"On the Post-Pandemic Horizon, Could That Be … a Boom?; Signs of economic life are picking up, and mounds of cash are waiting to be spent as the virus loosens its grip" by Ben Casselman New York Times, Feb. 21, 2021
The U.S. economy remains mired in a pandemic winter of shuttered storefronts, high unemployment and sluggish job growth, but on Wall Street and in Washington, attention is shifting to an intriguing if indistinct prospect: a post-Covid boom.
Forecasters have always expected the pandemic to be followed by a period of strong growth as businesses reopen and Americans resume their normal activities, but in recent weeks, economists have begun to talk of something stronger: a supercharged rebound that brings down unemployment, drives up wages and may foster years of stronger growth.
There are hints that the economy has turned a corner: Retail sales jumped last month as the latest round of government aid began showing up in consumers’ bank accounts. New unemployment claims have declined from early January, though they remain high. Measures of business investment have picked up, a sign of confidence from corporate leaders.
Economists surveyed by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia this month predicted that U.S. output will increase 4.5 percent this year, which would make it the best year since 1999. Some expect an even stronger bounce: Economists at Goldman Sachs forecast that the economy will grow 6.8 percent this year and that the unemployment rate will drop to 4.1 percent by December, a level that took eight years to achieve after the last recession.
“We’re extremely likely to get a very high growth rate,” said Jan Hatzius, Goldman’s chief economist. “Whether it’s a boom or not, I do think it’s a V-shaped recovery,” he added, referring to a steep drop followed by a sharp rebound.
Actually, it's a K-shaped "recovery," and now that Trump is gone we can have one, huh?
The growing optimism stems from the confluence of several factors. Coronavirus cases are falling in the United States. The vaccine rollout, though slower than hoped, is gaining steam, and largely because of trillions of dollars in federal help, the economy appears to have made it through last year with less structural damage — in the form of business failures, home foreclosures and personal bankruptcies — than many people feared last spring.
This is $ickeningly di$gu$ting "journali$m," and get ready to vomit.
Lastly, consumers are sitting on a trillion-dollar mountain of cash, a result of months of lockdown-induced saving and successive rounds of stimulus payments. That mountain could grow if Congress approves the aid to households that President Biden has proposed.
Yeah, the measly $3500 they have sent over the course of the year has $trengthened the $afety net and made us all rich -- when not spending it during holidays or on Gamestop stocks.
This in$ulting $lop literally makes one ill considering the food lines out there.
When the pandemic ends, cash could be unleashed like melting snow in the Rockies: Consumers, released from their cabin fever, compete for hotel rooms and restaurant tables. Businesses compete for employees and supplies to meet the demand. Workers who were sidelined by child care responsibilities or virus fears are drawn back to the labor force by suddenly abundant opportunities.
The plannedemic is never ending..... or is it?
“There will be this big boom as pent-up demand comes through and the economy is opening,” said Ellen Zentner, chief U.S. economist for Morgan Stanley. “There is an awful lot of buying power that we’ve transferred to households to fuel that pent-up demand.”
It's not pent-up demand, it is pent-up anger after all the wealth was tran$fered upwards -- which is why lockdowns are permanent, masks, permanent, and all the rest as they spin the hopium shell game of return to normal.
That vision is far from a certainty. Delays in the vaccine rollout could stall the recovery. So could new strains of the virus that render vaccines less effective. A political standoff in Washington could hold up aid for unemployed workers and struggling businesses, and even if the economy avoids all of those traps, there is unlikely to be a single moment when public health officials give an “all clear”; it could be years before people pack into bars and sports stadiums the way they did before the pandemic.
If ever.
A boom also carries risks. In recent weeks, prominent economists including Lawrence H. Summers, a Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton, have warned that Biden’s relief proposal is too large and could lead the economy to overheat, pushing up prices and forcing the Federal Reserve to bring the party to a premature end. Fed officials have largely dismissed those concerns, noting that the consistent problem in recent decades has been too little inflation rather than too much.
Oh, the party is over after the billionaires MADE $3.9 trillion during the pandemic while workers LOST $3.7 trillion?
Btw, that is the $ame Larry Summers that is one of the architects of all the economic destruction, someone who has had a hand in it through the years as he has worked his way through the revolving door before he became a tax reformer and health and labor nut and who is now of the opinion that electronic signatures are needed to protect our democracy and "on December 12, 1991, while serving as chief economist for the World Bank, Summers authored a private memo arguing that the bank should actively encourage the dumping of toxic waste in developing countries, particularly "under populated countries in Africa," which Summers described as "UNDER-polluted."
Oh, one more thing:
Jeffrey Epstein (second from left) hosted a dinner at Harvard in 2004. With him were (from left) Alan Dershowitz, Robert Trivers, and Lawrence Summers. (© 2004 Rick Friedman)
Yeah, he was in the flight log, too.
Other economists fear that the rebound will primarily benefit those at the top, compounding inequities that the pandemic has widened.
“We may see a boom in the future, but that may just leave some people even further behind, or may give them a trickle when they need a waterfall,” said Tara Sinclair, a George Washington University economist, but, but, but, there is no single definition of a boom, nor a committee of elite economists who agree when one has begun, as there is with recessions, but economists generally agree that booms are characterized by a combination of strong growth and a high absolute level of activity. By that standard, the period after World War II certainly qualifies as a boom. So do the late 1960s.
They are literally pi$$ing all over us.
In recent decades, however, booms have become less common. Growth never took off after the mild recession that hit in 2001, and while the unemployment rate hit a half-century low after the last recession, it took a decade to get there.
Who was president then?
Even if there is a strong rebound, however, economists warn that not everyone will benefit.
HUH?
Kara Gray and her husband, Christopher DeSure, spent years building their small Ohio construction company into a successful business. Then the pandemic shut them down, and, having a daughter at home with a compromised immune system, they haven’t felt comfortable returning to in-person work.
With the housing market strong, Gray is confident they will be able to get back to work once the pandemic is over, but she worries they won’t be able to take full advantage of the boom. She and her husband were forced to spend the money they had set aside to buy a house, and have fallen behind on bills and run up credit card debt. That could make it hard for them to qualify for a mortgage or for a business loan to expand their company.
“It’s going to affect me and my husband longer term,” she said. “It’s not just ‘Can I pay my bills this month?’ It’s that once this is over, I’m going to have to start all over.”
Oh, how lovely!
Yes, just imagine, John. It's all coming to fruition with the fresh start from the Boston Globe (wiped Kraft's record clean they did).
Still, for all its shortcomings, a boom may be the best chance many workers have to make up lost ground. The strong labor market that preceded the pandemic was delivering wage gains to low-income workers and giving opportunities to people with disabilities, criminal records and other barriers to employment. A quick drop in the unemployment rate won’t heal all the wounds caused by the pandemic, but it might at least stanch the bleeding, and there are reasons to think this recovery could be different.
Who was president again during the days of opportunity?
For one thing, the economy was fundamentally healthy when the recession began. There was no housing bubble; household debt was low; banks weren’t sitting on a tower of dubious loans that could collapse at any moment. That means there is no reason, at least in theory, that the economy can’t pick up more or less where it left off.
Who was the president again?
Policymakers have also responded much more aggressively to this crisis than to past ones. The Fed moved quickly to prevent the pandemic from setting off a financial crisis. Congress spent trillions of dollars to make sure unemployed workers could keep their homes and feed their families, and to help small businesses.
Those printed trillions are going to cause their own problem, and that is the destruction of the dollar as planned.
Those efforts were far from a total success. The unemployment system buckled under the crush of applicants, and millions had to wait weeks or months to get benefits, if they got them at all. Government aid was inadequate, or came too late, to save thousands of businesses. State and local governments have slashed jobs. Hunger rates have risen, but government aid appears to have been largely effective at preventing deep structural damage that could prevent a strong rebound. There has been no wave of foreclosures or corporate bankruptcies. Rates of entrepreneurship have soared, signaling that Americans are optimistic and have access to the capital necessary to act on that optimism......
Yeah, I was told that business starts had best year ever even as pandemic raged, and to be sure, many of the people filing the IRS documents will never get off the ground, and those that do probably will take several months to begin operating, but still, there is reason to think the boom is legitimate even if you only make 10 percent of what you used to while the market again nears record highs and those trillions are used to prevent deep structural damage as the entire economy is converted to state-run communi$m complete with oligarchic control.
The di$ingenousne$$ of the corporate pre$$ is $ickening.
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Here is a next day update that isn't much of a laugh:
"Positive coronavirus test? Canadians worry their neighbors will find out" by Catherine Porter New York Times, February 21, 2021
For a time, Cortland Cronk, 26, was Canada’s most famous — and infamous — coronavirus patient.
Cronk, a traveling salesman, went viral after testing positive in November and recounting his story of being infected while traveling for work to the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.
He was called a virus-spreader, a job-killer, a liar, and a sleaze. Online memes painted him as the Grinch, since subsequent outbreaks led to restrictions against Christmas parties. Many people, including a newspaper columnist, made elaborate fun of his name.
He also received threats; so many that he fled his hometown Saint John, New Brunswick, for Victoria, British Columbia — a city on the opposite end of the country, 3,600 miles away.
“They were acting like I purposely got COVID,” Cronk said from his new apartment. “I had hundreds of death threats per day. People telling me I should be publicly stoned.”
I don't believe it.
Many Canadians believed it was just rewards and that his case formed a cautionary tale to others who flagrantly break the rules, putting lives and livelihoods at risk. Some even think more formal shaming should happen in Canada, with governments not just fining culprits for breaking coronavirus regulations, but broadcasting their names.
This is fucking outrageous!!
Others have argued Cronk is a victim of a worsening civic problem — public shaming of people testing positive — which is not just unfair but ineffective and that makes the coronavirus harder to quash.
“It might feel like a release for the community, but it does very little to prevent virus transmission,” said Robert Huish, an associate professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax, who is conducting a study on the coronavirus and stigma. “In the process, we are causing people harm.”
Canadians might be known internationally as nice, apologetic and fair-minded, but, a year after the pandemic arrived, some Canadians worry it has exposed a very different national persona: judgmental, suspicious, and vengeful. COVID-shaming has become fervent in parts of the country, with locals calling for the heads of not just politicians and doctors breaking the rules, but their own family members and neighbors.
That part certainly is true beyond the stereotype, but not going to snitch and drop names, and the heads they are calling for are the criminal politicians and medical "profe$$ionals" behind the $camdemic.
“It’s not getting COVID — it’s breaking the rules that worries us,” said Randy Boyagoda, a novelist and English professor at the University of Toronto, noting that a Canadian foundational motto is “peace, order, and good government.”
“What’s the key point? It’s order,” he said. “For order to be sustained, we have to follow the rules. Canadians are a distinctly rule-focused and rule-following people.”
Are you tired of being patronized and insulted yet?
Complaint lines — or so-called “snitch lines” — set up across Canada have been flooded with tips about people suspected of breaking quarantine rules, businesses flouting public health restrictions, and outsiders, arriving with unfamiliar license plates, potentially bringing the disease with them.
The Ken and Karens have their eyes on you!
Facebook groups are full of stories of people being labeled potential vectors and being refused service, disinvited from family gatherings and reported to the police and public health authorities.
“This is impacting our ability to contain the virus,” said Dr. Ryan Sommers, one of eight public health doctors in Nova Scotia who published a letter beseeching locals in the small Atlantic province to stop shaming one another, as fear of discrimination was delaying reports of COVID symptoms and potentially driving cases underground.
What a bunch of fa$ci$ts!
The province has one of the lowest COVID rates in the country: just 18 active cases, as of Feb 20, but instead of offering solace, people have become hypervigilant, Sommers said.
“We want to create a social norm, where people will be supportive and caring and compassionate” Sommers said. “Social media can be more virulent than the virus itself.”
(Blog editor is apoplectic at this point. This is GARBAGE)
In the country’s four eastern provinces, which have enforced self-isolation rules for anyone entering the region, the shaming is not just online, Huish said. It’s intimate, particularly in small communities, where “community cohesion quickly flips to become community surveillance.”
Starting to look like EAST GERMANY!
Some say the fear of stigma has become worse than the fear of catching the disease.
Recently, after taking her second mandatory coronavirus test, Jennifer Hutton pulled out her suitcases, preparing to leave Halifax if she tested positive. She envisioned a front-page newspaper story saying she had brought the virus into the community because she travels for her job as an IT director for a medical supply company, she said.
Already, she had received a cold reception from local stores and a profane note had been put on her vehicle, which had Ontario license plates, telling her to go "home and take the rona with you." “I just couldn’t handle any more stigma,” she said.
Few victims of public shaming have become as famous as Cronk, the New Brunswicker who contracted coronavirus on a business trip.
Of course, if you are a Trump supporter shaming is called for and good!
He initially had no symptoms, so was not required to self-isolate upon returning, he said.
How deadly can the damn thing be when you don't even know you had it?
Nine days later, he exhibited a few symptoms and tested positive for coronavirus, so the health department began contact tracing. After local media did a story about a frustrated store owner disbelieving his staff had been exposed to the virus, Cronk worried he’d be outed as the source of the exposure, knowing he had visited the store.
“Saint John is very small,” he said. “I knew it was matter of time before my name was spoken.” So, he approached the CBC network to “get the story straight, before chatter got around.” To his knowledge, none of his contacts tested positive and he was never ticketed by police for breaking public emergency regulations, he said.
Afterward, a video clip from his Instagram account promoting his marijuana supply business, “Cronk Grow Nutrients,” made the rounds on Twitter. In it, Cronk said he “can’t taste a thing right now” and detailed the many trips he had taken that month. Many assumed he had been knowingly, carelessly spreading the virus.
The optics, and the timing, were terrible: As the memes multiplied, the province’s top doctor announced a surge in cases and the premier declared a crackdown on Christmas travel and gatherings. Online, Cronk was deemed New Brunswick’s infector-in-chief.
“There wasn’t a lesson to be learned,” said Cronk. “I was shamed for no reason.”
While some politicians and public health experts across the country are sounding an alarm about the trend of shaming, others are calling out for more.
In Manitoba, the premier began to publicly name businesses fined for breaking pandemic regulations in November. Since then, a list of their names is published every week.
“For many people, the scorn and contempt and disapproval of their neighbors will be at least as effective as a fine,” said Arthur Schafer, founding director of the Center for Professional and Applied Ethics at the University of Manitoba.
Schafer believes people who are fined for breaking the rules should be publicly named, too.
“We need to fully exploit every kind of deterrent,” he said. “Nobody wants to be seen as a terrible community neighbor.”
If I want to know what is going on in Manitoba, I go here.
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Meanwhile, the vaccanity continues:
"Thousands of hospital workers sickened with COVID since start of pandemic" by Priyanka Dayal McCluskey Globe Staff, February 21, 2021
They’ve been on the front lines of the pandemic for almost a year. They’ve battled under grueling conditions. They’ve saved lives and watched people die, and a staggering number have become sick themselves.
More than 14,000 health care workers at the state’s largest medical centers and hospital systems have been infected with COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, according to data compiled by the Globe — a reflection of the toll of the pandemic on the essential health care workforce. The figure includes people who work in all parts of hospitals, from nurses and doctors to cleaning and cafeteria staff.
Like grocery store workers and other essential employees, their jobs cannot be done from home.
“As front-liners, we can do everything right but still be exposed because we’re exposed at work, which we simply can’t avoid,” said Dr. David Rosman, a radiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and president of the Massachusetts Medical Society. “Being in health care at this time has meant placing yourself at risk of COVID.”
Rosman knows this first-hand. He felt symptoms in January — he was fatigued and couldn’t taste his food — after his wife, Dr. Samantha Rosman, an emergency medicine physician at Boston Children’s Hospital, became sick. The couple and their children, ages 8 and 10, all tested positive for COVID. None fell seriously ill.
They don’t know exactly how they were exposed, “but since March, we haven’t been in a restaurant, we haven’t been in a grocery store, we haven’t been in any store,” said Rosman, 44. “Our existence is Instacart and home and work. The only point of potential contact for either of us is work.”
To assess how many hospital workers contracted COVID, the Globe surveyed the state’s largest hospital systems and academic medical centers, including Mass General Brigham, Beth Israel Lahey, UMass Memorial, Baystate, Wellforce, Boston Medical Center, and Boston Children’s Hospital. Steward Health Care did not respond.
Now, as more health care workers receive their vaccinations and community spread slows, the rate of new infections is dropping.
“COVID is the first time I really had fear of going to work,” said Trish Powers, 58, a longtime nurse at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. For many months, Powers found herself pondering thoughts like “If I’m holding my patient’s hand, am I going to get sick?” and “Oh my god, did I touch my eye? Did I give myself COVID?”
Her fears were not unfounded. She tested positive for COVID in mid-December, an infection she suspects she picked up in a hospital break room where employees remove their masks to eat and drink.....
I was taught to never talk with my mouth full.
"Community health centers gear up for broader role in coronavirus vaccination; They say they are best positioned to reach those most likely to get sick and least likely to get vaccinated" by Felice J. Freyer Globe Staff, February 21, 2021
Community health centers are gearing up for an expanded role in the state’s vaccination effort, widening the pathway into the neighborhoods hardest hit by COVID-19.
While much attention has focused on high-volume sites including Gillette Stadium and Fenway Park, the 52 community health centers in Massachusetts are emerging as a growing force in the vaccination effort, now that the eligibility guidelines have expanded to include people age 65 and older and those with two health conditions that put them at higher risk.
Yeah, a lot of people can’t get to Fenway or Gillette so the plan is to vaccinate homebound seniors using state workers and local fire-rescue and paramedic teams to go to their homes.
A few health centers are already running mass vaccination sites, but all are giving priority to their own patients and neighbors — the very people most likely to get sick from COVID-19 and least likely to get vaccinated. All are expanding their capacity to provide vaccinations, with support from the state.
“Our health centers want to make sure that the patients that are closest to the disease are closest to the vaccine,” said Michael Curry, CEO of the Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers. “They know their patients are more likely to be hospitalized, and most likely to die.”
In so doing, the health centers, which provide primary care and other services chiefly to low-income people, confront a paradoxical challenge: coping with a barrage of calls from people eager for the vaccine and also reaching and persuading those who aren’t sure about it.
“When you open up the doors, you’ll see that first flood of people, the strong yesses,” said Manny Lopes, CEO of the East Boston Neighborhood Health Center, “but you’ve got to stay focused on those that are on the ‘maybe’ list, and those that are saying the hard ‘no.’ ”
And what about those people?
Why do we even need a vaccine for a non-existent virus that 99.98% of people survive or don't even know that had -- especially when the vaccine will not prevent infection or transmission?
The health centers report that they’ve received enough vaccine to meet their needs so far, but they haven’t been vaccinating large numbers — mostly their own staff members and the few patients who are 75 and older. Life expectancy is lower among the people of color who make up 60 percent to 80 percent of many centers’ clientele, Curry explained.
With the expanded eligibility, health center officials expressed hope that the state supply will keep up with growing demand. Additionally, 15 Massachusetts health centers expect to get extra vaccine doses directly from the federal government within the next two weeks, under a new program to supplement the state supply. Curry said it’s not yet known how many doses will come through this route.
Health center patients represent a significant share of the state’s population, Curry noted. The centers serve one in seven of the state’s residents; in Boston, it’s one in two, he said. From among their own patients, they could eventually reach almost 700,000 people over age 16 as eligibility expands with the floodgates now open. Some are teaming up with other community groups or the municipal government. They’re hiring staff and keeping their fingers crossed that federal and state money will eventually come their way, and some are getting help from the National Guard amid the high demand.....
That last part is absolutely frightening.
Still waiting for those doses, huh?
"Local leaders frustrated with Baker’s decision to stop sending doses to local vaccination sites" by John Hilliard and Lucas Phillips Globe Staff and Globe Correspondent, February 21, 2021
Leaders from small towns and cities across Massachusetts this weekend criticized a decision by the Baker administration to divert COVID-19 vaccine doses from their communities to mass vaccine sites, saying that the move blocks efforts to protect their most vulnerable residents.
The change, they said, was made after the Department of Public Health encouraged them to plan municipally run vaccination sites before abruptly changing course.
“Whenever any of us... have to try to explain to residents why they are not going to be able to get their vaccine through their local [health] departments, we don’t have any good answers,” said Raymond Barry, chairman of Tewksbury’s Board of Health. “We can’t tell them why.”
The state plans to open two new mass vaccination sites this week, one in the Natick Mall on Monday and one in Dartmouth on Wednesday, while also focusing vaccination efforts in 20 cities and towns — including Boston and Worcester — where communities of color have been disproportionately hit by the pandemic, but the state’s Wednesday announcement that it would cease shipments of doses to most municipalities undermines work to vaccinate eligible residents, particularly those age 75 and older, officials in some smaller communities said.
In Tewksbury, the town’s senior center gathered the names of eligible residents 75 and older who were interested in getting vaccinated at a local clinic, Barry said, but town officials have not been able to secure doses from the state, he said in an interview Sunday afternoon, leaving them unable to move forward.....
Related:
"Mass COVID vaccination sites to open this week in Natick, Dartmouth" by Gal Tziperman Lotan Globe Staff, February 21, 2021
Two mass COVID-19 vaccination sites will open this week inside vacant storefronts that once housed retail giants: one opening Monday at a former Sears in the Natick Mall, the other at a former Circuit City in Dartmouth on Wednesday.
The Natick location, which will only be open Monday through Friday, will distribute about 500 doses of the vaccine daily, though state officials hope to increase that number to 3,000 doses a day as supply ramps up, according to a release from the state’s Department of Public Health. The Dartmouth site, open seven days a week, will begin with 500 doses per day, then increase to 2,000 over several weeks.
Appointments are required for both locations, which will vaccinate only eligible people. Two groups became eligible earlier late last week: those over the age of 65, and people with two or more medical conditions the state deems high risk, including asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, obesity, and cancer. Front-line health care workers and residents and staff of congregate care facilities became eligible in December.
People coming to the Natick Mall location, near exit 117 on the Massachusetts Turnpike, can park in Garage C and enter the former Sears on level one. The Dartmouth location has a parking lot directly outside the former electronics giant. Both are wheelchair-accessible.
They even give you directions.
Eligible people can try and make appointments by visiting Mass.Gov/CovidVaccine or by calling 211.
State officials have urged patience and said it may take a month to get everyone in the current eligibility group, about 1 million people, vaccinated.
The two new sites will join four existing mass vaccination locations at Gillette Stadium, Fenway Park, the DoubleTree in Danvers, and the Eastfield Mall in Springfield.
After a slow start to the vaccination process — which public health officials hope will help the state end restrictions and residents safely return to offices, restaurants, and schools — Massachusetts officials are increasingly relying on large-scale sites to get the vaccine into as many arms as they can.
Whether it is needed or not!
As of Sunday, about 14.9 percent of Massachusetts residents had received at least one dose of the vaccine and 5.6 percent had gotten two doses, according to the state’s COVID command center.....
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"US coronavirus death toll approaches milestone of 500,000" by John Raby The Associated Press, February 22, 2021
The U.S. stood Sunday at the brink of a once-unthinkable tally: 500,000 people lost to the coronavirus.
According to the model that shut us down, over 2 million should be dead by now if not more.
That is the AP's version of the "unthinkable."
SIGH!
A year into the pandemic, the running total of lives lost was about 498,000 — roughly the population of Kansas City, Missouri, and just shy of the size of Atlanta. The figure compiled by Johns Hopkins University surpasses the number of people who died in 2019 of chronic lower respiratory diseases, stroke, Alzheimer’s, flu and pneumonia combined.
That is because anyone who died of those conditions was labeled a COVID death!
Yeah, seasonal flu is taking a year off, sure.
COVID IS and ALWAYS WAS nothing more than the COMMON COLD!
“It’s nothing like we have ever been through in the last 102 years, since the 1918 influenza pandemic,” the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
The U.S. virus death toll reached 400,000 on Jan. 19 in the waning hours in office for President Donald Trump, whose handling of the crisis was judged by public health experts to be a singular failure.
The nation could pass this next grim milestone on Monday. President Joe Biden will mark the U.S. crossing 500,000 lives lost from COVID-19 with a moment of silence and candle lighting ceremony at the White House. Biden will deliver remarks at sunset to honor the dead, the White House said. He’s expected to be joined by first lady Jill Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff.
The first known deaths from the virus in the U.S. happened in early February 2020, both of them in Santa Clara County, California. It took four months to reach the first 100,000 dead. The toll hit 200,000 deaths in September and 300,000 in December. Then it took just over a month to go from 300,000 to 400,000 and about two months to climb from 400,000 to the brink of 500,000.
Joyce Willis of Las Vegas is among the countless Americans who lost family members during the pandemic. Her husband, Anthony Willis, died Dec. 28, followed by her mother-in-law in early January.
There were anxious calls from the ICU when her husband was hospitalized. She was unable to see him before he died because she, too, had the virus and could not visit.
“They are gone. Your loved one is gone, but you are still alive,” Willis said. “It’s like you still have to get up every morning. You have to take care of your kids and make a living. There is no way around it. You just have to move on.”
Then came a nightmare scenario of caring for her father-in-law while dealing with grief, arranging funerals, paying bills, helping her children navigate online school and figuring out how to go back to work as an occupational therapist.
While the count is based on figures supplied by government agencies around the world, the real death toll is believed to be significantly higher, in part because of inadequate testing and cases inaccurately attributed to other causes early on.
Then we are WELL ON OUR WAY to NATURAL HERD IMMUNITY -- and this NO NEED for a VACCINE!
Despite efforts to administer coronavirus vaccines, a widely cited model by the University of Washington projects the U.S. death toll will surpass 589,000 by June 1.
“People will be talking about this decades and decades and decades from now,” Fauci said on NBC’s “Meet The Press.”
Like Hitler, you little bastard!
Related:
"Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser for COVID-19, said Sunday that Americans may still be wearing masks outside their homes a year from now, even as he predicted the country would return to “a significant degree of normality” by fall. “I want it to keep going down to a baseline that’s so low there is virtually no threat,” Fauci said on the CNN program “State of the Union,” referring to the number of cases nationally that would make him comfortable enough to stop recommending universal masking. “If you combine getting most of the people in the country vaccinated with getting the level of virus in the community very, very low, then I believe you’re going to be able to say, for the most part, we don’t necessarily have to wear masks.” Fauci appeared on a series of TV news programs Sunday morning, where he was quizzed on the dangers of variants of the coronavirus, the schedule of the nation’s vaccine rollout and when vaccination would allow more students to return to schools. On this last question, Fauci said on “Fox News Sunday” that he hoped high school students, far fewer of whom have gone back to classrooms compared with younger children, would be eligible for vaccination in the fall. “That’s why we are pushing on those studies, to get them vaccinated,” he said of teenagers, who are the subject of clinical trials by Pfizer and Moderna. “That will likely occur in the fall; I can’t say it’s going to be on Day 1 of when school starts in the fall term.” Vaccinations for younger children, however, “likely will not be before the beginning of the first quarter of 2022,” Fauci said."
The masks are NEVER MEANT TO COME OFF, and I am sick of the string along of us all.
"On the hotly debated question of whether people should wait longer than the recommended three or four weeks to get a booster vaccine, or even skip the second dose, Fauci said on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” that it was prudent for people to stick to the prescribed schedule. “There are enough unknowns in that, particularly the durability of the protection,” he said. He added that while new data suggesting people who have had COVID could get enough protection from one dose was “really quite impressive,” it might be complicated to document who has had the virus. He also addressed the subject of the mutated variant of the coronavirus identified in South Africa. In clinical trials involving the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine in that country, patients who were inoculated were not protected from mild or moderate illness caused by the variant, known as B. 1.351. Fauci said on “Fox News Sunday” that while it is rare in the United States, “if it becomes more dominant, we may need a version of the vaccine that’s effective specifically against” it. With the United States expected to surpass 500,000 deaths from COVID-19 in the coming days, Fauci told Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press” that “we haven’t seen anything even close to this for well over 100 years,” since the 1918 influenza pandemic, adding, “People will be talking about this decades and decades and decades from now.”
Those that are left over from the Great Cull, anyway.
Related:
Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence walked along the platform next to an Acela train at South Station in a scene for Netflix's upcoming film "Don't Look Up." (John Tlumacki/Globe Staff).
Do I even need to say it?
I guess $ome $cum are immune from mask-wearing, 'eh?
Btw, the lifestyle choice reminds me that there was a basketball game in the state of Texas Saturday -- even as the state suffered with lack of power and water under extreme temperatures:
"Conventional wisdom, seemingly in concert with common sense, suggested that sports television viewership would expand during the pandemic once the leagues returned to action. We were all stuck at home, missing familiar pastimes, and board games with the family can get boring pretty fast. It seemed logical that when live sports came back after the March 2020 shutdown — baseball in July, the NBA later that month, then the NHL in August — fans would watch in droves. So much for conventional wisdom. Ratings couldn’t have tanked more if we’d all simultaneously lost our remote controls. World Series ratings were down 36 percent over the previous year. NBA Finals ratings were down 51 percent. The Stanley Cup Final was down 61 percent. Individual sports fared no better. The Masters, played in November rather than April, was down 49 percent. With that context, the numbers for the NFL look downright encouraging by comparison. NFL ratings were down just 7 percent overall in the regular season, with the suspense-free Bucs-Chiefs matchup in Super Bowl LV down 9 percent from last year’s Chiefs-Niners title game. For the most part, the NFL maintained its enormous audience when, at least early in the season, it was competing against a variety of sports bunched into those late-summer/early-fall restarts. The novelty of the Stanley Cup Final in September and the NBA Finals in October was no match for the NFL on its own autumn turf. Still, the reason for sports viewership being down when it seemed they’d have an enormous audience confined to their La-Z-Boy recliners remains befuddling on the surface. I asked Dr. Jon Lewis, founder of the illuminating sportsmediawatch.com website, for his thoughts on what other factors affected viewership since last March. “My general thought is that sports ratings are down because of the obvious conditions facing all leagues right now: jumbled schedules and routines, half — or entirely — empty stadiums, etc.,” said Lewis, who teaches sports media at Northeastern. “I think some of it also has to do with broader changes in TV viewing habits sped up by the events of the past year. I think ratings would have ended up around this point for a lot of leagues by the end of the decade anyway, but that timeline has ratcheted up.” So what fared well if sports and so much else didn’t? Cable news, first and foremost, particularly in the buildup to the presidential election in November. Per Variety, CNN’s viewership was up 83 percent, Fox News rose 43 percent, and MSNBC saw a 23 percent bump. Fox News and CNN both had their best viewership years in their history, with the former averaging more than 3 million viewers per night in prime time, the first cable news network to reach that milestone. The other wild card? Netflix. The streaming service is notoriously private with its viewership data, and sporadic in what it does share. The company typically announces viewership numbers for only its most popular programs, and its audience-measurement tactics tend to skew that data. For example, it counts anyone who watched a minimum of just two minutes as a viewer. The trailers for most Netflix programs are longer than that. The let’s-binge-something-on-Netflix approach during the pandemic makes plenty of sense here, but I must admit, no matter your political leanings, I have no idea why anyone who cares about their blood pressure would choose to watch cable news over live sports. Give me the games, any time of year....."
I couldn't care le$$ about $port$ anymore and never watch them now.
Didn't even watch the Stupor Bowl, breaking a streak that goes back to 1973.
Fuck $ports!
