"Experts express optimism about COVID-19 pandemic coming to a close" by Dasia Moore Globe Staff, November 21, 2020
I'm told the ‘‘the end is in sight.’’
While the coronavirus continued to rip through the country and daily counts of new infections rose to record heights, the seemingly impossible occurred: good news.
Before continuing I'm going to put aside the obvious distortions in the above and point out the fact that if the above is in fact true and not the total distortion that it is, then the policies of masking, distancing, and lockdowns has utterly failed! They are getting near-complete compliance in this state.
Promising trials from Pfizer and Moderna suggest that highly effective COVID-19 vaccines could be available in a matter of weeks, bringing the end of the pandemic in view for the first time since March, but the end of the pandemic does not necessarily mean the eradication of COVID-19, epidemiologists said.
The closing act of this public health calamity is likely to be a gradual return to a new normal, with infections, restrictions, and public health fears falling away one by one rather than all at once. Getting there will not be as simple as getting a shot, but with effective vaccines, robust distribution plans, widespread testing, and continued social distancing through the winter — all possible but hardly assured — our exit from the pandemic could come much sooner than many dared hope.
It's like they are throwing the entire thing in your face with the "closing act" of the staged and scripted production.
“The virus is not likely to go away, maybe ever, but certainly not for a long time,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, “but that said, we’re not going to be living like this forever, and in fact, I expect by springtime that things will start really getting much, much better, and then it’ll continue to get better, and at some point, we will no longer feel like we’re living in the middle of a pandemic.”
The wave of optimism surrounding the pandemic’s end seems in some ways oddly timed, as it coincides with the worst wave of infections the United States has seen thus far. In the past week, the country recorded over 1 million new cases.
With Biden's inauguration, too!
Mission accomplished, right?
Massachusetts’ daily count of new cases last week averaged over 2,000, the highest level of new infections the state has seen since spring, but in the past week, two vaccine developers have announced breakthroughs with the potential to help prevent future surges. Drugmakers Moderna and Pfizer have said their vaccines showed more than 94 percent efficacy in trials — meaning they reduced the occurrence of disease in vaccinated people by 94 percent compared to people who were given a placebo shot.
Anyone who believes that, I gotta bridge to sell ya'; however, in all seriousness why do you need a vaccine that a) won't prevent you from becoming infected, b) won't prevent you from transmitting, and c) isn't needed due to the IFR?
This far exceeds scientists’ hopes for a coronavirus vaccine. For comparison, flu shots have usually been less than 50 percent effective in recent years. Good news from Moderna and Pfizer also gives reason to hope that other drugmakers, including Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca, will also produce highly effective vaccines.
The news drew hopeful remarks from Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert. If all goes as planned with these two vaccines, as many as 20 million Americans could be inoculated against the disease by the end of the year, he said at a Tuesday virtual event. While an impressive starting point, that number represents about 6 percent of the US population and barely exceeds the country’s 18 million health care workers.
There are limitations to what we know about these vaccines, experts said. Generally speaking, vaccines can protect against infection itself or against symptomatic illness. It remains unclear which type of protection the Moderna and Pfizer coronavirus vaccines provide. If they only prevent illness, not infection, vaccinated people could still spread the disease to others.
Here's something: what if the virus is actually in the vaccine, because they are allegedly injecting mRNA messaging to create the alleged COVID spike protein in order to fight it?
How long immunity lasts after vaccination is also an open question, and even if these details work out favorably, mass-producing the vaccines and distributing them to the nation’s hospitals, primary care practices, and pharmacies will be a herculean task.
If it isn't permanent immunity, then what good is it?
“The end will be more slow and ambiguous. It won’t be like the end of a war where there’s an announcement and then it’s over,” said Helen Jenkins, a Boston University epidemiologist. “As people get vaccinated, we’ll start to slowly see reduction in transmission.”
The needles are the point in the war against humanity!
The timeline for that reduction depends almost entirely on vaccine distribution, Jenkins said. There is also reason to worry that a considerable number of Americans will be hesitant to get vaccinated, with one survey showing significant variation in coronavirus vaccine trust from state to state.
Besides hurdles on the way to mass-vaccination, some characteristics of this global COVID-19 outbreak make an abrupt, clear ending unlikely, experts said.
Dr. Nahid Bhadelia was a physician on the ground during the West African Ebola epidemic. The World Health Organization declared that a country’s Ebola outbreak had ended only when the country saw no new cases for 42 days — two times the length of Ebola’s incubation period.
“What you want to see is that there’s no community transmission of the disease,” said Bhadelia, an associate professor of medicine at Boston University School of Medicine and an infectious disease physician at Boston Medical Center. “It’s not going to be that easy with COVID-19, because it’s so widespread, there’s asymptomatic cases, and there’s even a question of whether COVID will go away.”
Putting aside wether COVID even exists, the good doctor's claim has been debunked by science!
Instead of being eradicated, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 could continue to cycle through the world’s population at intervals, like influenza viruses and other coronaviruses, Bhedalia explained.
Because it is!
You've been hoodwinked, folks!
In that case, the pandemic will end when enough people are vaccinated that population level herd immunity thwarts COVID-19′s ability to spread easily, but significant and positive changes to daily life could come well before that endpoint, said Jha, the Brown University dean.
“Once you have 20 to 30 percent of people vaccinated . . . it’ll really start slowing down. We will not be seeing these massive outbreaks they way we’re seeing now.” Jha said. “Once you get to 40 or 50 percent vaccination, it’s going to feel totally different.”
Then those of us who don't want it won't need it, right?
Of course, herd immunity can be gained the old-fashioned way (despite WHO censorship) and probably already has been achieved given all the undiagnosed cases claimed by the pre$$.
Jha said that by the beginning of spring, parts of the United States might be in a position to reopen more workplaces. In late spring or summer, he said, indoor dining and other indoor leisure activities could be safe and comfortable. Higher-risk activities in crowded spaces like indoor concert venues might take longer, perhaps upward of a year.
Though experts varied on how quickly these things might happen, with some saying it could be summer before a shift toward normalcy begins, all agreed on the rough outline: As vaccination increases, major outbreaks will decrease in size and frequency and restrictions will gradually lift.
Our new normal will not be without its reminders of the pandemic, experts said. A high level of public health surveillance will be crucial to monitoring and preventing outbreaks. Taking a rapid test before eating out or starting work could well be part of our new normal, and because COVID-19 could recede at different times in different countries based on vaccine availability, travel screening and some level of international border restrictions could remain in place for years to come.
You see that?
“If you haven’t gotten deaths down to zero and eradicated the virus, then you can potentially have outbreaks take off again,” said Zoë McLaren, an associate professor of public policy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County whose research focuses on public health, “but as long as we have enough precautions that we can catch any outbreak, then we can resume normal activities.”
It's basically an unachievable goal since sickness and disease will always claim some, and that's how they will keep this fraudulent crime rolling.
Vaccines alone are not guaranteed to deliver the United States to a new normal, experts warned. The coming months will be a crucial time for developing an exit strategy for life post-pandemic — and for minimizing further unnecessary deaths.
Not the old normal.
Experts said the federal government should plan and fund vaccine distribution, launch campaigns to encourage vaccination, and invest in more widespread testing. Social distancing restrictions, including mask-wearing and limited group sizes, also need to be encouraged, they said.
“We have every reason to be hopeful that a vaccine plus coordinated federal leadership . . . can get us to a new normal relatively quickly,” said Sam Scarpino, a Northeastern University epidemiologist. “If we do not take non-pharmaceutical interventions . . waiting on a vaccine alone will probably take a year or more, but if you imagine taking those effective vaccines and layering them with the tools we have, there’s no reason we couldn’t kind of enter a new normal exiting the winter.”
Ordinary people also have a part to play in speeding along the pandemic’s end, experts said. They encouraged both caution and optimism: Hunker down now with the knowledge that safe gatherings may be only a few months away.
“We want to step up the social distancing, mask-wearing, and testing precautions that we take because the end is in sight,” McLaren said. “If we can prevent infections over the next few months, those will be clearly lives saved.”
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I'm also told there “will be a new normal [because] the pandemic has jump-started the change.”
The Nation
"States that imposed few restrictions now have the worst outbreaks" by Lauren Leatherby and Richard Harris New York Times, November 21, 2020
Coronavirus cases are rising in almost every U.S. state, but the surge is worst now in places where leaders neglected to keep up forceful virus containment efforts or failed to implement basic measures like mask mandates in the first place, according to a New York Times analysis of data from the University of Oxford.
Actually, it's the exact opposite given that California has gone into full lockdown while places that were open are not seeing a rise in the fraudulent case levels, and cases around the world surged after masked mandates!
Outbreaks are comparatively smaller in states where efforts to contain the virus were stronger over the summer and fall — potential good news for leaders taking action now. States and cities are reinstating restrictions and implementing new ones; in recent days, the governors of Iowa, North Dakota and Utah imposed mask mandates for the first time since the outbreak began.
They conveniently disregard and ignore the experience of South Dakota, which never shut down.
The index comes from Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government, where researchers track the policies — or lack thereof — governments use to contain the virus and protect residents, such as contact tracing, mask mandates and restrictions on businesses and gatherings. Researchers aggregate those indicators and assign a number from 0 to 100 to each government’s total response.
Did social ju$tu$ protest factor in anywhere?
At its highest level of containment efforts, New York state scored an 80 on the index. At the beginning of November, most states were scoring in the 40s and 50s. Although many have taken fresh steps to contain the virus since then, the Times analysis compares cases and hospitalizations for a given date to a state’s index score from two weeks before, since researchers say it is reasonable to expect a lag between a policy’s implementation and its outcome.
Most states imposed tight restrictions in the spring even if they did not have bad outbreaks then. After reopening early, some Sun Belt states, including Arizona and Texas, imposed restrictions again after case counts climbed. Now Midwestern states have among the worst outbreaks. Many have also done the least to contain the virus.
When cases first peaked in the United States in the spring, there was no clear correlation between containment strategies and case counts because most states enacted similar lockdown policies at the same time, and in New York and some other states, “those lockdowns came too late to prevent a big outbreak because that’s where the virus hit first,” said Thomas Hale, associate professor of global public policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, who leads the Oxford tracking effort.
A relationship between policies and the outbreak’s severity has become more clear as the pandemic has progressed.
“States that have kept more control policies in a more consistent way — New England states, for example — have avoided a summer surge and are now having a smaller fall surge, as opposed to states that rolled them back very quickly, like Florida or Texas,” Hale said. “I think timing really matters for the decisions.”
PFFT!
Not in my state!
The worst outbreaks in the country now are in places where policymakers did the least to prevent transmission, according to the Oxford index. States with stronger policy responses over the long run are seeing comparatively smaller outbreaks.
Looking at one state at a time, it is possible to track the relationship between coronavirus policy and public health. When the outbreak slammed the New York City area in March and April, leaders locked down. Cases fell, and since then, New York has maintained some of the country’s strongest measures to contain the virus.
New infections have stayed among the lowest in the country, adjusted for population — though cases now are rising in New York as they are everywhere.
Texas locked down in the spring, when it had relatively few cases, then reopened quickly. When the state faced a surge of cases over the summer, the governor closed bars and placed limits on restaurant capacity. Many local leaders went further. Cases dropped in late July, but since then Texas has eased efforts to contain the virus, and cases are rising again.
Many states in the Upper Midwest and Mountain West resisted more stringent control measures, like limits on gatherings and mask mandates. North Dakota, for example, made few efforts to contain the virus. After briefly ramping up restrictions — closing bars, restaurants, gyms, theaters and schools — in March, when most other states did, Gov. Doug Burgum reopened the state nearly fully in May.
Now nearly 1 in 10 North Dakotans have tested positive — about one-third of those in the past two weeks — and 1 in 1,000 have died of the virus, but state-level policy choices do not explain everything: New Mexico and Rhode Island have maintained some of the country’s strongest containment measures, according to the Oxford index, yet both states are battling serious outbreaks now.
Yeah, Rhode Island is now a hot spot, according to the script, and it is spreading to New Hampshire as my printed page comes to an end.
The wave of new restrictions in the United States follows national and regional lockdowns in Europe, where outbreaks surged past their spring peaks but cases per capita remained lower than many Upper Midwest states. A couple weeks into those lockdowns, countries with new restrictions may be seeing results; the rate of new daily cases has begun to level off or drop in France, Spain, Germany and Italy, though it continues to rise in the United Kingdom.
Hale said the Oxford data makes it clear that acting quickly and forcefully is the best shot governments have to combat the virus, and the more swiftly they can act, the shorter any lockdown-style policies need to be.
What a crock of shit!
The policies have failed!
Some countries that implemented fast, early restrictions and robust test-and-trace programs have seen the most success.....
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When no means yes:
"No, a negative coronavirus test does not mean you can safely socialize" by Claire Cain Miller, Katherine J. Wu and Margot Sanger-Katz New York Times, November 21, 2020
In the lead-up to Thanksgiving, Americans are no strangers to planning, but this year, as they prepare to let turkeys brine and pie crusts thaw, people across the country are waiting for something extra: a coronavirus test they hope can clear them to mingle with loved ones.
Many people consider a negative coronavirus test to be a ticket to freely socialize without precautions, but scientists and doctors say this is dangerously misguided. It is one precautionary measure but does not negate the need for others, like quarantining, masking and distancing.
The main reason is that a test gives information about the level of the virus at one point in time. A person could be infected but not have enough virus yet for it to register on a test. Or, a person may become infected in the hours or days after taking a test. Also, the tests do not have 100% accuracy.
Or this could all be a crock of shit!
I mean look at them!
The tests aren't accurate?
NO KIDDING!
The above paragraph is nothing more than agenda-shoveling garbage, and insulting garbage at that. A negative test means you may still be positive anyway, and a positive test is proof-positive of infection.
The bait and switch shell game knows no bounds!
“If you require all of your guests to email you a negative test result before your Thanksgiving dinner, it will definitely decrease the risk of an outbreak — but not completely,” said Dr. KJ Seung, chief of strategy and policy for the COVID-19 response at Partners in Health, yet this is a common misperception contact tracers hear when talking to people, he said.
Partners in Health is a Clinton racket.
The experts agreed that tests were very useful for one thing: If someone receives a positive test, that person knows to stay home and isolate, but a negative test, while helpful, is not sufficient, said Dr. Esther Choo, an emergency medicine physician and a professor at Oregon Health and Science University. A test “filters out those who are positive and definitely shouldn’t be there,” she said. “Testing negative basically changes nothing about behavior. It still means wear a mask, distance, avoid indoors if you can.”
They really have you hopping with the bullshit everywhere, don't they?
Different tests for the coronavirus give different information.
SIGH!
Laboratory tests that rely on a technique called polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, can detect the virus when it’s present even at very low levels, but it might take a couple of days to return results, leaving time for someone to be exposed. Antigen tests are faster, less expensive and more convenient — they can deliver results in a matter of minutes — but are also more prone to missing the virus when it’s scarce. To receive emergency authorization from the Food and Drug Administration, antigen tests for the coronavirus need to detect only 80% of the infections found by PCR. Many rapid tests also aren’t authorized for use in people who don’t have symptoms.
Testing is supposed to be the key, and yet it is inaccurate, and the PCR test is a complete sham!
The designer of the test said it was not to be used to diagnose infectiousness, and it doesn't specifically identify COVID-19.
It depends on how many cycles they gin up your genetic material, and they are turning over 90% false positives, and how nice of the New York Times to ignore their own reporting.
The entire scam is about CONTROL, not COVID!
In some cases, a person who tests negative with an antigen test might test positive by PCR — raising the risk that a negative antigen test could give someone a false sense of security en route to Thanksgiving dinner, said Paige Larkin, a clinical microbiologist at NorthShore University HealthSystem in Chicago, where she specializes in infectious disease diagnostics.
“A negative result is a snapshot in time,” Larkin said. “It’s telling you that, at that exact second you are tested, the virus was not detected. It does not mean you’re not infected.”
You could be sick the very next second!
Good Lord, is there no limit to the amount of BS they expect us to believe, or is it just throw it out there so they can refer back to it later?
After infiltrating a person’s body, the virus can take several days to build up, and in the meantime, there may not be enough virus for a test to detect it, but the person could still be infected or contagious in the interim. A person who tests negative one day might turn positive just a day later, or even an hour later. People can spread the virus in the days before they first start feeling ill, and can also spread the virus even if they never develop symptoms.
The last part regarding asymptomatic transmission is a lie, and the timelines they suggest are insane.
The New York Times should be EMBARRASSED for having put this out, and the Globe should be ashamed of itself for running it.
“The challenge then for the individual is that a negative test today does not mean that a person will be negative tomorrow or the day after that,” said Natalie Dean, an assistant professor of biostatistics at the University of Florida.
Taking multiple tests over a period of days gives a clearer answer, but experts cautioned that no test — regardless of how many times it is taken in succession — can definitively determine whether someone infected by the coronavirus is contagious, or no longer poses a transmission risk to other people.
It makes you sick, doesn't it?
The October outbreak at the White House is a good example of what can happen when a group of people rely heavily on testing and ignore other strategies to limit the spread of the virus.
In an informal survey of 670 epidemiologists, just 6% said that if they recently tested negative for the virus, they would be comfortable spending time indoors with others without precautions. Twenty-nine percent said they would do so if everyone also used masks and stayed distant, and a full 64% said that even if they tested negative, they would not be comfortable spending time indoors with people they don’t live with.
Still, it’s often unrealistic to avoid other people for months on end. People need to work and take care of their basic needs, and they also crave connection with family and friends. Risk is a spectrum, not binary, and there are ways to decrease it, experts said.
Dr. Michael Mina, an epidemiologist and immunologist at Harvard, said that at this point in the pandemic people couldn’t be expected to eliminate coronavirus risk entirely. He compared it to the risk of a car accident. To avoid all risk, people wouldn’t get in a car at all. Seat belts, air bags and adherence to traffic laws all cut down on risk, but they don’t mean someone is completely safe — and people don’t forgo using a seat belt just because the car has air bags. Coronavirus precautions like testing, distancing and masking work in the same way, he said.
Before gathering with others, Mina said, people could combine a negative test with a two-week quarantine if they’re able, and have a frank conversation with older family members about the risk and whether they’re willing to attend. At a gathering, he said, risk mitigation strategies might include keeping dinner short, hosting the event outdoors, wearing a mask when not eating and giving air hugs instead of touching.
That is where the print copy ended, and the criminal experts they turn are sickening!
“Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, said in a New York Times interview with Elisabeth Rosenthal. “The risk that you have, if everyone is tested before you get together to sit down for dinner, dramatically decreases. It might not ever be zero but, you know, we don’t live in a completely risk-free society.”
Fauci, however, will not be seeing his three adult daughters this Thanksgiving.
Avoiding any contact with other people for a week or more before taking a test is a powerful tool, said Jeffrey Townsend, a professor of biostatistics at the Yale School of Public Health. Not only does it decrease exposure, but it also gives the virus more opportunity to reach detectable levels in infected people, his research has found. “You can do more quarantine, and it is quite helpful,” he said, “but the test on exit really helps, and it really drops your chance.”
Townsend will be celebrating this Thanksgiving at home with his wife and children. Even though he studies testing protocols, he has never taken a coronavirus test himself, because he has stayed at home throughout the pandemic except for urgent needs.
Oh, look, another for thee not for me a$$hole!!
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{@@##$$%%^^&&}
"COVID-19 testing in Mass. is ‘far short’ of levels needed to stop the spread; The Massachusetts High Technology Council recommends that federal, state, and local governments develop a systematic, expanded testing regime using multiple kinds of tests" by Jon Chesto Globe Staff, November 23, 2020
Members of the state’s high-tech business community on Monday urged the state and the rest of the nation to step up the amount of COVID-19 testing, saying the number of tests is still falling far short of what is needed to win the fight against the coronavirus.
A virtual panel discussion hosted by the Massachusetts High Technology Council made the case for a broader and more methodical approach to testing the population than what’s being done now.
You can shove your f**king flawed and faulty tests.
One key issue the experts on the panel identified: the benefits of testing asymptomatic individuals who might be carrying the virus. Many people getting COVID-19 tests right now, they said, already have symptoms, but a broader survey of the population is necessary to curb the disease.
Another takeaway: A ramped-up testing infrastructure will remain crucial to public health, well after vaccines are widely available.
It's your "new normal," folks, and even if the asymptomatic are carrying the virus they are not infectious and have immunity!
“It’s not at the pace we would have expected,” said Donna Hochberg, a partner at consultancy Health Advances who leads the firm’s diagnostics practice. “Testing really does help control the pandemic.”
Bain Capital cochair Steve Pagliuca, who leads the tech council’s COVID-19 response and recovery efforts, hosted the Monday event. The main goal of the event was to educate employers and public leaders about the continued need to focus on testing strategies even as the fight against COVID-19 enters a new phase with the arrival of vaccines.
In its latest report, the council recommended that federal, state, and local governments develop a systematic, expanded testing regime using multiple kinds of tests and employing public-private partnerships.
That is Great Reset fa$ci$t $hit!
Pagliuca, also a co-owner of the Boston Celtics, noted how the number of tests taking place is still inadequate even in Massachusetts — a state that is considered a leader in this regard.
They lost a legend and 12-time NBA champion (one the most interesting men in the world) because of COVID and had to change jerseys and close the bar because of the infection.
They won't have to $weat it, though. After a $urpri$e turnaround, they took the lead and blew out the opponent and the Globe was there to document it all.
“We’re actually testing very few people in the general population,” Pagliuca said. “It’s far short of the levels being recommended to stop the spread.”
The second wave of the virus has indeed begun, and many experts say it is happening at a faster clip with broader geographic reach than they initially envisioned, but “proactive surveillance testing” could be critical to get this wave under control, Pagliuca said.
F**k off, Pags!
Thermo Fisher Scientific chief executive Marc Casper said a nationwide testing strategy — similar but on a bigger scale to how universities use COVID-19 testing — could make a real difference. Labs across the country could process as many as 40 million PCR tests (the highly accurate tests that identify the virus’s genetic material) a week, but only about 10 million tests a week are actually being conducted, he said.
Casper’s company, a giant diagnostics maker based in Waltham, could produce as many as 20 million tests a week in the United States given its current manufacturing capacity. While the demand for testing is strong, Casper said, it isn’t catching up with the available supply. “We’re probably selling at half that rate,” he said. “If you went to a [coordinated testing] strategy, . . . there would be some bumps in the road in matching supply and demand, but they would get sorted out.”
In Massachusetts, at least, the number of tests continues to increase, and has cleared 100,000 on a handful of days this month, according to the latest state data.
These local numbers will likely continue to grow. The Baker administration on Monday announced plans to roughly double the testing of staff at all long-term care facilities; tests are also being sent to these facilities to be used on visitors now. This follows an announcement last week that tests would be distributed in public school districts across the state.
Baker, in his daily news conference, said the state is in talks with “a number of providers about expanding lab capacity,” and he expects more capacity “around the middle of December.”
He said there were 110,280 tests reported Sunday, part of a “colossal increase” in recent days that might be related to the upcoming holidays.
An increase in tests is an increase in cases!
Meanwhile, the private sector is responding to the demand for more testing. The co-working space CIC started selling tests at its Main Street location in Cambridge a few weeks ago, for example, and on Monday, Logan Airport commercial landlord New England Development announced that XpresSpa Group has opened its testing facility in Terminal E for passengers (for a fee), in addition to the airport and airline workers who were already using it.
During the tech council’s presentation on Monday, National Basketball Association executive David Weiss said daily PCR testing was instrumental to the success of the 2020 NBA playoffs, held in a quarantine-style “bubble” in Orlando. Players weren’t the only ones tested. So were hotel workers, bus drivers, and everyone else who came in contact with the players. Not one player is believed to have caught COVID-19 during the time they played in the bubble.
“Testing was critical for that,” Weiss said. “It allowed us to identify dozens of people who would have been coming in . . . and [remove] them from that group.”
Also see:
"A small number of protesters carrying signs and shouting into megaphones blocked at least two buses chartered by the NBA from briefly from entering the Walt Disney World campus on Saturday night, with the group saying it wanted LeBron James, Russell Westbrook and other top players to take notice. The group blocked charter buses carrying members of the news media and some NBA staff, but no players or team personnel. Among their chants: “Black Lives Matter” and “LeBron can you help us?” Some also carried signs with messages such as “Russell Stand With Us.” The protesters assembled near one of the entrances and were not inside the so-called bubble, where teams, NBA staff and other have been for more than two months in some cases for the resumption of the season. They appeared to have gathered on a road that is open to the public, then stopped buses on an access road near a primary entrance to the resort. All entrances to the bubble are secured by law enforcement, security officers or both. It was not known if the protesters were able to be seen by any players....."
So the BUBBLE is like a PRISON for the mostly Black NBA players?
"A small number of protesters carrying signs and shouting into megaphones blocked at least two buses chartered by the NBA from briefly from entering the Walt Disney World campus on Saturday night, with the group saying it wanted LeBron James, Russell Westbrook and other top players to take notice. The group blocked charter buses carrying members of the news media and some NBA staff, but no players or team personnel. Among their chants: “Black Lives Matter” and “LeBron can you help us?” Some also carried signs with messages such as “Russell Stand With Us.” The protesters assembled near one of the entrances and were not inside the so-called bubble, where teams, NBA staff and other have been for more than two months in some cases for the resumption of the season. They appeared to have gathered on a road that is open to the public, then stopped buses on an access road near a primary entrance to the resort. All entrances to the bubble are secured by law enforcement, security officers or both. It was not known if the protesters were able to be seen by any players....."
So the BUBBLE is like a PRISON for the mostly Black NBA players?
The panelists suggested that antigen tests — less expensive but also less reliable than PCR tests — be made widely available so people could monitor whether it’s likely they are infected. Antigen tests would be particularly useful for surveillance purposes, to quarantine suspected cases and then recheck with PCR tests, Pagliuca said. The tech council report quotes Deborah Birx, who is coordinating the White House’s COVID-19 response, as saying national testing needs to be increased by 10 times the current amount to test symptomatic and asymptomatic people.
She then took off and traveled with family for Thanksgiving!
Hochberg said that even as COVID-19 vaccines arrive on the scene, the need for testing will not go away, particularly as more people return to their offices after many months of working from home, and the tech council noted that it could take six to 12 months for vaccines to be successfully distributed. By that point, the council said in its report, the virus could cause significant further economic damage. “There’s a danger that we stop testing when we should be accelerating testing,” Hochberg said.
It’s not just about fighting this virus, Pagliuca said. It’s also about building a testing and contact-tracing infrastructure that can quickly respond to the next pandemic.
Yeah, it has NOTHING to do with COVID!
“There is capacity out there for tests,” Pagliuca said. “There are ways to change our regimen. We need to push as hard as we can to get those programs into place.”
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Oh, look at the line!
"Pre-holiday push for virus tests stresses taxed system" by Laura Krantz and Dasia Moore Globe Staff, December 19, 2020
Appointments for COVID-19 tests have been increasingly harder to come by in recent days, as virus case numbers surge and residents clamor for tests before the holidays.
Appointment-only testing sites across the state were largely booked on Friday, a sign that suggests many still plan to travel or see friends and family for the holidays, despite warnings from Governor Charlie Baker and health officials. A similar surge just prior to Thanksgiving resulted in long lines for a swab and turnaround times that stretched up to a week.
I'm glad citizens gave the tyrants the finger.
“Because of the holidays we are anticipating the spike in testing,” said Sandra Silva, vice president of operations and community support services at the Greater Lawrence Family Health Center, which offers free walk-up testing six days a week.
Demand has increased steadily since the week before Thanksgiving, Silva said, and the health center plans to expand its hours this week.
Many state-run testing locations plan to close for 2½ days around Christmas, which will surely further strain the system at a time when cases are rising. In addition, recent snow and frigid weather have made it harder for providers to administer tests.
Not even winter yet as they constantly scream climate change.
As the holidays near, health experts continue to stress that widespread testing, with quick turnaround times, is key to curbing the spread in this crucial phase of the pandemic.....
Yeah, they are losing the narrative and have to accelerate as "a core part of the control strategy, until the vaccine is really widely distributed, needs to be enhanced testing.”
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Turned out to be the Worst.... Christmas.... Ever...., what with all the death and sickness and worry in the state, but people see a light at the end of the tunnel.
"Amid a tsunami of COVID-19 infections, strain on contact tracing grows. Should we keep trying?" by Kay Lazar Globe Staff, December 2, 2020
Local health departments in Massachusetts, striving to track and prevent new COVID-19 infections amid an onslaught of new cases, are growing frustrated as testing turnaround times now stretch to a week in some cities and towns.
The delays have made it more difficult for tracers to quickly reach potential contacts of infected residents, and increase the chances those infected will spread the virus in the interim. At the same time, the staffing available to make contact tracing calls is wearing thin.
The strain is reflected in state data that show more than a third of newly infected residents are not reached within 24 hours of receiving their results by contact tracers to collect critical information about who else they might have infected, and, the data show, contact tracers have been unable to reach 25 percent of residents identified as potentially infected by another person.
The reports of significant delays in contact tracing and testing turnaround times follow criticism earlier in the pandemic of the multimillion-dollar state-led tracing initiative and have prompted some infectious disease experts to question the effectiveness and expense of contact tracing for COVID-19 in general.
Massachusetts is spending as much as $94 million this year on the effort. About $55 million is allocated to Boston-based Partners in Health to lead a tracing collaboration with local health departments, and $39 million to two other companies, Accenture and Salesforce, to establish and manage software for the collaborative.
OMFG!
The contract tracers are connected to the military and the Clinton crime family!
In August, the state extended the Partners in Health contract through March, for an additional $22 million, with increased responsibilities including contact tracing at some colleges and boarding schools.
“It continues to boggle my mind why we continue to try to use this strategy that is just not working now,” Dr. Michael Mina, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, said in a recent call with reporters.
Contact tracing has long been used successfully to help contain outbreaks of other infectious diseases, including the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa and the increasingly common clusters of measles across the United States, but there has been limited evidence of its widespread success amid a surge in COVID-19, a respiratory disease that spreads rapidly.
“Because we just keep focusing on pounding that and trying to say that is what’s going to work, it’s detracting from our ability to be creative and think of other solutions,” Mina said.
Some would call that INSANITY -- doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result (it's the delusion with which I purchase a paper every morning expecting to find truth).
Mina has repeatedly called on federal regulators to approve over-the-counter, low-priced rapid antigen tests. The tests would allow consumers, without a doctor’s prescription, to test themselves at home and receive results in 15 minutes. Federal regulators have balked, saying the tests in development are not accurate enough; meanwhile, local health departments are stymied, because testing sites in Massachusetts rely on traditional molecular tests, processed at laboratories, that are taking longer and longer to produce results. While the state is reporting average turnaround times of just under two days, new data provided to the Globe show that 10 percent of tests in the past month have taken longer than three days and 5 percent longer than four days. That means thousands of tests are coming back each day after the time when a person is most infectious.
A recent paper by researchers in England and Harvard Business School concluded that a lapse in contact tracing may have exacerbated COVID infections and deaths in that country.
They are pushing a CONTACT TRACING TYRANNY , folks, and it has nothing to do with the COVID cover story!
They could never get away with this massive expansion of totalitarian tyranny otherwise.
The researchers studied a glitch in which nearly 16,000 new cases were mistakenly not sent to tracers for up to a week in late September. They concluded that the glitch was associated with more than 125,000 additional infections and over 1,500 additional COVID-19 related deaths. Their work has not been peer-reviewed, and has not yet been published in a medical journal.
That is what they call pulling shit out of your ass!
Public Health England, an agency in the country’s national health system, disputed the findings, saying its own analysis indicates the delay in contact tracing could not be definitively linked to increased illnesses and death. It said those increases coincided with students returning to universities, and other trends across England.
Dr. Shira Doron, hospital epidemiologist at Tufts Medical Center, read the UK paper and said it is logical to conclude that contact tracing would have prevented some of those cases.
“Every one of those traces does prevent potentially subsequent infections,” Doron said, “but contact tracing cannot stand alone. It’s only one measure that prevents some portion of the infections and it’s very, very imperfect.”
Doron also said tracing becomes much less effective amid a surge, when each infected person potentially has had contact with many other people and testing turnaround times lag.
She noted recent statements from Governor Charlie Baker that experts believe Massachusetts, based on the current volume of testing, is probably detecting just one in every four COVID-19 cases, but Baker said even that rate of testing may help prevent people from spreading the virus.
That sounds about right to Mike Armano, Lawrence’s health and inspectional services director.....
That sounds about right?!
How scientific!
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Only one obstacle left:
"There’s a big obstacle looming for coronavirus vaccines — a strong antivaccine movement" by Jazmine Ulloa Globe Staff, November 28, 2020
WASHINGTON — For as long as there have been vaccines, there have been people like Winnie Harrison who shun them.
Harrison, 67, a former educator and mother of four, became an ardent disbeliever in immunizations after her first child had an adverse reaction to a measles, mumps, and rubella shot some three decades ago, but it wasn’t until recent years that she and other skeptics began to forge online connections, fostering fear about vaccines and what doctors call a growing ecosystem of health misinformation that has only ramped up amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The founder of the Connecticut Vaccine Rights League, Harrison administers her group’s Facebook page, one of hundreds, if not hundreds of thousands, nationwide that dole out testimonials from antivaccine activists and celebrities, memes of doctors sharing now discredited claims about vaccines — and, more recently, warnings about the forthcoming COVID-19 vaccines.
As drugmakers close in on vaccines to tame an outbreak that has killed more than 260,000 people in the United States alone, medical professionals and online disinformation researchers are warning that an expanding antivaccine movement — bolstered by far-right opponents of coronavirus lockdowns — could undermine efforts to get Americans to take the shots and end the pandemic. They are urging health authorities, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies to invest heavily in public education to counter the misinformation, build confidence in the vaccines, and explain how they could help save lives, reopen schools and businesses, and return the US to normal.
Well, a NEW NORMAL anyway!
“Vaccines are one of our greatest health care achievements,” said Dr. Bisola Ojikutu, an infectious disease specialist at Massachusetts General and Brigham and Women’s hospitals. “The same energy that was placed into development and distribution of a coronavirus vaccine should have been placed in messaging and community engagement.”
Excitement in the medical community has been building as three companies — Moderna, Pfizer, and AstraZeneca — recently released data showing their COVID-19 vaccines were highly effective, but doctors and disinformation researchers have seen trouble looming since the earliest days of pandemic shutdowns, as misinformed or intentionally false and deceptive content spread through the internet like wildfire and conspiracy theories abounded over the virus’s origins, symptoms, and cures. Around that time, antivaccine groups saw huge increases in content and engagement, and started to merge efforts with conspiratorial actors, far-right groups, and activists protesting health measures ordering schools and businesses to close, researchers said.
Reading the endless public relation handouts and interference the Globe is running for the vaccine companies is sickening, and the "disinformation researchers" they refer to are propaganda agents.
The truth "disinformation researchers" are the people who do what I do, refute ma$$ media lies on a near daily basis.
The environment of fear and uncertainty created prime conditions for some of the top antivaccine activists to make an even broader push against science and government measures to protect public health.
“They are downplaying the pandemic, they are encouraging people not to wear masks, they are leading reopening protests, and then they also see this as an opportunity to erode confidence in vaccinations overall,” said Renée DiResta, the technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory and one of the lead experts in the study of online narrative manipulation and the so-called antivaxxer movement.
They don't need or help in eroding confidence since their poison potions do that, and what do anti-vaxxers have to gain other than vitriol being aimed at them?
It's the pharmaceuticals the Globe shills for that have everything to gain. TRILLIONS, in fact, as well as a totalitarian control grid to boot!
Some public health experts are urging President-elect Joe Biden to add misinformation researchers to his coronavirus task force, but complicating any efforts to respond to the outbreak has been President Trump, who has frequently minimized the dangers of the pandemic, fueled political polarization in the nation’s response, and had, until this week, held up the presidential transition. In the midst of it all, doctors and researchers have often referred to him as the “disinformation super spreader.”
Trump has a history of sharing falsehoods to undermine vaccines dating to at least 2007, but this year he has boasted about the speed with which some vaccines have been created under a federal initiative known as “Operation Warp Speed” in an attempt to claim credit for the achievement.
The pre$$ has a long history of overhyping them, so.... Trump did it to himself. He should have been more forceful and called this scam out and failed to participate like Belarus.
Since the early 1800s, antivaccine activists have opposed immunizations based on largely the same themes, such as pseudoscientific claims that they are unsafe and harmful, causing sudden infant death syndrome, autism, and other side effects, but in more recent years, many vaccine opponents now also argue that policies requiring vaccination for school or work are a violation of their freedom of choice and civil liberties, according to research by DiResta.
Well, they have caused all those ailments and it is a violation of civil rights.
MY BODY, MY CHOICE, right, ladies?
Some believe businesses that manufacture vaccines are motivated by profits and can easily escape liability should something go wrong. Increasingly, outlandish conspiracy theories are circulating that the coronavirus vaccine in particular could alter people’s DNA or even transform them into 5G wireless antennas, DiResta said.
In many ways, “vaccines are a victim of their own success,” she wrote in a 2018 paper.
SIGH!!
Of course, vaccine makers do have immunity from legal liability for the harm their product causes. Why the Globe left that out one can only wonder.
Vaccination has made major contributions to world health, eradicating polio and smallpox in the US, and eliminating a deadly cattle virus around the world known as rinderpest. Doctors also have seen its success in controlling measles, spurring hope that disease, too, could possibly be completely stamped out from society one day, but the latest push against vaccines began to take shape after Andrew Wakefield, a former British physician, and other colleagues released a now discredited 1998 study that falsely linked the measles, mumps, and rubella, or MMR, vaccine to behavioral regression and developmental disorder. Vaccination rates for MMR dropped by about 2 percent in the US, and even more in the United Kingdom and Ireland, in the wake of the study.
Study discredited by who?
We all know there is a cause and effect.
The arrival of social media accelerated interconnections among activists’ and created fresh forms of opposition, with those on the left shifting their message to appeal to the libertarian right, DiResta said.
Opponents now span class and political lines, including celebrities like Alicia Silverstone and Jim Carey, as well as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has become one of the top antivaccine influencers on Instagram. An order just last summer by Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker that nearly all students in the state under the age of 30 get a flu vaccine this year sparked protests outside the State House, and in the wake of the pandemic, antivaccine activists have not only increasingly “discovered, engaged with, and amplified” each other but also other far-right and extreme conspiracy groups, such as QAnon, said Graham Brookie, director and managing editor of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. One rabbit hole, he said, can easily lead to the next.
There is little coherency to how people are drawn into opposition, said Jonathan Corpus Ong, an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. Some vaccine opponents fall in through wellness and alternative medicine culture; others are believers in conspiracy theories about the pharmaceutical industry, the influence of Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, and 5G wireless signals. Some support Trump but oppose his push for a coronavirus vaccine. Others might cheer the president’s vaccine efforts but are skeptical about immunization plans will fall to Biden to implement.
Then there must be something to it if the pre$$ is attacking it so hard.
Honestly, hurling "conspiracy theorist" at anyone who questions the distortions, lies, and garbage that comes from government and their mouthpiece media has lost its effect.
Ever hear of the boy who cried wolf?
Researchers with the nonprofit First Draft — which collected 14 million tweets and posts from Facebook and Instagram about vaccination in English, Spanish, and French ― found a large amount of the content fell under a common theme: perpetuating the unsubstantiated claim that the quest for profits by pharmaceutical companies undermined the safety of all vaccines.
The Globe discredits itself with such slop!
As the US prepares to distribute coronavirus vaccines, researchers said policymakers need to understand how even innocuous-seeming posts work in tandem across social media sites to shape people’s attitudes, said Seb Cubbon, one of the research analysts on the study.
The pre$$ is jealous because they no longer have a monopoly!
Doctors and researchers see some positive signs. A Gallup poll released this month found about 58 percent of Americans were willing to get a COVID-19 vaccination, up from a low of 50 percent in September. Studies show about 75 percent of the population needs to be vaccinated to control the outbreak.
The true number willing to take the abominable jab is between 25-40%, and it decreases every day. That's why the Globe front-paged this. The fake pandemic they helped promote has awoken the world, even if Globe is ignoring protests across Europe and elsewhere.
A poll of nearly 20,000 adults in 27 countries released in August by the World Economic Forum found 74 percent said they would get a vaccine if it were available. The US figure then was 67 percent, roughly where it was in a late July Gallup poll.
There are your culprits!
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is developing education materials on coronavirus vaccination, according to its COVID-19 handbook. Twitter and Facebook have implemented stricter controls to keep coronavirus falsehoods and conspiracy theories from spreading on their social networks, but doctors and disinformation researchers said those measures will not suffice and are likely to leave large information gaps or “data voids” in search engines, which could lead people down the wrong path. Health and government officials must also understand how internet users could be micro-targeted. “We will see all the same tactics and trends that went after voters pivot to going to vaccines,” said P.W. Singer, a political scientist and author of “LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media.”
If the thing is so damn self-evident, why do we need to be massively propagandized to take it?
In Black communities, a sordid history of racial experimentation and continued barriers to health because of structural racism have contributed to a justifiable distrust in vaccines, doctors said. In Latino communities, Spanish-language medical disinformation has largely gone unchecked and narratives “are receiving high levels of engagement ... where there are low health literacy skills,” said Jacobo Licona, who leads disinformation research at the firm EquisLabs.
They have to drag race into it, and they should be even more resilient given past history.
TUSKEGEE!
To reach people across communities, doctors emphasized the importance of recruiting trusted and popular messengers with varied cultural backgrounds and language skills. Vaccinations, they said, should be widely available not only in local pharmacies and medical clinics but also in schools and on college campuses.
That is only going to deter me even more.
F**k celebrity!
Ong, the UMass professor, urged that public education campaigns point to history, to the immense benefits of past immunization campaigns. “We have been vaccinated against polio and hepatitis, so many have worked over time,” he said.
That was then, thi$ is now.
The longer it takes to develop accurate and positive vaccine messages, the harder it will be for them to break through with some people. Harrison started her Facebook group in 2015, about a year after a measles outbreak at Disneyland spurred mostly Democratic legislators in California and other state legislatures to expand vaccine requirements.
To critics that say she is spreading disinformation, Harrison responds that people are entitled to express their opinions. Hers, she adds, are based on personal experience: Two years in and out of hospitals with her son after he fell ill with pneumonia, allergies, and asthma following an MMR vaccination.
“This wasn’t just something that I just woke up one day and said I am going to listen to whoever — some stranger — on the internet,” she said, adding that she doesn’t believe large pharmaceutical companies have people’s best interests in mind.
Because they don't.
Ojikutu, the MGH specialist, and other doctors stressed that there can be medical complications with vaccines — although rare and often mild — but that investment in vaccines benefits the public in huge ways.
“It is totally reasonable to have your own beliefs, but when those beliefs get in the way of yourself, your children, parents, or other people, that’s when it becomes problematic,” Ojikutu said.
I wrote untucking real to remind me to comment, but the Orwellian totalitarianism leaves me speechless.
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