, and California, according to data from the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic .

For now, overall deaths from COVID-19 are on a downward trajectory, potentially because COVID-19 patients are currently younger on average than those who fell ill in the Northeast this spring. However, experts say this doesn’t mean we won’t see more deaths in facilities like Sapphire of Tucson, where at least 58 residents and 36 staffers had tested positive for the coronavirus as of April, right at the time of Hector’s visit. (Arizona DHS has since inspected the facility.) Instead, the disease will likely spill from the young to the old, from bars into nursing homes.

Additional COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes are probable, and they will have been preventable. American nursing homes are chronically short-staffed and, even prior to the pandemic, were doing a poor job of controlling infections. Well into the crisis, authorities kept these facilities strapped for masks, tests, and other desperately needed equipment. And now, with the coronavirus raging across southern states, experts say the elderly will remain in danger in precisely the places so many of them typically go for a peaceful retirement. The tragedy of even more nursing-home deaths will be worsened by the fact that they could have been stopped.

Nursing homes’ COVID-19 deaths may seem inevitable, given that their elderly residents live cooped up together. But according to interviews with nearly a dozen nursing-home experts, it didn’t have to be this way. Worldwide, entire cities and individual nursing homes have remained coronavirus-free.

Take Hong Kong, population 7.5 million, which has reported no deaths from COVID-19 in its care homes. The city was scarred by the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, in 2003, during which it suffered nearly 300 deaths, or almost 40 percent of the global death toll. Nursing-home residents were more likely than the general public to get SARS, and 78 percent of residents who got the virus died from it, according to Terry Lum, the head of the department of social work and social administration at the University of Hong Kong. “We also had a few doctors and nurses get killed by SARS,” Lum told me. “Those are painful to watch. We didn’t want to see that ever again.”

Immediately after the 2003 outbreak, the Hong Kong government launched a revamped policy of infectious-disease control that required nursing homes to have a designated, government-trained infection-control officer, according to Lum. All nursing homes had to maintain at least a month’s supply of face masks and other PPE.

As soon as COVID-19 broke out in Hong Kong, in January of this year, its nursing homes halted nonurgent hospital trips among residents as well as family visitation, Lum said. Nursing-home staffers donned masks as they cared for the residents. Any nursing-home residents who caught COVID-19 were isolated in hospital coronavirus wards—not in nursing homes—until they had tested negative for the virus at least twice.

There was a human cost to the lack of family visits, Lum told me; patients who had dementia deteriorated more quickly without social interaction. But nursing-home administrators were certain that if even one COVID-19 case snuck into a nursing home, it would spark a conflagration with tragic results.

Some American nursing homes have likewise succeeded at keeping out the coronavirus. The Maryland Baptist Aged Home, a 30-resident, 100-year-old facility in Baltimore, avoided having any coronavirus cases. Its director, Derrick DeWitt, told me that in February, when the U.S. had just 15 known cases, he paused family visits and community meals, sent vendors and delivery drivers to a separate entrance, and brought in extra cleaning crews. The staff was trained on social distancing, screened regularly for their temperature and symptoms, and asked about their social activities. DeWitt, following the guidance of Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, said he ordered extra masks early, before they began to run out.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the U.S., the virtual opposite played out. Nursing homes were ill-equipped, both literally and figuratively, to deal with the pandemic, and federal and state governments took a hands-off approach until it was too late. “I think we really dropped the ball here,” David C. Grabowski, a health-care-policy professor at Harvard Medical School, told me. “We have not done right by older adults who are living in nursing homes and those that care for them.”

Nursing homes were already struggling with infection control before the pandemic hit. A Government Accountability Office report published in May found that more than 80 percent of nursing homes were cited for infection-prevention deficiencies from 2013 to 2017. About half of those homes had “persistent problems and were cited across multiple years.” The report describes, among other incidents, a New York nursing home where a respiratory infection had sickened 38 residents. The home did not isolate or maintain a list of those who were sick, and continued to let residents eat meals together.

Lum said that, like many homes in the U.S., those in Hong Kong don’t tend to have a large number of staffers for each resident. Those staffers were just very, very careful about COVID-19. But in the U.S., some experts say that staffing shortages have made nursing homes unprepared to deal with a pandemic. One recent study that examined nursing-home data in Connecticut found that long-term-care facilities with lower nurse-staffing levels had higher rates of confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths.

Grabowski and other experts have also noted that nursing-home staffers tend to make little money, so many work multiple jobs. That creates an environment in which busy, undertrained personnel are shuffling quickly between patient rooms and nursing homes, taking the virus with them.

Experts generally agree that regular testing of staff and residents in nursing homes is key to halting outbreaks. “In order to keep the virus out of a nursing home, you need to be able to test staff regularly, every time they come in for a shift,” Katie Smith Sloan, the president of LeadingAge, an advocacy group for the elderly, told me. “And you need to get results within minutes, not days.”

But this spring, asymptomatic staffers brought the virus into homes, Konetzka and other experts believe, and these workers weren’t being tested. In Rhode Island—where more than three-quarters of COVID-19 deaths have taken place in nursing homes and assisted-living facilities, according to Kaiser Family Foundation data—one home did not begin testing residents and staff until after an employee had already died of COVID-19, as ProPublica reported. In June, a House subcommittee tasked with overseeing the country’s response to the coronavirus wrote a letter to the largest American nursing-home companies, and to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which regulates nursing homes; nationally, such facilities, the letter pointed out, still lack enough tests to meet the federal government’s recommendation that nursing homes test all residents and staff weekly. (In response to a request for comment, CMS said it was confident that all states had sufficient capacity for testing.)

And then there’s the issue of masks, which are considered another crucial element of stopping the spread of the coronavirus in nursing homes and elsewhere. Guidance on masks from CMS came much too late, Sloan said. According to a recent Reuters investigation, some nursing-home managers initially discouraged staff from wearing masks because they thought they wouldn’t help prevent infections.

Unlike those in Hong Kong, American nursing homes didn’t have months of masks stocked up. When the virus hit, they were tearing through their supplies at hundreds of times the rate they normally would. Hospitals, not nursing homes, were seen as the priority destination for the country’s precious reserves of masks. “We somehow expect individual nursing-home operators to compete against large hospitals and states in trying to get that equipment,” Konetzka said.

FEMA said it would ship supplies to nursing homes in May. But as Kaiser Health News reported, some homes received cloth masks instead of surgical ones or N95s, which are considered the gold standard for treating COVID-19 patients. (“FEMA did not ship N95 respirators or cotton masks as part of the nursing-home deliveries,” an agency spokesperson told me. “[The Health and Human Services Department] is providing cloth facial coverings as part of a separate, multipronged approach.”) Perhaps expectedly, months into the pandemic, many nursing homes ran out of masks and gowns. In early June, federal data showed that more than 250 nursing homes had no surgical masks and 800 more were a week away from running out.

To make matters worse, nursing homes across the U.S. took in COVID-19 patients from hospitals. In Minnesota, 77 percent of COVID-19 deaths have taken place in nursing homes, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Despite this, Minnesota hospitals discharged dozens of COVID-19 patients to nursing homes, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported in May. “Hospitals were running out of space,” Sloan said. “And so they were transferring people to nursing homes. And our nursing homes were saying, ‘You can’t give us people who have COVID unless you give us PPE.’”

Adding to the challenge is that it’s not clear whose problem the nursing-home shortcomings are. Considering CMS is tasked with nursing-home safety, if the agency doesn’t “have enough resources, they should be going to Congress and demanding those resources,” Andy Slavitt, the former acting administrator of CMS under President Barack Obama, told me.

In response to a request for comment, CMS said that although the agency does oversee facilities, nursing homes are themselves responsible for the health of residents and should work with state governments to procure PPE.

But nursing homes received different levels of help and guidance from states and localities. Some states helped nursing homes test all of their staff, for example, while others didn’t, Maggie Flynn, a reporter at Skilled Nursing News , told me. Only certain states have increased pandemic-relief funding to nursing homes, according to LeadingAge.

All told, this lack of government coordination has led to poor and delayed data collection on deaths and infections in nursing homes. CMS did not require facilities to report coronavirus infections and deaths that occurred prior to May 8, even though the first nursing-home outbreak began in February. When CMS did begin compiling nursing-home infection and death data, it was found to be riddled with errors. (In its response to me, CMS said it would be refining the data over time.)

Given the dearth of accurate federal data, the Kaiser Family Foundation and the COVID Tracking Project have been independently compiling lists of coronavirus infections and deaths in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities by state. Yet even there, gaps remain because not all states have been publicly reporting their nursing-home infection data.

As with so many other elements of the pandemic, the federal government and states could have learned from their previous failures on nursing homes. As COVID-19 ravaged care facilities along the East Coast all spring, officials in southern states, where infections are currently spiking, had months to prepare. Still, we’ll very likely see even more nursing-home deaths in the Sun Belt. “I’m very concerned that the explosion of cases in Florida, Texas, Arizona, and California will lead to a dramatic increase in cases in nursing homes,” the former Kansas Governor Mark Parkinson, now the head of the American Health Care Association, a nursing-home trade group, told me.

Reports from multiple states, including those presently experiencing large coronavirus outbreaks, paint a bleak picture of nursing-home readiness for a COVID-19 surge. Some facilities in Texas still don’t have the masks and the testing capacity they need, according to Patty Ducayet, the long-term care ombudsman for Texas. Dana Marie Kennedy, the state director of AARP Arizona, told me that while the state’s skilled-nursing facilities have received federal money for PPE, assisted-living facilities, which aren’t regulated by CMS, are struggling to get supplies. In fact, much of the money allocated for nursing homes in the coronavirus relief bill hasn’t been distributed yet, according to a letter sent by two members of Congress in June. And Parkinson said even that amount—$200 million—pales in comparison with what nursing homes actually need.

The humble mask, which officials have known to be an essential virus-fighting tool for months now, is still in short supply. According to a recent National Nurses United poll, 85 percent of nurses were still being asked to reuse PPE as of last month. Melinda Haschak, a licensed practical nurse in Connecticut, testified before the House Ways and Means Committee in late June that workers at her home still lack protective equipment. Parkinson told me that “the PPE shortage is still not over,” especially when it comes to N95 masks. That means many nursing homes are still on what’s called a “conservation protocol,” reusing gowns and masks—and potentially infecting themselves in the process. In Arizona, Melvin Hector told me of another home he worked in, which he declined to name, where he claims nurses were going between the rooms of different patients—some of whom had COVID-19—wearing the same gown, simply because there weren’t enough to go around.

Arizona, Florida, and Texas are now considered the epicenters of the pandemic. According to the latest CMS data (which, again, has had some reliability issues), out of 10,322 nursing homes in those states, 1,166, or about 11 percent, currently don’t have a one-week supply of N95 masks. Texas nursing homes are still reporting defective shipments of PPE from the federal government.

The same goes for tests. After the White House Coronavirus Task Force in May urged states to test all residents and staff of elder-care facilities, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said the state would not be doing so, the Tampa Bay Times reported. In Arizona, Kennedy said, “testing is totally inadequate.” Parkinson pointed out that beyond simply mandating the tests, states need to pay for them, because many homes can’t afford to. Meanwhile, Konetzka said that truly stopping outbreaks in nursing homes requires “testing at the right time with rapid results, such that people can be separated in time before the virus spreads through the facility.” And that requires even more staff to perform the tests.

Still, one of the strongest correlates of whether nursing homes experience outbreaks is whether the surrounding community has lots of COVID-19 cases—which is certainly the circumstance right now in the Sun Belt. Nursing-home staffers leave work, after all, and go to the grocery store, where they might brush up against someone who’s positive. When they return to work, the virus creeps in with them. “There’s a good chance that they’re going to come in contact with somebody, and that’s the most likely way that COVID-19 is going to get into a building in the first place,” Greg Shelley, the manager of the Harris County Long-Term Care Ombudsman Program at the Cizik School of Nursing at the University of Texas, told me. Already, the Arizona Republic reported in late June that a large senior community in Phoenix had an outbreak of the coronavirus, with 16 staffers and two residents testing positive.

Some experts say the best way to stop coronavirus outbreaks inside nursing homes, then, is to stop them outside of nursing homes first. But state and federal leaders have largely failed to do that too. In April, Texas Governor Greg Abbott prohibited local officials from issuing mandatory mask orders. Texas saw its highest number of daily deaths the day before Abbott decided to reopen stores, restaurants, and movie theaters at 25 percent capacity. In Florida and Arizona, too, governors have resisted statewide mask mandates. (The Arizona and Texas governors have since reversed course.)

That’s to say nothing of leadership higher up. Vice President Mike Pence held a large indoor rally, complete with maskless singing, at a church in Dallas last week as Texas hospitals filled to capacity. And aside from tweeting misleading statements about it, President Donald Trump has scaled back his engagement on the coronavirus.

Nursing homes are on their own when it comes to combatting the coronavirus, in other words. But then again, so is everyone else.

dragonfly9 · August 6, 2020, 4:03pm

Impassioned widow of a husband who died of Covid-19 writes a powerful obit - blaming Trump, Gov Abbott and those who have been negligent about wearing masks for her husband’s death.

Texas wife blames Trump and Gov. Abbott for husband’s COVID-19 death in viral obituary

August 4, 2020 / 1:09 PM / CBS News

A man from Texas died from COVID-19 on July 22 — and the obituary his wife wrote for him has now gone viral. In the obituary for David W. Nagy, published in the small local newspaper the Jefferson Jimplecute, his wife, Stacey Nagy blames his death on President Trump and Texas Governor Greg Abbott.

"David’s death was needless," his wife, Stacey Nagy, wrote. "The blame for his death and the deaths of all the other innocent people, falls on Trump, Abbott and all the other politicians who did not take this pandemic seriously and were more concerned with their popularity and votes than lives."

She also said others are to blame: "the many ignorant, self centered and selfish people who refused to follow the advice of the medical professionals, believing their ‘right’ not to wear a mask was more important than killing innocent people."

“Dave did everything he was supposed to do, but you did not. Shame on all of you, and may Karma find you all!” she wrote.

dragonfly9 · August 6, 2020, 4:09pm

More hotspot alerts as we and Birx/T’s administration continue to play whack-a-mole with this virus.

Many of the Sun Belt states have made substantial progress with their mitigation efforts,” Birx told state and local officials on Wednesday, according to a copy of the call obtained the Center for Public Integrity, referring to a slew of Southern states that experienced surges earlier this summer.

But Birx said that the percentage of coronavirus tests coming back positive is increasing in nine U.S. cities as well as California’s Central Valley.

"We are concerned that both Baltimore and Atlanta remain at a very high level. Kansas City, Portland, Omaha, of course what we talked about in the Central Valley,” Birx said. "We are seeing a slow uptick in test positivity in cases in places like Chicago, Boston and Detroit and D.C.”

Birx also said that Nebraska and California have moved into the red category, with more than 10 percent of tests coming back positive. And she noted that while Los Angeles saw improvements, there was significant movement of the virus up California’s Central Valley.

…

In another call obtained by the Center for Public Integrity last month, Birx warned of an uptick in 12 other U.S. cities, including Miami, New Orleans, Las Vegas, San Jose, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, Cleveland, Nashville, Pittsburgh, Columbus and Baltimore.

Thursday morning, Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert and member of the White House coronavirus task force, said that the infection rate is a “pretty good predictor” for potential surges.

“We’ve seen that in the Southern states as predictors,” Fauci said on CNN. “This is a predictor of trouble ahead.”

“You’ve got to get that base line down,” he added. “Everybody on the team of American citizens need to pull together. Because we’re all in this together.”

dragonfly9 · August 7, 2020, 12:34am

I believe whatever Andy Slavitt says for finds (former Medicare health expert/Obama)

And to see this test result - Asymptomatic people shed same amount of virus as those with symptoms means of course that those who do not know they have it are equally big spreaders.

dragonfly9 · August 7, 2020, 2:11am

Death rate going up…nothing is under control.

US Tops 2,000 Deaths In 24 Hours For First Time In Three Months: Johns Hopkins

AFP - Agence France Presse By AFP - Agence France Presse
August 6, 2020

The United States has recorded more than 2,000 coronavirus deaths in 24 hours, the highest number of daily fatalities in three months, Johns Hopkins University’s real-time tally showed Thursday.

The country, which has seen a major resurgence in coronavirus since the end of June, added 2,060 deaths in one day as well as more than 58,000 new cases, the Baltimore-based university showed at 8:30 pm (0030 GMT Friday).

The last time the US recorded more than 2,000 deaths in 24 hours was on May 7

@anon95374541 @MissJava - Might we put this under Coronavirus…please? thanks!

Windthin · August 7, 2020, 5:16pm

A vaccine, or a spike in deaths: How America can build herd immunity to the coronavirus

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/health/coronavirus-herd-immunity-simulation-vaccine/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most

This has some amazing simulations that show how herd immunity works.

Windthin · August 9, 2020, 7:11pm

Tracking the Real Coronavirus Death Toll in the United States

Windthin · August 9, 2020, 10:42pm

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2020/08/09/nine-people-test-positive-coronavirus-georgia-school-where-photos-packed-hallways-went-viral/

Windthin · August 10, 2020, 7:41pm

Can somebody move this to the coronavirus thread?

Duke researchers put masks, face coverings to the test

The study shows basically that N95s are best, surgical are good, cloth masks are pretty okay, bandanas provide pretty much no protection at all, and neck fleeces actually make MORE droplets somehow, much to their surprise!

More than 97,000 children tested positive for Covid-19 in the last two weeks of July, report says

Another study said children younger than 5 carry a higher viral load than adults, raising even more questions about their role in transmission.

anon95374541 · August 11, 2020, 12:02am

dragonfly9 · August 11, 2020, 1:35am

Just so infuriating isn’t it? These groups with ‘magical thinking’ or ‘fantasyland’ adherents within the nation are flaunting their rebellious streak - ‘you can’t make me put on a mask’, or ‘miss my fun’ is just what Hillary called it - deplorable.

We really have been on a precipice. With 5 million cases and counting, you wonder what the duration period is for each sickness, and how much are those who are spreading it is? Isn’t it spreadable by a factor of for every 1 you times 1.5 people 1x1.5 per victim.

I can not help but think there is an alternative motive working here…aside from helter skelter, win the election at any cost.

Is it possible…

‘they’ are trying to get us to herd immunity…but NYC is the closest and I believe less that 15% or their population has had it, and therefore set up for others. But I think the herd immunity has to be about 50% start protecting others.
Or just a form of eugenics - culling out brown and blacks - people of color because that is the republican way to mastermind and curate their voters. Sorry to offend anyone, just spit balling. And even Rep Karen Bass (D-CA) suggested that this may be so…in one of her community calls.
Disruption…
Placing T’s positive spin on everything…to create unbelievers in any danger in an effort to get him re-elected.

Unreal…every day the same groundhog’s day. No end in sight. Except there is an election.

Excerpt from above article Stet Article

Ehresmann and others in public health are flummoxed by the phenomenon of people refusing to acknowledge the risk the virus poses.

“Just this idea of, ‘I just don’t want to believe it so therefore it’s not going to be true’ — honestly, I have not really dealt with that as it relates to disease before,” she said.

Buckee, the Harvard expert, wonders if the magical thinking that seems to have infected swaths of the country is due to the fact many of the people who have died were elderly. For many Americans, she said, the disease has not yet touched their lives — but the movement restrictions and other response measures have.

“I think if children were dying, this would be … a different situation, quite honestly,” she said.

Epidemiologist Michael Mina despairs that an important chance to wrestle the virus under control is being lost, as Americans ignore the realities of the pandemic in favor of trying to resume pre-Covid life.

“We just continue to squander every bit of opportunity we get with this epidemic to get it under control,’’ said Mina, an assistant professor in Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and associate medical director of clinical microbiology at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

macro · August 11, 2020, 2:51am

I’m sorry but I feel that the time to get the epidemic under control in America is way past the point of no return until such time as a vaccine is available. The thing is you need more than just an efficient testing regime available free to everyone. The test results need to be available within 24 hours (not 2 weeks as I have heard instances of in the US) and the person with the suspected infection needs to self isolate at least until the results are back. It can take up to 2 weeks for a person infected to actually test positive, and during that time they can be shedding the virus and unknowingly infecting others. You also need to have a gold standard contact tracing program, ensure proper isolation for all those who come in contact with the person who has tested positive, and that means going back over a period of up to 10 days prior. Your super-spreader events such as open bars etc do not help.
According to the Worldometer Coronavirus web page the US has around 2.6 million active cases today and gains around around 50,000+ cases per day at present.

That is an enormous task of tracking all the contacts of those infected.
For a country such as ours with just 5 million people and a peak infection rate of some 100+ per day ( where it is a standing joke that everybody knows everyone else), it requires a staff of some thousand trained personnel to sort each source of infections into “bubbles” to isolate and contain the virus, and to contact all those who had come in contact with the infected people, to ensure that they were tested and isolated too. Scale that up to a country with a population of 330+ million with 50,000 cases and you are are talking massive staff numbers.
We also have the benefit of having a unified Health system that is public funded, and of course, available to all. It was possible for our response to be co-ordinated across all districts, and for PPE etc, to be redistributed to the areas most in need. Furthermore, the Government ensured that all persons were adequately funded, so that no one was out of pocket for any reason whether it was a small or large business that had to close, or a worker had to stay home. One of the most amazing benefits to come out of the lockdown was that many of our homeless people were finally housed in the motels that were left vacant, because all travel and tourism stopped. Some who had been sleeping rough for up to 20 years suddenly found themselves in a proper bed - and they like it!
It took almost three months to ensure that there was no community transmission at all, before considering the country opened up slowly again from lockdown. Coming down a mountain is as difficult, if not more so, than going up. We have currently 22 active cases in the country, all in managed isolation, and all returnees from overseas. Anyone entering NZ must go immediately into managed isolation for a period of 2 weeks, and undertake 2 covid tests. One after 3 days and the other after 12 days. All the 50 odd cases that have been detected in the past 103 days have been people returning to NZ, and still in Managed Isolation. (over 70,000 people have returned to NZ since the beginning of the lockdown. Up until today there was no charge on a person returning to NZ for their enforced isolation, however those returning now for a short stay (ie visit family or a wedding) will be required to meet some of the cost of their Managed Isolation. Obviously if a person does test positive for Covid-19 they are immediately transferred into a quarantine facility until such time as they are free of the Virus.

dragonfly9 · August 11, 2020, 3:31am

And you New Zealanders got to it immediately and hammered out all the variables. US is haphazard at best without strong leadership and direction.

Yes…vaccines and 24 hr or less testing. That would help.

macro · August 11, 2020, 4:16am

Yes we all here really do feel for you all over there (and by “all here” - I do mean all here.) There is not one person in this country who is unaware of the trials you all now face and we hope and pray that reason and sanity may prevail on the 3rd Nov, and that somehow the situation will not deteriorate beyond hopeless before the 20 Jan next year.
If you are fortunate enough to have a new Administration in the new year, they will be faced with an enormous task, and the country will have to accept that it is going to take some time to turn the 4 years of Malpractice around. I also hope, that there will be a cleansing of the Enablers (you know who I mean) who have stood by and watched this rolling catastrophe and have done nothing, because if that doesn’t happen then I cannot see much of a future ahead. 400+ Bills sitting in the Senate is an abomination.

Windthin · August 11, 2020, 4:47am

The sad fact is, as much as some states want to do something, no one state, even those as rich as New York and California, has the money, capacity, or network to replace what they’re lacking in leadership and resources from the federal government.

Trump knows that, and he didn’t care so long as it was hurting blue states. Now that it’s hurting red states, they’re in a bind, because Trump can never, ever admit he was wrong.

macro · August 11, 2020, 5:35am

The sad fact is, as much as some states want to do something, no one state, even those as rich as New York and California, has the money, capacity, or network to replace what they’re lacking in leadership and resources from the federal government.

We are seeing a similar situation happening across the ditch from here in Victoria Australia.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-11/coronavirus-live-blog-tuesday-august-11-victoria-19-deaths/12543432

Yes exactly. and that point was well made in the recently published book by his niece Mary Trump.

macro · August 11, 2020, 10:10am

Excuse me but
Bugger!

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has announced Auckland will go into lockdown and the rest of the country will go into level 2

It comes after four cases of community transmission from the same family were confirmed - after 102 days without any.

Ardern and director general of health Ashley Bloomfield announced the news tonight and an alert was sent to New Zealanders’ phones.

As of noon tomorrow, Auckland will move to level 3 for three days until midnight on Friday.

dragonfly9 · August 11, 2020, 6:09pm

Yes…you guys are on it.

AUCKLAND, New Zealand — Auckland is locking down and the rest of New Zealand faces lesser restrictions for 72 hours after a four members of the same family tested positive for COVID-19, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced Tuesday.

Why it matters: It’s the first cases not in managed isolation for 102 days, Ardern said at a news briefing.

“Together we have beaten the virus before. We can do so again.”
— Ardern

What to expect: From noon Wednesday until midnight Friday in Auckland, in-person school lessons will be closed to all but the children of essential workers, non-essential businesses can open, but there must be no physical interaction with customers and the Aucklanders are advised to work from home.

Those who outside of Auckland will not be allowed to travel to New Zealand’s most populous city for the lockdown period.

Social distancing measures will be reintroduced and larger gatherings, such as for events like funerals, will also be limited across the country.

What happened: NZ’s top health official Ashley Bloomfield added that a young child was among those to test positive. The family member who initially tested positive for the virus has no history of overseas travel, he said.

Flashback: New Zealand beats coronavirus

Windthin · August 11, 2020, 8:11pm

Wave of evictions sweeps US amid impasse over coronavirus protections

Moratorium in federal housing expired at end of July

Trump stopgap measures seen as of doubtful efficacy

A huge wave of evictions is gathering pace across the US, with tens of millions of people facing the looming prospect of being ejected from their homes with the expiry of federal government protections.

A moratorium on evictions from most federally backed housing, along with a $600-a-week unemployment benefit, helped ensure many Americans avoided being made homeless from an economic crash sparked by the coronavirus pandemic.

But these protections expired at the end of July and a slew of evictions are starting to unfurl across the country, while party leaders are at an impasse over further economic relief and a slew of stopgap measures from Donald Trump are on an uncertain path.

A picture shared widely on the internet described “eviction cairns” in New Orleans, showing belongings heaped beside the road, reportedly from a family of six that had been evicted from their home after being unable to pay rent.

According to the Aspen Institute, a non-profit thinktank, at least 30 million Americans out of the 110 million who live in rental housing are at risk of eviction by the end of September.

The organization warned the Covid-19 crisis will cause “long-term harm to renter families and individuals, disruption of the affordable housing market and destabilization of communities across the United States”.

The lapsing of eviction protections means that many people, unable to afford rent or mortgages, have been plunged into a precariously vulnerable situation. “There’s tremendous urgency,” Diane Yentel, president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, told NPR. “There are millions of renters who can’t sleep at night because they don’t know what they’re going to do if they become homeless.”

The fresh disaster to stem from the pandemic is set to reach all corners of the US. A study by UCLA found that as many as 120,000 households in Los Angeles county, including up to 184,000 children, will probably become homeless when evictions resume.

Meanwhile, in South Carolina, 52% of renters cannot afford their rent and risk eviction, with about 185,000 evictions possible across the state by the end of the year, according to Stout Risius Ross, a consultancy firm.

“A lot of the safety net things that people relied on are gone,” said John Pollock, coordinator of the National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel. Stripped of federal assistance, and with many states also scaling back help, many people are having to rely upon savings or credit in order to retain their homes.

On Saturday, Trump signed an executive order on evictions that the White House said would address the situation. In the action, the president vowed to defer payroll taxes, waive student loan payments and secure unemployment benefits, albeit at a lower rate of $400 a week. The order also pledged to help renters facing eviction, although all of the measures were provisional on other actions or studies, and sowed confusion and controversy about certainty and timescale.

“I’m protecting people from eviction,” Trump said on Saturday. “You’ve been hearing a lot about eviction, and the Democrats don’t want to do anything having to do with protecting people from eviction.”

However, the order doesn’t actually extend the moratorium on evictions, nor provide any rental assistance to those unable to pay. Instead, it orders federal agencies, such as the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, to look at options for protecting renters. Housing advocates attacked the order as a toothless gesture.

“The president alluded to ‘stopping evictions’, but the executive order fails to provide any meaningful relief to the millions of renters who are at risk of losing their homes,” Yentel said. “President Trump failed even to use his existing authority to reinstate the limited federal eviction moratorium that expired on July 24, which covered 30% of renters nationwide.”

Deferring evictions is only one part of the action required, advocates argue. Even though many landlords have been barred from removing renters unable to pay until now, the owed amount of rent has continued to accumulate, meaning that tenants will face a huge bill once protections are lifted. About half of landlords are small, family-run operations, meaning that they, along with renters, may require substantial financial assistance to avoid ruin.