Emergence of a Deadly Coronavirus

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On Saturday, nearly 24,000 new COVID-19 cases were reported in Florida, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said, marking an all-time one-day high for the state. An additional 93 people died, and more than 13,000 people were hospitalized.

For comparison, the state reported just 1,250 new infections on June 1.

Baptist Health, a system of 11 hospitals, counted 810 COVID-19 patients as of Friday, a representative confirmed, which is a 97% increase from two weeks ago.

Intensive care units in Florida are filling up, and final moments with loved ones, separated by face shields and glass barriers, have become a resurgent reality.

Insider interviewed seven doctors, hospital leaders, and local government officials, to understand how they're responding to the situation.

Steve Kessel, a South Florida cardiologist at Palm Beach Medical Center and Jupiter Medical Center, said that some frontline doctors have found themselves burning precious time quibbling with sick patients who are still adamant that they were right to forego the vaccine. It's producing exasperation and even anger among medical providers, he said.

At one South Florida hospital, some COVID patients have had to wait in the triage area for up to a day since no ICU beds were immediately available, said a doctor in the area who requested not to be identified as they were unauthorized to speak to the media.

About half of adults in Florida (50.8%) are fully vaccinated, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. The Delta variant is preying upon the roughly half of adults in the state who aren't.

"It's certainly been frustrating to know that we have really excellent preventative measures at this point. We're so lucky to have a vaccine," said David Wein, chief of emergency medicine at Tampa General Hospital. "That adds, perhaps, to some of the frustration — that it's just not being accessed and utilized to its fullest."

Jimenez said he's heard of some patients pleading to be vaccinated after they've fallen ill. "The saddest ones obviously are the ones that are in the ICU," he said. "It's clearly way too late."

Paul Schwartz, a South Florida physician, has detected something else: continued defiance among some about the severity of the illness.

With the number of COVID patients skyrocketing, it's not just emergency medical systems which are being taxed, said Barry Burton, the county administrator who leads local government operations for Pinellas County, which counts nearly 1 million residents on the state's west coast.

The situation "has taxed our healthcare system, our emergency rooms, our ambulances, and our fire rescue, because it all works as a system," he told Insider.

The county's ambulance system used to be able to do a patient transfer to a hospital in about 15 minutes.

But backups at county hospitals are forcing patients to sit, waiting in ambulances, for hour-long stretches or more when they arrive, Burton said, taking those emergency units out of commission. New patients have to wait longer at home to be picked up, or the fire department has to pitch in to run transfers.

Meanwhile, hospitals are confronting a nationwide shortage of nurses.

Kevin Taylor, the emergency room director at Baptist Health's two Bethesda Hospital locations in Boynton Beach, said that nurses on staff are making up for the lack of reinforcements by volunteering for extra shifts.

Jimenez of the UF Health Shands Hospital told Insider that his hospital has rescheduled some elective surgeries until next week to ensure that enough ICU beds remain available.

Simultaneously, some hospitals' oxygen capacities have been besieged by a sudden, increased demand for emergency care.

Last week, Putnam Community Medical Center, a 99-bed medical facility in the city of Palatka, had to divert some patients to the nearby North Florida Regional Medical Center, which has 523 beds, in order to deal with a patient overload.

As ominous as the situation appears now, some Florida doctors worry it could escalate, particularly with schools reopening in the coming week.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, previously issued an executive order prohibiting schools from requiring students to wear masks in the classroom.

Ultimately, Floridians themselves will be the arbiters of what happens next, Kessel, the cardiologist, said.

The peak of Louisiana’s fourth and latest coronavirus surge could be weeks away, the state’s chief health officer said Tuesday, calling that a “catastrophic” scenario for hospitals already overrun with COVID-19 patients that are increasingly having to turn away people with other life-threatening emergencies such as heart attacks or strokes.

Kanter stressed that the highly contagious delta variant of the coronavirus is difficult to model, so it’s hard to determine when Louisiana’s latest coronavirus surge will begin to lessen. But models so far have painted a “doomsday” picture.

Kanter’s morning remarks followed similarly grim messages from authorities in St. Tammany Parish. The suburban parish on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, across the lake from New Orleans, is in an area of the state where health department figures show only about 35% of the population is fully vaccinated, and where resistance to mask mandates has been strong.

Statewide, about 38% of the population is vaccinated against the coronavirus illness, among the bottom five states in the nation, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But the numbers of people seeking their first shot has increased 500% over the last month, Kanter said, with nearly 45% of Louisiana’s residents starting the vaccine series

Officials around the state continue to sound the alarm about rising COVID-19 case numbers.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before. Our hospitals are being overwhelmed,” Dr. Michael Hill, of St. Tammany Parish Health System, said at a Monday news conference. ”You don’t believe me? Come by the ER. There are lines now, around the building because there are no seats available in our waiting area.”

The state has hit new record-breaking benchmarks of hospitalized COVID-19 patients each day for nearly a week.

“It’s a real dire situation, not so much for physical space. Hospitals will make physical space where they can. They will double up rooms where they have to,” Kanter said. “There’s just not enough qualified staff in the state right now to care for all these patients.”

Kanter said he worked in a New Orleans emergency room last weekend. He described a heart attack patient trying to find a hospital with space for treatment.

“This patient had to bypass six separate hospitals to get to us with an acute massive heart attack, which means the outcomes are going to be worse for that individual,” Kanter said.

As vaccination rates lag and the new delta variant surges, Covid infection rates among kids have risen and children’s hospitals are seeing a spike in medical care needs among the young patients.

The Covid surge is also stacking upon an unseasonable spike in respiratory illnesses among children typically seen only in winter. That has shrunk the bed space further in children's hospitals and expanded on the unrelenting demand on doctors and nurses.

“It is scary, especially for kids who don’t fully understand what’s going on. They’re air hungry, struggling for breath, and it’s just scary,” said Dr. Kelechi Iheagwara, medical director of the pediatric intensive care unit at the Our Lady of the Lake Children’s Hospital in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. “You have the illness, the fear, they can’t breathe, they’re isolated — that’s hard for anyone to understand, but can you imagine what it’s like for a kid?”

Her hospital has treated Covid in children ages from 3-week-olds to 17-year-olds in recent weeks. Iheagawara said that for the past month, her unit has had to treat 25 or 26 patients in a space designed for 20. And things are getting worse.

Multiple doctors in the half-dozen children’s hospitals NBC News reached out to said they have seen children infected because a member of their household, often a parent, brings the coronavirus home. Oftentimes, it is because an adult in the home is unvaccinated.

More children are coming in with Covid symptoms just ahead of the start of the school year. Bed shortages and overworked doctors and nurses in children’s hospitals are becoming commonplace.

Doctors and experts said that kids who returned to school last school year did so successfully because Covid precautions were in place. But as the CDC and state and local governments relaxed their guidelines this year, many of those safeguards evaporated.

“This new variant is a major contributor, but a major issue is that people’s behavior has changed,” said Gigi Gronvall, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “I don’t think we can absolve people and leaders of responsibility for this because it gives them a pass. The reason kids are getting infected is because we don’t have those precautions and parents and households are getting infected.”

Extra Australian military personnel may be called in to ensure compliance with lockdown rules in Sydney, the New South Wales state government said on Thursday, as the highly infectious delta coronavirus variant spreads into regional areas.

The move comes as Australia’s capital, Canberra, 260 km (160 miles) southwest of Sydney, announced a snap one-week lockdown from Thursday evening after reporting its first locally acquired case of Covid-19 in more than a year.

Australia is battling to get on top of the fast-moving delta strain that has plunged two of its largest cities —Sydney and Melbourne — into hard lockdowns.

“We are making sure that we do not leave any stone unturned in relation to extra (military) resources,” New South Wales (NSW) state Premier Gladys Berejiklian said at a media conference in Sydney, the state capital.

A spokesperson for Defense Minister Peter Dutton told Reuters the NSW government has indicated it would soon formally request additional military support.

Some 580 unarmed army personnel are already helping police enforce home-quarantine orders on affected households in the worst-affected suburbs of Sydney, Australia’s most populous city.

Several regional towns scattered across NSW have also been forced into snap lockdowns after fresh cases, raising fears the virus is spreading out of control.

Despite seven weeks of lockdown in Sydney, daily infections continue to hover near record highs. NSW on Thursday reported 345 new locally acquired cases, most of them in Sydney, up from 344 a day earlier.

Lockdown rules were tightened in three more local council areas in Sydney, limiting the move.

Melbourne.

But the rapid spread of the delta variant in New South Wales and a slow vaccine rollout has left the country vulnerable to a new wave of infections.

Only around 24% of people above 16 years of age are fully vaccinated, and experts see Australia heading into a cycle of stop-and-start lockdowns until a higher vaccination coverage is reached.

A growing COVID-19 outbreak has forced a Sydney school for children with autism spectrum disorder to shut its doors, with 18 cases linked to the cluster.

Health authorities say three staff members and seven students at Giant Steps special education school in Gladesville have tested positive to COVID-19, as well as eight family members.

Autism Awareness Australia chief executive Nicole Rogerson has spoken to a number of devastated parents at the school, with hundreds of children and family members now in isolation.

A hospital trip for someone with moderate to severe autism is an unbelievable thing to have to deal with. My heart goes out to all of them.”

In a letter from principal Kerrie Nelson, seen by the Herald, parents were first told on August 5 the school would shut after a staff member tested positive to COVID-19. All staff and students were asked to isolate until receiving further advice.

The school, which was established in 1995, caters for high needs children with autism from kindergarten to Year 12.

Ms Rogerson said it was essential that schools for students with moderate and severe disabilities could remain open during lockdown, criticising the federal government’s vaccine rollout across the disability sector.

She said more needed to be done to ensure students, staff and carers were vaccinated.

So many of us have been yelling from the rooftops for months that people with a disability were part of 1b of the rollout, yet so many remain unvaccinated.

“If you’re working with a very vulnerable population, I’d be very keen to see who on the staff was vaccinated and who wasn’t.”

Mississippi out of ICU beds.Overflow is being treated in a parking garage.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wwltv. ... 5c84f866f6

We're eight months into this pandemic, and Donald Trump still doesn't have a plan to get this virus under control.

I do.

We're 8 months into his presidency: It's nice to see how well his plan is working.

U.S. health experts are expected to recommend COVID-19 booster shots for all Americans eight months after they get their second dose of the vaccine, to ensure longer-lasting protection as the delta variant spreads across the country.

Federal health officials have been looking at whether extra shots for the vaccinated would be needed as early as this fall, reviewing case numbers in the U.S. as well as the situation in other countries such as Israel, where preliminary studies suggest the vaccine’s protection against serious illness dropped among those vaccinated in January.

An announcement on the U.S. booster recommendation is expected as soon as this week, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Doses would only begin to be administered widely once the Food and Drug Administration formally approves the vaccines, which are being dispensed for now under what is known as emergency use authorization. Full approval of the Pfizer shot is expected in the coming weeks.

Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, on Sunday became the latest public health official to predict the U.S. will break 200,000 daily coronavirus cases – numbers last seen in January – as he warned unvaccinated Americans remain “sitting ducks” for the highly infectious Delta variant.

Collins said on Fox News Sunday that the latest surge of the virus is “going very steeply upward with no signs of having peaked out,” adding that he will be “surprised” if the U.S. doesn’t exceed 200,000 daily cases in the coming weeks.

Collins also underscored the particular danger the virus poses to 90 million Americans who are unvaccinated, calling them “sitting ducks,” and adding, “We’re in a world of hurt.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease official, has also predicted the U.S. will surpass 200,000 daily cases, as has Tom Frieden, the former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The U.S. came close to that number late last month, reaching 194,608 cases on July 30, the highest number of cases since the winter surge on Jan. 16.
Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, predicted in a Meet The Press interview that the latest surge of the virus could continue for four to six weeks.

113%. That’s the increase in coronavirus deaths over the last two weeks, with a 65% increase in cases and a 69% increase in hospitalizations, according to data compiled by the New York Times.

The White House has said that just two states, Texas and Florida, accounted for 40% of new coronavirus hospitalizations last week.

White House coronavirus response coordinator Jeff Zients said Thursday that vaccinations have tripled in Arkansas and quadrupled in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi.

The University of Mississippi Medical Center will open a second field hospital in one of its parking garages, another attempt at propping up a hospital system on the verge of collapse due to a surge of COVID-19 patients.

Samaritan’s Purse, an evangelical Christian humanitarian aid organization, will build and staff the field hospital. It will contain 32 patient beds, with five of them being ICU beds. None of the 50 or so beds in the field hospital UMMC opened on Friday are ICU level.

As Missouri's intensive care units swell with record numbers of COVID-19 patients, hospitals across the state are grappling with an increasingly competitive market for temporary health care workers, which has sent costs soaring.

Hospitals have leaned more and more over the past year on staffing agencies to boost ranks during COVID-19 surges, and the nationwide demand for those workers has inflated hourly rates to sometimes double pre-pandemic levels. The Missouri Hospital Association said costs for traveling nurses have risen, in some cases, to $200 per hour.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has tested positive for Covid-19, his office said Tuesday.

Abbott, a Republican, is fully vaccinated against the virus, his office said in a statement, adding that he is tested daily and this is his first positive result.

He is currently isolated in the governor's mansion and is receiving Regeneron's monoclonal antibody treatment, the statement said. Abbott is in good health and not currently experiencing any symptoms.

Texas first lady Cecilia Abbott has tested negative and everyone with whom Abbott has been in close contact has been notified, the statement continued. Abbott attended an indoor "Republican Club" event Monday evening, according to photos posted to his Twitter account.

All New York City public school teachers and other staffers will have to get vaccinated against the coronavirus, officials said Monday as the nation’s largest school system prepared for classes to start next month.

The city previously said teachers, like other city employees, would have to get the shots or get tested weekly for the virus. The new policy marks the first no-option vaccination mandate for a broad group of city workers in the nation’s most populous city, though Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Friday that coaches and students in football, basketball and other “high-risk” sports would have to get inoculated before play begins.

Now, about 148,000 school employees — and contractors who work in schools — will have to get at least a first dose by Sept. 27, according to an announcement from the Democratic mayor and the city health and education departments.

The city hasn’t immediately said what the penalty will be for refusing, or whether there will be exemptions. The previous vaccinate-or-test requirement had provisions for unpaid suspensions for workers who didn’t comply.

Unions that represent school employees said they needed answers — and negotiations.

Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, said its priority was ”keeping our kids safe and the schools open,” but provisions for medical exceptions and other details “must be negotiated with the UFT and other unions, and if necessary, resolved by arbitration.”

Robert Troeller, the president of the custodians’ union said he was concerned that the city had announced the requirement without bargaining.

At least 63% of all school employees already have been vaccinated. That figure doesn’t include those who may have gotten their shots outside the city.

There was one "jimmy m" post after the stroke...maybe someone helped him with that?

As of right now, his WP profile says he last visited WP on 25 Apr 2021.

The massive surge of COVID-19 infections in Israel, one of the most vaccinated countries on earth, is pointing to a complicated path ahead for America.

In June, there were several days with zero new COVID infections in Israel. The country launched its national vaccination campaign in December last year and has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, with 80 percent of citizens above the age of 12 fully inoculated. COVID, most Israelis thought, had been defeated. All restrictions were lifted and Israelis went back to crowded partying and praying in mask-free venues.

Fast forward two months later: Israel reported 9,831 new diagnosed cases on Tuesday, a hairbreadth away from the worst daily figure ever recorded in the country—10,000—at the peak of the third wave. More than 350 people have died of the disease in the first three weeks of August. In a Sunday press conference, the directors of seven public hospitals announced that they could no longer admit any coronavirus patients. With 670 COVID-19 patients requiring critical care, their wards are overflowing and staff are at breaking point.

The complex and sobering truth is that no single policy or event brought Israel to this crisis, Hagai Levine, a Hebrew University of Jerusalem professor of epidemiology, told The Daily Beast. A deadly set of circumstances came together to put Israel on the precipice, most of which can be summed up as: “We are still in the midst of a pandemic, and there is no silver bullet.”

“All the vectors have influenced the rise in morbidity,” he said.

But the principal causes of Israel’s current predicament are the dominance of the extremely infectious Delta variant, which was carried into the country by Israelis returning from foreign vacations during the weeks in which Israel dropped all restrictive measures—along with the worrisome decrease in vaccine efficacy after about six months.

Israel vaccinated its population almost exclusively with the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, which received full FDA approval on Monday and remains the gold standard for the prevention of severe illness due to the coronavirus.

But in early July, with citizens over the age of 60 almost completely vaccinated, Israeli scientists began observing a worrisome rise in infections—if not in severe illness and death—among the double-vaccinated.

Fully vaccinated people with weakened immune systems appeared particularly vulnerable to the aggressive Delta variant.

By mid-July, Sheba Hospital Professor Galia Rahav began to experiment with booster shots for oncology patients, transplant patients, and the hospital’s own staff. A group of 70 elderly vaccinated Israelis with transplanted kidneys were the first to receive a third dose.

The success of Rahav’s trials in boosting immunity at about the sixth-month mark contributed to the Centers for Disease Control decision, announced last week, to begin offering booster shots to Americans in September.

In order to keep severe illness and the number of COVID deaths down, and avoiding a fourth national lockdown, Israel has embarked on an aggressive effort to provide all adults with boosters in a matter of weeks.

As of this week, all Israelis over 30 will be eligible to receive booster shots. By the end of the month, they are expected to be universally available to anyone over the age of 12 who received their second vaccine five months or more ago.

Israel will then reconfigure its Green Passports, granting them only to the triple-vaccinated, and limiting their validity to six months.

The Centers for Disease Control published a study on Tuesday that found that while vaccine efficacy against the delta variant of covid-19 is moderately decreased, vaccines still lower infection risk for the SARS-CoV-2 virus by two-thirds. The study reported the efficacy of Pfizer and Moderna's vaccines against the virus dropped from about 90 percent to 66 percent once the delta variant became the dominant strain.

Newly sworn-in Gov. Kathy Hochul sought to lay down the foundation for her administration's response to the pandemic on her first days in office, reimplementing a mask mandate in schools, outlining plans to combat the delta variant and offering promised gestures of transparency on multiple fronts.

Hochul included New York state's total COVID-19 death toll as reported to the CDC in her first daily COVID release issued Tuesday -- a count that is more than 10,000 deaths higher (55,395) than the state's (43,415) and includes the nursing home deaths Andrew Cuomo's office said it excluded to avoid double-counting them.

"We're now releasing more data than had been released before publicly. So people know the nursing home deaths and the hospital deaths are consistent with what's being displayed by the CDC," Hochul told MSNBC Wednesday. "There's just a lot of things that weren't happening, and I'm gonna make them happen."

In what was another blow to what's left of Cuomo’s legacy, Hochul said on NPR that "the public deserves a clear, honest picture of what’s happening. And that’s whether it’s good or bad, they need to know the truth."

“There are presumed and confirmed deaths. People should know both," Hochul said later on NPR.

The governor said in her first official public address that her top priority is safely getting children back to school. Hochul said she was directing state health officials to make masks mandatory for anyone entering public or private schools. Her administration will also work, she said, to implement a requirement that all school staff statewide either be vaccinated or undergo weekly COVID-19 testing.

Newly sworn-in Gov. Kathy Hochul sought to lay down the foundation for her administration's response to the pandemic on her first days in office, reimplementing a mask mandate in schools, outlining plans to combat the delta variant and offering promised gestures of transparency on multiple fronts.

The Worldometer, which I've been referring to every day, has had New York at about 54,000 deaths for a long time.