Can you imagine a world where COVID never existed?
"As US surpasses 500,000 COVID deaths, experts reflect on what could have been" by Dasia Moore Globe Staff, February 22, 2021
Early last February, a Californian became the first American to die from COVID-19. At the time, testing was barely available, and it would take months for authorities to determine why the person had died. Global health authorities had not yet settled on a name for the disease or the novel coronavirus that caused it.
Months = five weeks now because the whole society came to a screeching halt last March!
What they did know was that the disease was deadly. As they soon came to learn, it claimed lives at a horrific rate even as entire countries imposed strict lockdowns. It preyed on the elderly, ripping through nursing homes and pushing the most distinguished hospitals past their limits. The disease spread fairly easily, transmitted even by people who had no idea they were sick. No one was immune.
Just over a year later, after months of tragedy around the world, the country’s daily case and death counts are falling, the pace of administering highly effective vaccines is accelerating, and the pandemic’s gradual end seems to be within sight. In Massachusetts, more than 1 million people have received at least one vaccine dose. Day by day, we know more about the coronavirus and how to stop its spread, yet the progress has emerged from a toll of staggering proportions. The United States has now reached a calamitous milestone that crystallizes a year of grief and anguish: 500,000 lives lost to COVID-19.
The somber moment was observed in the nation’s capital on Monday. At the White House, President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and their spouses lit candles to memorialize the dead and led the country in a national moment of silence. Bells at the Washington National Cathedral rang 500 times.
The New York Times extols the echo that no other country has counted so many deaths in the pandemic as Biden marked the nation crossing the 500,000 COVID-19 deaths barrier with a moment of silence and candle lighting ceremony at the White House where he asked Americans to wear masks and practice social distancing and members of the House and Senate gathered on the steps outside the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., to honor 500,000 lives lost from COVID-19 with a moment of silence and candle lighting ceremony, a grim milestone just over a year after the first confirmed US fatality due to the novel coronavirus, a “monumental tragedy that was so very preventable and which we will remember forever” -- as are all the BIG LIES of HISTORY!
Early models of the pandemic offered a wide range of possible outcomes, depending on how the country responded. Some models projected that as many as 2 million Americans would die without public health intervention, and others that as few as 100,000 would die if the United States imposed serious mitigation strategies. The country’s actual death count, falling firmly in the middle of these estimates, may not represent a worst-case scenario, but the scale of human loss stands as an indictment of a series of fatal policy missteps, experts said.
They ruined your life and life on this planet over a f**king model that turned out to be wildly inaccurate and wrong!
“Did I know the virus was capable of taking this many lives? Yes,” said Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo, a Johns Hopkins University epidemiologist who has led a team tracking COVID-19 data since last spring. “Did I expect, at the beginning of this, that the US would allow half a million people to die? No.”
Despite significant advances in treating the disease, January marked the outbreak’s deadliest month so far in the United States, with more than 95,000 lives lost. Nuzzo and other experts said that while the pandemic has not been as deadly as it might have been, the US’s toll — the highest in the world — is far greater than it had to be. This level of devastation — equal to the entire population of a major city — was far from inevitable, they said.
“We spent much of the last year not really seriously trying to tackle the virus. So, if you just allow the virus to spread and are half-hearted in your measures of responding to it, it’s not surprising that we’ve suffered nearly incalculable losses,” Nuzzo said. “There’s no other way to frame [500,000 deaths] than as a devastating loss.”
These double-talking, $hell game criminals should be jailed and shot for pushing this colossal fraud.
When experts sought to predict how deadly the pandemic might become, they relied on models that analyze a range of variables, including policy interventions, population-level behavior, and characteristics of the virus itself.
They still are, and the term garbage in, garbage out still holds.
In March, White House officials presented forecasts based on a number of national and international models. A worst-case scenario, with no intervention, would mean between 1.5 and 2.2 million deaths in the United States, they said. On the other hand, with mitigating steps such as social distancing and targeted lockdowns, officials said, deaths could range from 100,000 to 240,000, but despite widespread restrictions, in many areas the pandemic has been far worse than many imagined.
Except for those involved in Event 201 in October 2019.
In Massachusetts, where officials once questioned a University of Washington prediction that 8,200 would die from COVID-19, more than 15,000 people have lost their lives, and the nation’s outbreak, while currently slowing, is ongoing, with more than 1,000 Americans still dying each day. That’s down from highs of more than 4,000 a day in January.
“It’s really tragic that this is not surprising,” said Samuel Scarpino, a Northeastern University epidemiologist. “The risk that we would mismanage this, especially federally,” was clear early last spring, he said.
Scarpino said 500,000 likely undercounts the deaths caused by COVID-19. It took months for testing to become widely available, and several studies have shown that the virus was circulating globally much earlier than originally thought.
Then natural herd immunity has already been reached!
You can't have it both ways, fear-mongering liar!
States and the federal government were slow to act when cases rose last spring and again this fall and winter, an error Scarpino said cost countless lives. Beyond modeling, Scarpino and Nuzzo both pointed to one concrete, clear indication that the United States could have avoided this level of loss: Other countries did.
Globally, nearly 2.5 million have died, data from Johns Hopkins shows. The country with the second-highest death toll, Brazil, has recorded just under 250,000 deaths, with a slightly smaller population than the United States. India, home to 1.4 billion people compared to the US’s 328 million, has recorded just over 156,000 deaths.
Despite the rollout of vaccines since mid-December, a closely watched model from the University of Washington projects more than 589,000 dead by June 1.
The pandemic is not over, and it is too early to know its final toll, experts said, but they also expressed something rare in recent months: hope. Although the exact reasons behind slowed transmission are difficult to pinpoint, and the fear of fast-spreading variants persists, experts said they are optimistic that with vaccine distribution picking up across the country, these encouraging trends will continue.
“We were given a tremendous gift from science with these vaccines,” Nuzzo said. “So I do expect to see the death numbers continue to decline, which is really welcome news.”
Still, Nuzzo said she remains devastated by the enormity of loss and haunted by what might have been......
She fears dying alone most.
Don't worry, you'll have help:
"Legislature drops deference to Baker as it more stridently questions vaccine rollout" by Emma Platoff and Matt Stout Globe Staff, February 22, 2021
The Massachusetts Legislature, which has seemed content to allow the executive branch to lead the state’s fight against the coronavirus, is poised to assert itself this week, summoning Governor Charlie Baker and his top aides before a new oversight committee to demand answers about the state’s coronavirus vaccine rollout.
Thursday’s live-streamed hearing — billed as the first of many — presents both an opportunity and a test for state lawmakers to press top Baker administration figures, including the governor himself, on what they’ve so far criticized in tweets and public statements as a shoddy and unpredictable distribution process.
It’s also a rare flex of legislative authority, and one of several signals that Democratic leaders are stepping beyond the role of the deferential partner to Baker in the state’s response to the pandemic.
Since declaring a state of emergency in March 2020, Baker has driven the state’s response with relative autonomy. It was the Baker administration that laid out the initial criteria for vaccine eligibility, based off recommendations from an advisory panel he formed, and it’s the Baker administration that has begun retooling its approach in the face of criticism.
For months, legislative leaders appeared content, by and large, to push the administration in private calls and back channels. Some lawmakers penned public letters on various concerns, but they never sought to curtail Baker’s emergency authority or override the emergency-era executive orders that have reshaped daily life by closing some businesses early in the pandemic, later limiting the number of customers in others, and requiring people to wear masks in public, but missteps in the state’s vaccine rollout, lawmakers say, spurred them to take on a broader and more public oversight role. Democratic legislators have balked at allowing younger people who accompany older residents to vaccine sites to get shots themselves and criticized Baker for severely curtailing the number of doses going to cities and towns in order to divert them to the mass vaccination sites.
The Legislature has held occasional oversight hearings, but this one comes at a time of growing frustration and rare, intense public criticism of Baker, even as his approval ratings remain unscathed, according to polling.
“There’s a role for us to hold the governor accountable,” said state Representative Mike Connolly, a Cambridge Democrat and vocal critic of Baker’s decisions amid the state of emergency. “From my perspective, there has been a need at the beginning for strong oversight, and there has been a lot of room for critique of the Baker administration. It feels like more people are realizing it.”
Even as the state has dramatically increased the number of people getting vaccinated in recent weeks, Democrats continue to knock the governor over ever-changing distribution plans and persistent inequities in who can access the shots. That frustration only intensified last week when the state’s vaccine website crashed just as 1 million more residents became eligible to schedule appointments.....
The Globe is demanding an apology even though he is still enormously popular among Massachusetts residents amid the sluggish vaccine rollout.
I find it interesting that the allegedly "botched" rollout is now causing him problems when it was no problem when he stripped the budget bill of the provision that would have allowed 16- and 17-year-olds to get an abortion without a parent’s consent despite his reputation as an abortion rights supporter (I am discomforted by the whole idea, and just hope you can and will $upport the child and give it a good family).
Of course, the debate over the abortion language was but one consideration as Trotsky(?!) a$$ures your future. The good governor also signed a police overhaul into law that was condemned by leaders of color before sending it back to Legislature, asking for changes.
That was the first inkling that the Globe was calling for a change at quarterback. There were offsetting fouls; however, only the delay of game was called out as a penalty because the union isn’t ready for real reform and won't release the full body camera footage. They agreed to key changes in how the state holds police accountable and made an example out of two former State Police supervisors who were indicted on federal fraud charges so the momentum would not be the victim of a massacre that made the House accept a revised bill, included loosening proposed limits on the use of facial recognition (pardon me, I did not hear that last part).
That is the political climate around here. The Globe says sign the climate bill, governor, and that is the last thing you want, thus Governor Charlie Baker vetoed a far-reaching package of climate change and energy legislation Thursday, rejecting — perhaps temporarily — a bill that would have set the state on a path to in effect eliminate its carbon emissions over the next three decades. The move disappointed but didn’t surprise lawmakers and advocates, who had feared the Republican governor would veto the bill, despite having laid out his own ambitious plan to achieve zero emissions on a net basis by 2050. The legislation, considered the state’s most sweeping measure to address climate change since the landmark Global Warming Solutions Act in 2008, would have required the state to reduce its emissions by 50 percent below 1990 levels by the end of the decade.
If such a thing were to go forward, economic growth would literally drop off a cliff for the rest of eternity and in defiance Democratic leaders vowed to rush new climate change bill back over if need be. The explosive posture resulted in a compromise that makes on sick with Boston ready to join dozens of other municipalities in a renewable-energy push with the flexibility to extract more affordable housing commitments from developers -- on the heels of what has happened in Texas.
Nevertheless, it was a key victory for Baker, as was using $1.6 billion in savings to balance state budget to o$tensibly $hore up the unemployment fund because business needs a break on their taxes. Must be why there they were withholding unemployment claims under the guise of protecting against fraud that the department says will help weed out illegitimate claims and make payments to unemployed workers more quickly (after judicial review) because as the economy continues to slowly rebound from the worst of the pandemic, but even so, the number of new filers remains extremely high by historical standards, a sign of just how entrenched the pandemic remains one year after it first struck and “it’s going to take a long time to get back to normal” even as some businesses have managed to grow.
That as they demand their cut of the sales tax immediately as states battle each other over billions in work-from-home taxes -- although Massachusetts says its telecommute rule is temporary and due to expire when the governor declares an end to its pandemic state of emergency despite the pleas from more than 50 mayors and town managers for aid and in the post-pandemic remote-work economy, there’s no reason the state can’t attract as many workers as it loses. Just reminding you who is still king of the hill and directing policy regardless of gender, complete with pictures.
Baker is now under fire for the ill-fated PrepMod deal that for the second week in a row left thousands of Massachusetts residents who logged onto computers and smartphones in search of a COVID-19 vaccination shot frustrated and no closer to their goal of bringing the vaccine to communities of color with the state AG calling for more attention to equity in state’s coronavirus vaccination campaign as a new mass vaccine site opened Monday morning in the former Sears store at the Natick Mall, where Claire Kirylo, 71, of Somerville, came out of the mall and said she was pleased by how seamless the process was for getting the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, saying, “They’re so well-organized. They had me stay a little longer because I had some allergies, but it was fantastic. It was a great experience.” I don't know what her tolerance level is, but the account made me feel $ick and left out.
That was after Massachusetts spent 20 years (and untold dollars) refining its own mass vaccination plan, and they need to figure this out with a new thrust to boost vaccination efforts through regional sites and local pharmacies for the better despite pushback from the teachers union because winter is almost over and what the ultimate exit strategy from the pandemic lockdowns looks like is still unknown. Waiting for zero infections isn’t realistic; it’s unlikely that COVID-19 is going away, even when the vaccines are fully distributed, while at the same time, shutdowns can’t go on forever. The grim reality is that, like flu deaths and traffic fatalities, this is going to be a constant threat we may have to learn to tolerate to get on with life, but for now, though, the state should ask residents for just a little more patience. Delaying further reopening, to buy time for more vaccinations and to limit the spread of variants, will be worth the sacrifice to prevent a spike in deaths. Thus, as new cases ease but hot spots dot the East Coast it is time to put the pandemic’s deathly scale in perspective and put the fear into the deep freeze and fix the Affordable Care Act.
That's the State of the State, anyway, as sick as it is; however, to be Black and Bostonian makes some proud Nubians. She is one of the five new lawmakers to watch on Beacon Hill, along with a former boxer, actor, third-grade teacher, and more than one activist, so watch your phone while you are staying at the hospital or YMCA.
