#Then had to get tested for covid for an entirely unrelated reason

[littlegreenwyvy]

If you do not wear a facemask indoors

then go fuck yourself, cuz this is your fault 💚

This goes for my friends too btw sorry 💚

Actually tbh not all that sorry

I'm getting to the point where I'm willing to lose friends over whether or not you voluntarily protect your community in ways that will tangibly and directly help to prevent a fatal effect on people like me. Frankly if you're friends with me and you don't do this then please don't be friends with me, because like you're basically making yourself a danger for me to be around anyway. If I have to worry about how many people YOU'VE been in contact with IN ADDITION to how many people I'm in contact with myself, and all the people THEY'RE in contact with, and the likelihood that any of us or them have been in contact with someone who may or may not have had or been exposed to someone who had covid... I'm just gonna not bother. We will never meet, ever. And that's what my life has been like. I haven't seen my friends. I've barely seen some of my own family members who I LIVE with, because of how often we have to isolate IN OUR OWN HOMES from each other after a possible exposure. Remember isolating? It's that thing you do when either you're sick OR YOU DON'T KNOW YET IF YOU'VE CAUGHT THE SICK FROM SOMEONE.

Btw since nobody can afford to regularly test anymore (not that people stay home anyway even when they are sick), any stranger with a cough or sniffle you're 'in contact' (i.e. in the same room/vehicle/space) with is essentially a possible covid contact (and that's not even taking into account how many people go around with NO acute symptoms at all, or just really bizarre, seemingly unrelated ones, or who mistake then for migraines or allergies or something else).

But to get back on track, I don't really wanna be friends with you if after 4 years of all this, knowing everything we know now, after all that the world has been through, you STILL don't bother to take ANY precautions.

If you don't wear a mask nowadays, why not?

Do you just not care? I wish I had that luxury.

Do you think 'why bother'? It's because we're super fucked if nobody does, so start with yourself.

Are you just content with the risk of infecting someone else? Fuck you if so.

Do you think infections are GOOD? You couldn't be more wrong.

Do you think it's not 'bad enough' to warrant taking a PREVENTATIVE MEASURE? It's called PREVENTATIVE for a reason.

Do you genuinely just not know how prevalent and SERIOUSLY BAD covid still is?? Learn how to listen to disabled people.

Whatever the reason, I'M not content with the risk. I don't know your situation, friend who is reading this, but the risk is significantly higher for ME than it is for 'healthy' people! And I'm sick of the entire world deciding FOR me what the 'comfort level' with covid should be, based on the people who are statistically less likely to die from it. (The objectively correct answer is still SUPER SERIOUSLY UNCOMFORTABLE by the way. You're straight up, plain old wrong if you think otherwise, by the way. Covid is ALWAYS a risk, no matter how 'healthy' or 'low risk' you are.)

So in short my friends, even if you're not going to interact with me specifically, if you're also not implicitly and automatically trying to protect the people who ARE around you with some high-covid-risk factor, then that's just kinda fucked up in my opinion.

You're contagious for several days before AND after your symptoms start and end. You're contagious even if you have NO symptoms. Just wear the mask...! It won't kill you to wear one, but it very well may kill someone you know, if you don't.

#vent

[flockofdoves]

obviously there is no time that is Good or Convenient to have covid and i guess technically its good that this isn't happening to me in the middle of a time where i have more active work or school responsibilities

but also it just feels like Such bad timing in a lot of other ways

i literally Just was recovering after unrelated health problems over the past couple weeks that were making me so so fucking stir crazy i had plans to go out and really start planning my days for the rest of the summer doing things like going to rhode island again and going birding more and going to museums and stuff because i was at my fucking limit with being cooped up in my apartment recovering. but now i just gotta do that all over again for at least another 9 days from today

kinda sad about ending my summer this way. and also i'm gonna have to miss my niece's christening party when i really would like to see her again i've only seen her once since she was born :(

also there are just so so many issues surrounding my lease and roommate situation. my symptoms started on tuesday the 16th which means i should isolate til the 26th (i do not trust the new recommendations saying you can even go to work if you have covid after 5 days i think thats fucking insane and would be irresponsible of me with how extremely symptomatic i am right now)

my current lease ends on the 26th. so so lucky i don't have to move but every single thing about my roommate situation and how shes supposed to move out on the 26th is made so fucking complicated by this

because my roomate is still here the whole time i have to isolate i have to stay entirely in my bedroom outside of wearing a mask to go to the bathroom (and shutting the door and taking it off to shower or brush teeth) or quickly get food to bring to my room

and my girlfriend didnt test positive yesterday but it feels kind of inevitable considering that we sleep in the same room (and cpaps even aerosolize viruses further apparently) so its not like she can even stay in the other room for the time being while periodically checking to see if she's gotten infected

and also i put in repair requests earlier this week for issues with the apartment that preexisted me and my gf moving in but that over the past year i'd been too nervous about having maintenance come in and see how bad things were bc of my roommate until me and my gf deep cleaned last week

but the repair requests were not fulfilled within a few days and then i had to cancel them obviously once i tested positive. and so now that means i cant have maintenance fix anything til after the new lease starts... which means that we're gonna have to pay back my roommate the her entire portion of the security deposit and then pay for the repairs during our new lease for things that happened when she lived here before us...

it also kinda puts a wrench into any hopes i still kinda had of trying to reach out to anyone she knows to try to help her cat

and im sad bc i realized cats can get covid so i shouldnt even really be playing with or petting her cat over the next 10 days :(

also its gonna be so so weird bc ive already doubted that shes actually gonna move out at all and now its even more ambiguous bc like. if she ever communicated with me at all i'd find it very reasonable for her to ask to move out a little later so she doesnt have to deal with that or expose anyone shes potentially bringing to help her move or anything. but like i know shes not actually gonna communicate anything so if the 26th comes and goes and shes still here its gonna feel even weirder than it was gonna originally because i'll feel more unconfident about asserting like. you need to get out of here. when i can find a reason to understand why she'd unexpectedly need to stay a little longer

#thank god my roommate unblocked my number so my text actually went through letting her know i have covid #still kinda wondering about the possibility of her ignoring texts enough that she still doesnt know tho lol #cpost

[wheres-hoid]

Thank you all for the kind words, things are feeling rather less end-of-the-worldish. I have Absolutely No Energy at the moment and probably won't be replying to anything tonight, but I see you and appreciate you immensely. Again, thank you all ❤

#Just had a um. Rough bit. #Learned some people that I care for have covid #Then had to get tested for covid for an entirely unrelated reason #Which was Not Pleasant #And while getting ready to leave for the testing place I tripped in my room and stabbed my foot #With my largest tipped calligraphy pen. Which was enormously fun to deal with (/s) #Leading to my having a bit of a panic attack in the back seat during the drive over #Plus I just generally feel like shit because I have what is potentially the fucking plague! Doing great! #And I just kinda. Could no longer hold that all up along with the other shit I've had to deal with lately. Hence the post. #However! Then I went home and read a good book. Good books are very very nice. #Oh dear this has become a bit of a vent post hasn't it #Well. If you're still here thanks for reading 💕 #And thank you for the kind words! They very much helped and I really really appreciate it #Special shout out to the person that put a Hoid quote I damn near cried /pos #A'ight this is getting long #I love you all! I hope you have a lovely rest of your day/night 💕 #Be excellent to each other #Not Cosmere #My post #Not a quote #Vent #Injury mention #Covid #Covid 19

[foster-the-world]

Okay

My Mom does have Covid but seems to be hanging in there. She has pneumonia in one lung. She got the infusion therapy on Saturday. I think she was hoping it would immediately make her feel better but no luck. So not a mild case but so far it seems like she’ll escape a severe case. Thank goodness.

My Uncle tested positive today. He didn’t get it from my Mom. He’s unvaccinated and obese. My Mom’s other brother died two weeks ago - unrelated to Covid. Here’s to hoping no more bad news for the whole family. My Uncle doesn’t have insurance so hasn’t gotten the infusion therapy. I’m going to call around tmrw to see what his options are. Why does America have such a shitty healthcare system?

We seem to have convinced our building to redo our bathroom and kitchen while we are away at Christmas. In exchange for no rent increase we agreed to pay 20%ish. It’s a flat rate but I’m assuming its 20% or less based on past contract estimates we saw. Seems crazy to pay money for a rental but I think considering the situation it makes sense. They are going to take down the walls that currently go over where a dumb waiter used to be. Our kitchen will be 25% bigger. It will still be NYC small but not quite as small. Plus, new floors, backsplash, etc in both the kitchen and bathroom. Still in negotiations if we get a washer/dryer.

We recently went to a few open houses but for the size/# of bedrooms we need there is nothing even close to our current place in our price range. Our rental is stabilized so we pay below market rate and they can’t raise the rent. Hence, the only reason we are willing to pay anything. We did the math and even if we decide to move to my home state in a few years the costs of the upgrade will be worth it for the time we can use it. If we stay in the city forever it will 100% be worth it for the additional space alone. 

We can pick tile colors, etc. It’s feeling more stressful than fun so I think we may go with the basic colors the contractor suggested. White cabinets in the kitchen, black countertop, white backsplash and tiles. In the bathroom we like the old school black and white floor tiles so he agreed to leave them and redo the grout. Thinking of doing white tiles in the bathtub/shower walls and half way up the walls in the entire bathroom. May go with grey or black painted walls. Not sure we can pull it off but maybe. We want the upgrades so everything feels clean/looks new rather then because we have an aesthetic we are going for. I do wish I had better talent at picking things out. 

[hardheadedbighearted]

Since Hayley is dying of no-Covid juice and I don't have any other watermelons stuffed with hamburger meat to chase around my enclosure for enrichment right now, I thought it might be a good chance to talk about some of my characters' relationships with gender.

(eta: Apparently it's non-binary people's day so I'm going to pretend that's why)

So, it doesn't get many opportunities to come up, but while most of my characters use the pronouns given to them by canon, that doesn't mean all of them are binary; it just means they all have binary pronouns (for various reasons, which I'll get into in a second). Along with "not really coming up much", another reason is that the characters themselves aren't really there yet, or because even I don't know what their gender will do once they actually get there.

Anyway, all that said, here are some of the characters that I know are non-binary, or who otherwise lack what we would think of as a traditional relationship with gender (which I'll explain in a minute).

-Neopolitan {Redacted}: Neo is the most obvious example, and the only one I've been able to have come up on screen that wasn't an oc. Neo's gender is "all", and "all your gender are belong to us", and "this gender is mine", and "gender: yes". When it comes to pronouns, her stance is not so much "I use all pronouns" as "all pronouns are equally correct". Most people default (herself included) to she just because she is to all appearances a woman, but if someone were to break out a he or a they or a xe or a hir or etc, she's not going to care or likely even notice unless a big deal is made.

However, Neo does at times take on personas in order to do her job, and her personas will sometimes have very different stances on their genders. Gideon, for example, uses exclusively they; if memory serves, the sphynx cat from the raid was a he, and the black cat with the green eyes that is underneath Neo's many illusions is exclusively a she. (There's a reason for this, but she informs me it's none of your business.)

(In before, the black cat with the green eyes is not Neo's "true" identity; insofar as she thinks of any of her personas as the "true" self, that would be Neo, the black cat with the green eyes is just her natural form. This is why the black cat with the green eyes doesn't have a name and is usually referred to using the name of the strawberry calico. The reasons for this are, again, none of your business.)

-Yang Xiao Long and Weiss Schneebird: I'm listing both of these together because they're both in the camp of "haven't gotten there yet" with a healthy dose of "I don't know what they'll do when they do get there". I know that I, personally, don't see either Yang or Weiss as binary girls, nor do I feel the urge to rub my trans man fingers all over them (that's for Ruby... maybe. we'll see). I think Yang will likely end up somewhere on the Butch side of the Butch/Trans cusp; I've been reading a lot of blogs from trans men and transmasc individuals recently and them talking about their experience, and I feel like Yang will probably settle in somewhere in that arena. Weiss, on the other hand... look, okay. Honesty time: years ago during an event I won't talk about, I threw out "nonbinary Weiss" as a counterexample to a point I shouldn't have even had to make, and that single, throwaway suggestion has lived in my brain rent-free for years. Now that I have finally moved past the part of me that is still bitter about what happened (okay.. I'm still bitter, but not as much as before), I feel safe to explore that without the negative associations. Also, I saw an edit last year of Weiss with short hair, and it unlocked something in my brain. I think Weiss will end up somewhere unadjacent to binary (contrary to Yang moving along the feminine to masculine line), with an attachment to certain specific identity labels as removed from the context of a binary identity. Also given how long this turned out probably I shouldn't have made them the same bullet point. (Side note, this early gender questioning is why Yang took care to ask Neo's pronouns.)

-Qrow and Raven: Okay, so this one is the one I meant when I alluded to "non-traditional relationships with gender". While both twins do exist on what we would think of as a binary axis (while not identifying either as binary or nonbinary man/woman, respectively), they didn't get there in the traditional "assigned at birth" or "transition" way.

See, here's the thing about ravens: they don't have much sexual dimorphism to speak of. Males are typically larger than females, but with such a broad overlap that even size isn't that reliable. From this, I headcanon that in DT society, ravens (and other birds that have matching genitals and no dimorphism) don't really have a concept of "assigned at birth gender". You find out what sex you are once puberty hits, and gender is something that ravens just explore, sometimes settling very quickly into one thing and sometimes trying on lots, sometimes moving fluidly throughout their entire life.

When it comes to their actual sex, we know that Raven is female. Qrow... I genuinely don't know. I know based on certain things coming down the pipeline it's a high probability that he's also female, but those are just loosely based on my assumptions about how those loose ideas will play out, and are irrelevant and unlikely to come up anyway.

As far as their relationship with genders go, Qrow settled into male sometime during childhood, while Raven tried on genders for awhile before deciding sometime in her twenties that female was "close enough". However, for both of them gender is about how they're perceived externally, and doesn't mean much as far as their internal relationship with gender goes (which is basically nonexistent).

Will also say that there was a time when Raven was absolutely prepared to try on male for awhile to see if it would get James into bed with her, but that was more out of horniness than anything else. When it's been awhile and your best friend is hot, just got fitted with a metal dick he should probably take for a test run, and is pining for your identical twin, a girl will consider anything. Apparently.

Note regarding Yang re: raven genders, Yang is half-tanager and appeared more tanager than raven until adolescence, so Raven kind of got vetoed by Tai and Summer (not in a deliberate way, just sort of happened like that). However, both Yang and Ruby were raised to think of their assigned gender as a "default setting" that they could change at any point they so chose.

-Reese Chloris: This one will come up as soon as I get the opening for it; Reese is a transmasculine woman, and is in fact early into hrt (this is why I took care to specify her as a peahen when she first turned up). She is also a straight transmasculine woman, something that she's only recently come to accept about herself, because of course a woman who wants to look like a man to the point of taking hormones to make that happen has to be sapphic, right? Reese is still on a journey when it comes to her gender and identity; the three things she knows for sure positive are: 1, wants to kiss boys, 2, doesn't want to be boys, 3, wants to be mistaken for boys.

-Emerald Sustrai: Listen, Mercury's comment that "Emerald's not a girl, she's Emerald" is easy to dismiss as Mercury not thinking of his partner as a potential romantic pursuit until you remember that Mercury and Emerald share a dreamscape and a mental connection and that Mercury is trans, and you start to wonder if maybe he just knows something we don't.

Anyway, Emerald's not a girl, she's Emerald. What that will mean for her... well, that's actually one of the ones that I already know, but Emerald hasn't gotten there yet. Give her time. :)

-Lie Ren: He's never actually onscreen, but I always sort of envision Ren as menderfluid- never a woman, not always a man. He's also aro-ace, but that's unrelated. I just wanted to put that out there. ("But Theo! What about Renora?!" What about Renora?)

-Neon Katt: Nonbinary woman. There's not much to say about this one; Neon just considers the box of "cis woman" to be too stifling for her taste. Strictly speaking she's a she/they and even has a pin advertising this, but it's never come up outright.

-Roman Torchwick and Robyn Hill: Binary man and woman, just not in the traditional way. Not gonna elaborate, they just belong on the list. Don't worry about it.

[d2kvirus]

Dickheads of the Month: March 2021

As it seems that there are people who say or do things that are remarkably dickheaded yet somehow people try to make excuses for them or pretend it never happened, here is a collection of some of the dickheaded actions we saw in the month of March 2021 to make sure that they are never forgotten.

It was brainless enough when the Metropolitan Police suggested that Sarah Everard’s death could be blamed on her for walking home alone at night - but when it turned out that it was a police officer who murdered her, who had also been previously let off at least one case of publicly exposing himself entirely because he was a police officer, brainless left the table and instead we found ourselves noticing they were trying to blame the victim while had covered up for the eventual perpetrator

...while we also had the angry men of Twitter respond to Janie Jones’ clearly not serious suggestion that if a 6pm curfew for women were to be introduced then she would call for a 6pm curfew for men with all manner of bile, shouting, finger-pointing, and comments which the police might just so happen to want to look into

...while smirking bully Priti Patel also managed to get her oar in, as various Reclaim The Streets Vigils were shut down by the police (which is a good look, all things considered...) using the legislation that Patel rushed through a few days earlier to combat BLM protests several months after the BLM protests happened

...but then the Metropolitan Police managed to pivot the focus back onto themselves with their heavy-handed tackling of a vigil on Clapham Common that ended up with them handcuffing various women who were there - which they weren’t so keen to do when Kate Middleton was there - before releasing a statement that boiled down to “Look what you made us do” and then rushing to protect a statue of Winston Churchill for no reason whatsoever but making sure to have lots of photos of them protecting their precious statue anyway

...but then the Tory government demanded they get the last word by bulldozing through their boot stamping on a human face forever policing bill that bans all forms of protests due to it causing “annoyance” as if protesting against the ills of society is the same thing as somebody cutting in front of you in the supermarket queue or not holding open a door

...although the Metropolitan Police did try and regain their title as Biggest Dickheads the following week when an anti-lockdown march featuring professional victim Lawrence Fox and fecal enthusiast Gillian McKeith was met by the police letting them walk in a large, huddled mass without a mask between them and didn't lift a single finger

...and there’s nothing sinister about how the BBC failed to broadcast a single item saying the bill had been bulldozed through, while the piece on their website was buried instead of being on the front page

...and then at the buzzer Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services published a report saying that the police acted appropriately at the vigil, in spite of a wealth of evidence and eyewitness testimony saying they absolutely fucking didn’t

Of course we can trust the Tory government when they publish a report stating that racism isn't a systemic issue in the United Kingdom, even when various people cited as experts for this report were very surprised to hear that they were part of it given they were never asked for their input

So it has been found that proven liar Boris Johnson misled parliament over the Covid contracts being doled out by the Tories, which I’m sure will lead to widespread calls in the media for his resignation - or are we to believe that the real reason for the British media calling for Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation is down to something different?

To sum up the British press completely losing their minds about the Meghan Markle interview, we had various royal correspondents responding to some of the more serious allegations with a combination of vicious smears that don’t debunk a single thing she said or outright misrepresenting what she said to try and tip the narrative in the Royals’ favour, while the Press Gazette issued a statement rejected her claims of bigotry in the British media that can easily be disproved in seconds with photos of various front pages of The Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express on whichever subject you wish to choose - which was supported unintentionally by Ian Murray trying to shout down criticism having been presented with examples of such bigotry live on air - and in response to Murray’s hapless showing, the Society of Editors put out a mealy-mouthed nonpology that pretended that nobody ever said anything about bigotry...before suggesting Murray bugger off

...although Piers Moron Morgan picked up the baton for nastiness by first accusing Meghan of making up that she had suicidal thoughts and immediately after the interview aired it was announced that Meghan’s estranged father was lined up for an interview, although it does have to be said he was far from the only person to respond by throwing that at Meghan like a rock - only to then flounce out of the Good Morning Britain studio when called out for his bullshit, shortly before being told to hand in his resignation or else

So after Keir Starmer tore up the ballot for the Liverpool mayoral election last months, you would expect him to name a new list of candidates that was more to his liking - which is cynical enough - right?  Wrong, instead he backed the government's plans to seize control of the city, meaning that Keir Starmer handed over the Labour stronghold of Liverpool to the Tories with no fucking questions asked

Further enhancing public trust in the police was Andy Marsh of Avon and Somerset Police claiming that several of his officers suffered broken bones and one a punctured lung dealing with the protests in Bristol - which turned out to be a complete lie, a lie told by the Chief Constable of Avon and Somerset Police, as not a single officer was treated for any of those injuries

...and a few days later Avon and Somerset Police apparently had to deal with mindless thugs attacking police batons with their faces and seated protesters holding up their hand throwing themselves into their riot shields.  Oh wait, that isn't what happened, instead they waded in swinging batons and using blading tactics with their shields

Nice to know that the Tory government are so in control of the Covid pandemic that somebody with the Brazilian variant got through the tough measures of testing people on arrival by simply not filling out the form - and it was three weeks before the Tory government admitted this had happened

...and the main response appeared to be Chris Philp posting a lot of tweets pointing the finger at Croydon council for something completely unrelated the same day it emerged the person with the Brazilian variant was in Croydon, which looked like a blatant attempt to game Twitter’s search algorithm

Smirking bully Priti Patel ended up having to pay off Sir Philip Rutnam to make his claims against her go away after an expensive court case with the taxpayer footing the bill, which I’m sure will lead to widespread calls in the media for his resignation - or are we to believe that the real reason for the British media calling for Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation is down to something different?   

Nice guy Rishi Sunak wowed people with his Budget, where he gave NHS staff a 1% pay raise that, in some cases, amounts to £3.50 a week which won’t even cover the fees to park at their place of work, claims that he wouldn’t raise taxes while sneaking in tax hikes, bunging an additional £15bn to Serco for their woeful Test & Trace system, and also pretending that the UK could pursue freeports now that they're out of the EU in spite the UK having seven freeports between 1998-2012 - but we’re supposed to ignore all of that because he paid to have ludicrously self-aggrandising videos of himself made

Smirking bully Priti Patel not only somehow managed to pay £5400 in a single trip to Primark, nearly £7000 in two trips to a restaurant, and £700 on cupcakes,  but also claimed the lot on her expenses - however she most certainly did not spend £77,000 on having her eyebrows done, as that business was wound up  2018, meaning she spend £77,000 somewhere - which of course led to widespread calls in the media that she resign

So nice of proven liar Boris Johnson to say how glad he is to hear that Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is being released from prison in Iran.  Yes, that would be the same Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe who was imprisoned in Iranian prison due to proven liar Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, who was then Foreign Secretary, not reading his brief and then blurting out of she was guilty of the charges she was being held under which then led to her being given the prison sentence she has just been released from

In response to the Georgia shooting Fox News really read the mood of the nation when the debate was about anti-Asian hate and incel terrorism by doing their damndest to make sure the message told everyone who the real victim was: the shooter, that poor white boy that he is

It was so nice of proven liar Boris Johnson to arrange a charity gala to...hang on, let me check my notes, raise funds so that Carrie Symonds could redecorate her Downing Street flat

According to Andrew Pierce he doesn't see Meghan Markle as black.  Apparently it didn’t occur to Andrew Pierce how that sounds, a.) Really fucking bad, and b.) Like Andrew Pierce has reached the next level of Whitesplaining, which shall henceforth be called Whitekeeping

There’s something definitely sinister about the BBC seeing a clip where Charlie Stayt made a quip about known swindler Robert Jenrick having a huge photo of The Queen and an (upside down) union flag in his office, yet their response was to demand that Naga Munchetty publicly apologise for giggling

As if David Cameron fucking up the country in a failed bid to gain political advantage isn’t enough reason for him to be banned from going within five miles of Westminster, him calling up Rishi Sunak to see if he could get some people in the Treasury make the financial problems that Greensill Capital, who Cameron just so happens to have a stake in, certainly counts as another very good reason

Fish fetishist John Redwood reacted to the US removing trade tariffs on British cheese and British Scottish whisky by proudly crowed from the rooftops that this would not happen if we were still in the EU.  Three hours later the US removed trade tariffs on all EU cheese and alcohol exports

In another bout of Keir Starmer uniting the Labour party he decided that Anneliese Dodds would be removed as Shadow Chancellor for failing to effectively communicate the party’s vision as if it was Dodds’ fault for the poor poll results - only to do a quick 180 and back Dodds when the main response to this reason was “What the hell?”

The only surprise about The Core being exposed as a dodgy grift that was being secretly bankrolled by the deep pockets of Tim Rutherford-Browne is that it actually took so long for somebody to expose this - because it sure as hell wasn’t a surprise that Twitter account for The Core, plus the accounts and sock puppets run by Rutherford-Browne, very quickly vanished

Of course The Daily Mail and The Sun would both devote far more time and column inches to Angela Rayner claiming expenses for her air pods and rile their readership into an all too predictable frenzy than they would ever devote to, say, tens of billions of pounds worth of taxpayer’s money being siphoned off into the pockets of various Tory MPs’ mates no matter how unqualified or ill-equipped those people happen to be to fulfill those contracts

Clag peddler Gilson B Pontes demonstrated how ill-equipped they are to deal with fair criticism of their god-awful games (which Sony somehow keeps allowing on their store) by abusing Youtube’s copyright system to try and get Jim Sterling’s account terminated - and failed, thus drawing far more attention to Pontes trying to abuse the system, and Youtube doing fuck all about it even though this issue has persisted for years by this point

Are we going to hear about how Andrew Beattie is the latest victim of “cancel culture” or are we going to hear that Beattie could have started his message about how inclusive Beattie Communications in a better way than literally saying “At Beattie Communications, we don’t hire blacks, gays or Catholics”?  Gee, let me guess which one...

...and then Burger King make the exact same error by trying to tweet out a message of inclusivity on International Women’s Day, which was doomed when the first tweet of the chain said just five words: “Women belong in the kitchen”

There’s something perverse about Electronic Arts being hit with a scandal involving FUT cards from the FIFA series not because they’re clearly a form of gambling that the company have gotten away with for many years outside of a few countries who call it what it is, but because it turns out an EA employee has been selling the rarest FUT cards on the black market for several hundred pounds per bundle to many willing players who want to cheat the system.  The system of gambling.  Which is what FUT cards are

The Tories reached peak flag shagger when James Wild posed a series of questions about the lack of union flags in the BBC Annual Report, as if that means a goddamn thing

Sleazebag and alleged wrestler Joey Ryan thought he could pull a fast one and just so happen to improve his image for when the next round of SLAPP suits goes before the judge by organising an event called Wrestling For Women’s Charity - only for the entire grift to fall apart due to it being held by the company he owns, the charity itself having more than questionable backing, and the fact that Ryan was dumb enough that he tried to sneak his own face onto the poster and thought nobody would notice.  Coincidentally, once the poster was out, a lot of people noticed and the event was rapidly shut down.  Funny, that...

In the latest attempt by Gab to try and make themselves seem relevant they tweeted out some intense batshittery about preserving our way of life featuring a heavily-armed family (including the dog, which was also packing) around the barbeque.  There was one teeny tiny issue with this image: it was stolen art from the indie game The American Dream which actively satirises America’s obsession with guns, and all gab did was remove the watermarks from the picture (which they took without permission) for their rallying cry of “remember us?  We used to be where all the edgelords hung out before they went to Parler”

Once again Manchester United fans responded to a loss not by suggesting that the opponents played better but with racially abusing one of their players on social media, with Fred bearing the brunt of it this time in the wake of being knocked out of the FA Cup by Leicester

Forgotten 90s comedian Lee Hurst continued to be the face of angry white men on Twitter who think they’re funny by posting a tweet about Greta Thunberg that managed to be creepy, misogynistic, showing a remarkable failure to understand what condoms are made of, and worked out so well for him that Twitter promptly suspended his account 

And finally, irritatingly, we have Donald Trump and his proclamation that he won’t be creating a new political party for the 2024 election as he worries that he’ll split the Republican vote.  But Donald, you told us you were so popular, so surely both Republican and Democrat supporters will flock to your new party?  Or are you worried at losing two elections in a row?

#dickheads of the month

[exeggcute]

glad to know you are mostly recovered from covid! if i may ask, could you describe how where your symptoms or at what pace you got them? the information i've got from both medical / govermental sources in my country is contradictory at times. also, what would you recommend drinking if i found myself to be with covid?

first off: WATER!!! drink water!!! I mean you can probably drink whatever as long as it’s moderately healthy and you’re staying hydrated (my drink of choice while sick is red gatorade. it has to be red or it doesn’t work though) but water is always a safe bet

also I’m happy to share my experience, just know that (1) I am not a doctor, just a professional Sick Person and (2) I never officially got tested thanks to a shortage of coronavirus tests in my area, but I’m pretty damn sure my symptoms were aligned with covid-19, so take that as you will

the first thing I noticed was a sore throat... but I have sore throats allll the time because of my other health issues, so I didn’t think much of it. I did start to notice my sore throat was getting better (from a previous mystery illness that knocked me out for a few days, and which I initially thought was strep but was probably just a bad cold) before suddenly getting bad again. I also had a day where my sore throat was especially pronounced and I had that Really Tired Feeling you get when you’re sick. I guess we can call that day one, but at this point I definitely didn’t think I had corona

that night I noticed some chest tightness, which I initially wrote off as an anxiety attack (and considering my extremely anxious personality and the fact that we were battening down the hatches for a pandemic, that seemed like a fair assumption) but using my inhaler didn’t help--in fact, it made the pain worse! but it did pass eventually, more or less, and I forgot about it

(side note here that if you think you have corona, do NOT use your albuterol inhaler or any kind of steroid inhaler unless you’re having a legit asthma attack with wheezing and all the works. using your inhaler can make the corona symptoms worse, but obviously if you need to use it then it’s important to keep using it. consult your doctor. also another similar note: if you think you have it, stay away from most NSAIDs if you can, as those can also make things worse. tylenol is okay though as long as you’re careful about the dosage--not as a corona thing, you just always need to be careful with tylenol dosage. and it’ll help keep your fever down, which is important!)

then over the next day or two I noticed the chest pain flare-ups but wrote those off as well. they were short-lived and mainly seemed to happen at night, but the inhaler always made them worse. around this time I also started experiencing some general GI upset for a few days (not to get too into that...), but I have a very touchy digestive track and was taking antibiotics at the same for other unrelated reasons, so I was like “well it’s probably nothing” but was starting to get worried.

then about five days later, the chest tightness really made itself present. like, it lasted all day and was constant. I was concerned but not immediately freaking out, and it was really windy that day so I kind of chalked it up to allergies, but as a very allergic person I’ve never had chest tightness like that from allergies (and my other allergic symptoms have improved considerably since I started allergy shots, so it would be weird to have a new symptom crop up out of nowhere like that).

then the next day, and the next day, the tightness wasn’t going away. this was clearly not allergies. I started to seriously think about corona tests, and I even called my primary care doctor, but she was extremely dismissive (all she did was call in a prescription for an old allergy drug that never even worked for me in the first place) and it was downright impossible to get tested. I was freaked out, but not entirely sure.

it’s about day seven at this point, and the chest tightness is in full swing. when I first wake up, the pain isn’t really present, but after about an hour of wakefulness my chest starts to get tight, congested, and kind of has that rattle-y feeling when it’s full of mucus and crap from the postnasal drip. not much congestion otherwise, but I’m so hopped up on antihistamines at all times that I don’t really get congested in general. the best way I can describe the chest tightness is that it feels like when I exert myself and my asthma makes my chest seize up and it’s hard to catch my breath (aka every single PE class I was ever forced to take as a kid), but my inhaler doesn’t do shit. my throat is still hurting pretty bad too and I feel vaguely fevery, but I don’t have a working thermometer at home. overall I just feel shitty, like that feeling you have when you know you’re sick (and I get sick a lot so I’m pretty well-versed in that lol). for quarantine purposes, this is the day I’ve been counting as the “first day” of having obvious corona symptoms, but it was really predated by the things I described above.

several days pass like this, I keep trying to get tested and call all sorts of places but it’s all dead ends. I also develop a slight cough, which mostly comes in bursts or when I speak/eat. by day twelve I manage to get a primary care appointment, and they do an EKG to make sure it’s not cardiac pain (the EKG came back fine) and a throat swab to see if it’s something bacterial (it’s not). they do confirm I’m running a slight fever, although my body temperature is usually so low that even a fever of 99 is high for me. my primary care doc basically tells me to fuck off and stay home, which I was already planning on doing. she also didn’t even wear a mask or gloves to look into my throat, despite the fact that all the other nurses in the practice were wearing masks and gloves when they interacted with patients... so I’m not exactly full of confidence in her judgement here.

the night of day thirteen, the day after seeing my doctor, I have a night where I can’t sleep because my airway feels restricted (both in my chest and my actual throat being swollen from pain). I used my inhaler, like a fool, and when the inhaler didn’t help the first time I tried using it two more times. big mistake! I ended up lying awake gasping for air, taking huge gulps just to feel like I was getting the teeniest bit of oxygen, and feeling stabbing pain when I took these deep breaths. I was too afraid to sleep and almost made my girlfriend drive me to the ER but I hate going to the ER so instead I just tried to calm down until I got exhausted enough to fall asleep around dawn. I also kept alternating between sweating buckets and shivering to death, no matter how I kept adjusting the temperature and my blankets, so I assume I was having a crazy fever that night.

the next day, roughly day fourteen, I decided to suck it up and go to the ER to get a chest x-ray. they said my x-ray looked fine, which was encouraging (hopefully no permanent lung damage there), and they took a flu swab and a strep swab just to rule those out (both negative, of course). at least two other people were there with me in the ER complaining of similar symptoms, but they didn’t have any tests for us so the doctor just told me to go home, act as if I had it, and keep taking tylenol and drinking water. this doctor is also the one who told me to stop using my inhaler--and the fact that my inhaler kept making the pain worse is one of the things that really tips me off here that I probably had it.

things are pretty much uneventful for the next week: still having a tight chest, a fever that seems to come and go, sore throat, cough. no more crazy attacks like that one night.

by day nineteen (yesterday) I start to notice a bit of improvement in my chest pain. it’s not gone, but it’s not as bad and I’ll have slight reprieves from the tightness. today is day twenty (more or less, my numbers are a little rough here) and I actually felt okay most of the day. by the evening the tightness returned and I’m still coughing every now and then, but far less often. I think the fever is gone and my throat doesn’t hurt too bad, either! I’m well past the point of being contagious, so I actually went to the grocery store today and got a few things. I’m not totally out of the woods yet, but I think (knock on fucking wood) the worst has passed.

anyway, I hope my anecdote is helpful for you, and I hope you stay safe and healthy!

#long post #Anonymous

[anonsally]

Days 79-82 of COVID-19 shelter-in-place

These have been four very intense days both globally and personally. This admittedly long post will focus more (but not exclusively) on the personal side of that.

Day 79 was Wednesday. I hadn’t had enough sleep, but I got up at a reasonable hour because I needed a ballet class. Before class started, I got a call from the medical center for scheduling a procedure I need to have done. That will be in 2 weeks, contingent on me testing negative for COVID-19 four days beforehand. I’m anxious about the procedure but will be glad to get it over with after several months of worry. Anyway, ballet class was good for calming me down. 

It was hot out. I did my parents’ grocery shopping (and bought a few things for us) and then had a nice conversation with my dad when I dropped off his groceries. We talked about the state of the world. He told me about a city that had literally fired its entire police department and started over... which is what we probably need on a national level, with very few exceptions. 

I refueled the car on the way home and got a predictably late start on my work day. Wife got two more job interviews scheduled at very different companies. I took a walk, spotting another Steller’s jay at the bird feeders. The jays are so much larger than the little birds who frequent the feeders!

I then went to try to buy milk, but the tiny independent market had closed early to enable the employees to get home before curfew. So I had to go to Trader Joe’s instead. By the time I got home I was somewhat demotivated about food prep, but luckily Wife pulled herself together and scrambled me an egg. I didn’t manage to get to bed till 1am, which was at least an hour later than I’d intended, but Wife was still up at 4am!

Day 80. I forced myself to get up at 8:30 since I knew I would need to go to bed early that night. I arranged to (video-)meet with my boss at 12:30. I started work around 11am or so and got a few thing done. The meeting with my boss was good--partly social, discussing how we were coping with the situation and working from home, what we missed about the office, and such, but we also talked about what I’ve been working on. She reminded me that the study section reviewing my grant application will be meeting this month, so I will have to remember to check my scores.

Afterwards we had a meeting with a few other coworkers, which was fairly productive. I had a short “coffee break” video call with a colleague, too. The county-wide curfew was lifted a day early.

After work, I took a walk in a direction I hadn’t gone in a while. Was heartened to see Black Lives Matter signs even in cul-de-sacs in a wealthy, mainly white neighborhood. I picked up takeout for dinner, and did a bunch of Adulting in the early evening, including preparing for the next morning. I was in bed by 10:45pm.

Day 81. My alarm got me up at 5am, and we left at 6am. We got to the medical center on time at 7am and I went in (Wife was not allowed to accompany me, but had to be there to drive me home; there was a separate room across the street for visitors to wait in, which was good because it was suddenly very cold outside). Initially, there was a lot of waiting, during which I did a little bit of yoga and dancing as I knew I would not be able to move much for the rest of the day. I was there for a diagnostic procedure involving a needle (for data privacy reasons I won’t get more specific here; it’s unrelated to the procedure I’m having in 2 weeks), which required me to remain horizontal for 4 hours afterwards, at least according to the information they’d given me beforehand. I had to be fasting from midnight the night before: no food or drink, including water.

Eventually I was wheeled down to the ultrasound department, where the doctor who planned to do the procedure met me and the radiologists. However, when they looked at the images, there were a lot of vessels around. The doctor did not feel confident that she could do the procedure based on a mark on my skin without accidentally hitting a blood vessel. So she asked the radiologists to do it as an ultrasound-guided procedure, which would be safer since they would be able to see what they were doing on the ultrasound. This procedure was done with only local anaesthetic. Mostly I couldn’t feel what was going on, and it was supposed to be very quick, but unfortunately, the resident had a lot of trouble--the senior radiologist was trying to guide him through doing, but he couldn’t get the needle positioned quite right, and in the end the senior radiologist had to do it herself. It was pretty uncomfortable and there were some moments where it was quite painful. I tried to breathe deeply and stay relaxed, but it was hard. When they finally got it to work, it was over pretty quickly. I was relieved. It was about 11am by then.

However, I had to spend an hour in a large recovery room with many other patients, while my blood pressure and pulse were monitored. I had expected to have the procedure done upstairs in the room where I’d started, where I had left all my stuff. They very kindly sent someone up to retrieve my phone for me so I could at least text Wife and my parents so they would know the worst of it was over. 

After an hour I was wheeled upstairs and transferred from the gurney to a bed (this took 3 people as I was not allowed to stand up yet) for more monitoring. They drew my blood to test my blood counts; I was going to be allowed to leave after only 2 hours of bed rest if the counts were stable. After the 2 hours, I was allowed to get up and use the bathroom (and grab the crossword puzzles from my backpack to work on), and then I continued resting while waiting first for the blood counts, which finally came back fine, and then for the discharge papers, which took an unreasonably long time. Around 2pm the nurse finally allowed me to have some ice--hoorah! (I was parched. I normally drink at least 2 liters of water per day.) At 2:40pm I was cleared to leave; I texted Wife, who went to get the car and picked me up at the entrance to the hospital at about 3pm. 

Literally every single person on the hospital staff was kind and friendly. They all introduced themselves to me by name, including the people whose job it was to simply wheel me from one place to another, and they all seemed to be invested in my well-being. When I was being wheeled through the hallway, whenever we passed anyone else who worked there they smiled and said hello both to me and to the person in charge of transporting me. It seemed like everyone working really considered themselves a team, with respect for everyone regardless of place in the hospital hierarchy. Since, like all patients during this pandemic, I was there alone and a bit anxious, it made the experience much less unpleasant than it could have been.  

I spent 8 hours in the hospital, so I really hope I didn’t catch COVID-19, but the procedures seemed pretty good. I was wearing a mask almost all the time (except in the room where I was waiting at the beginning and end, which was essentially private), as were all the employees, and everyone was sanitising their hands every time they entered or exited a room or touched any equipment. I also didn’t spend the whole time with any one person. So, hopefully it was safe. 

I spent the rest of the afternoon vedging out at home, rehydrating, and finally eating, and I went to bed earlier than usual though later than I expected, around 12:15am.

Day 82. I wanted to try to get a lot of sleep so my body could heal from yesterday’s ordeal, so today I slept till about 10am. The wound from the procedure is tender to the touch and there’s a small bruise near it, but otherwise I’m not in pain from it. Except my ankle is in more pain than it’s been in for ages, and I have no idea why. Maybe I slept on it funny? Or maybe it’s an aftereffect of the weird position I had to hold during the procedure.

I think my joy at getting to eat cereal this morning was perhaps a bit over-the-top!

Wife had a bad headache today, likely caused by neck tension from all the driving yesterday. I am still pretty tired today, despite all the sleep, but I suppose that’s to be expected.

We went to the farmers’ market and stumbled upon a socially-distanced, family-friendly protest. A friend of mine was there with her kids, but I didn’t see her. We bought our produce--though I had to make an extra trip back to the car to drop off my purchases, as I am not supposed to lift anything heavy today. The stand with the curried fish had run out, but they still had some uncooked prepped fish, so we bought that and they explained how to steam it at home. We came home and cooked the fish and ate it for lunch; it was just as good as it would’ve been if they’d cooked it. Phew! Other than that we’ve been relaxing at home, though Wife did gather her energy and go for a run, which has helped to relieve her headache a little (as has the bath she took afterwards, and the painkillers she took). 

I’m hoping to feel up to taking a dance class (online) tomorrow. 

#personal #dance #birdwatching #Health Care #food #even though there is no picture of food here #black lives matter #epidemiology #activism #tl;dr

[haywire4]

As short stories go, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” is very short. At 2,378 words it would qualify as a decently economical Jamboroo installment, and can be neatly summed up in a sentence. During a time of plague, a prince and his royal buddies repair to a well-provisioned castle, weld the iron gates shut, and throw themselves a heedless, non-stop party in defiance of the sickness ravaging the world outside, until such time as that party becomes immediately and entirely untenable. It’s a perfect story, but it’s not a subtle one.

If there’s any aspect of the presidency in which Donald Trump has come close to flourishing during his first term, it is the ceremonial one. To the extent that anything in his plummy, anxious, relentlessly public life prepared him for the job ahead, it was this. Trump has bobbed and leered through gaudy ballrooms all his life, blithely cutting the line at one buffet after another and demanding one more ashen flap of beef than any other guest is permitted, rising to Make Some Remarks at some point in the evening, and otherwise circling and circulating to receive the thanks and praise that are his due as host. He may enjoy all of that, but it’s just as likely that he doesn’t. Trump is not at these parties to have fun, anyway. He’s there because it’s the only place he can be.

The thing for him is to move, to collect whatever adulation there is and then to float on, leaving behind the absolute minimum of his own small self. The tribute he receives from these supplicants—the habitually divorced, the serial franchisees, the plump pink yachters and the reckless sunburned boaters alike—is fulsome but reflexive. It’s thin and vague and it doesn’t sustain him so much as it propels him ahead; it’s the continual rush of water through a shark’s gills that allows it to breathe. The other guests, the schools of smaller Trumps that push him around the room, are all mostly there because he is, but the party doesn’t really start until he leaves. It’s then, lit up with the memories of the moment when they saw some perfected and untouchable version of themselves in Donald Trump and were acknowledged by him in turn, that the celebrating starts.

“Staff and guests lingered after the president was there,” the Minnesota political consultant Blois Olson said of Trump’s private fundraiser at the home of a countertop company’s CEO in the state on Wednesday. “They sang karaoke, they had their arms around each other.” The St. Paul Pioneer Press reported that South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem was one of the celebrants, but between that fundraiser and a rally in Duluth and flights around the state with various Republican officials and Members of Congress, Trump saw a lot of people during his visit. Some percentage of them may now have picked up the coronavirus that Trump himself and numerous members of his executive entourage confirmed they had on Thursday night.

Again, the story is concise and perfect and not really remotely a metaphor. When Trump called Sean Hannity’s Fox News show on Thursday night, shortly before the public announcement that he and his wife had tested positive for COVID-19, he made clear that none of this was really anyone’s fault. “You know, it is very very hard when you are with people from the military or from law enforcement,” Trump said, “and they want to hug you and they want to kiss you, because we really have done a good job for ’em. You get close, and things happen.”

Like every story that Trump tells, this is both one he tells often and always to the same end. People just can’t help themselves around him, they come up to him with tears in their eyes—the big people, the tough and even rough people, the successful people and the real workers—and they need to be near him. Who could tell them to keep their distance, or to wear a mask, or take any of the precautions that some other citizens have taken because they are the only way to stop the spread of the pandemic that Trump has effectively chosen to ignore? Who would? “There are some who would have thought him mad,” Poe wrote of Prince Prospero, the decadent party’s decadent host. “His followers felt that he was not. It was necessary to hear and see and touch him to be sure he was not.”

The basic premise of Trumpism and the fundamental promise that Trump has made during his political career is that those who are with him will be treated one way, and those who are not will be treated in another, much worse way. Because of how Trump is—because of how avaricious and joyless he is, and because of how fearful and paranoid he is, and because of how unrelentingly aggrieved he is—this promise is fundamentally negative. Only the most powerful of the people that fell into formation behind him will receive any positive benefit from anything that he does; this is axiomatic, as Trump doesn’t do anything for anyone other than himself. Everyone that follows him understands and accepts this to some extent, and the less influential of those who lined up behind him either out of perceived interest or some rote and sour habit or pure servile instinct surely know as much. They also know that they will receive a more diffuse but still quite valuable dividend for their service, which is the certainty that they will never be treated as badly as the people on the other side.

That certainty is false, of course, but that doesn’t mean it’s not valuable. Trump has lived his life inside a curdled and childish belief that he can do and take and keep whatever he wants, without consequence, forever. As a sort of tabloid cartoon of a rich person, an adult Richie Rich that had somehow figured out how to use a smartphone and commit adultery, this delusion has served him decently well; the realities of his wealth and the structural forces that the country has built to protect people of similar fecklessness and similar means conspired to sustain it for decades. The version of this impunity that Trump sells to his audience is a cheaper reproduction, not sold in any store and available exclusively through this limited-time television offer, in which they can feel as invulnerable and unaccountable as him, and be just as lazy and just as cruel, without actually being anywhere near as well-insulated from the consequences of their actions. “I play to people’s fantasies,” Trump “writes” in the ghostwritten Art Of The Deal. “People may not always think big themselves. but they can get very excited by those who do.”

“That,” Trump continues, “is why a little hyperbole never hurts.” When it comes to building a brand or a public image, the utility of this sort of theatrical dishonesty is at least debatable. But the open secret with Trump is that there is nothing underneath all of this—not just no actual values beneath the pretend ones or actual product behind the pitch, but nothing at all. There is just bottomless idiotic appetite and unstinting demand, the urgency and endlessness of which makes any number of outlandish cruelties not just possible but inevitable. Trump is not the only person who is like this, but it may be that no one is more like this than him. Discernment isn’t on the menu, but it also fundamentally isn’t an option—admitting any kind of error or demonstrating any kind of vulnerability would mean not just defeat but a sort of death. The nature of this country and its economic and political depravities guarantee that such a person—someone rich enough and determined enough, stupid enough and frightened enough and selfish enough—can go a very long way. The idea of being that way is something that can be sold, because the shiny false certainty of it is something that people want to display, and feel themselves. It is a poisonous lie, but an aspirational one.

It is true that, from a public health perspective and a political one, Trump could have done any number of things to fight the pandemic that’s still spreading unchecked across the United States. But the reason he did basically none of them is that Trump is incapable of thinking of this challenge—of any challenge, really—from a public health perspective or a political one. These are abstractions to him, and as such much less interesting or important than his own comfort. Trump would and could not wear a mask because to do so would signal that he could get sick like anyone else; he could not tell the truth about what needed to be done to fight the pandemic, let alone actually do those things, because it would interrupt the story he prefers to tell about his own success. He could not follow or even accept the advice of scientists and epidemiologists because it would be a tacit admission that they knew more about this than he did. Most importantly, though, Trump could not care about what the pandemic does, about the communities it hurts and people it kills, because none of that is him; their deaths just don’t rate relative to his own discomfort.

And so the move, the only move, was to go on in denial, to push irritably and impatiently through the unrelenting fact of the disease behind the fantasy that none of it could ever have any consequences for him. His people followed on behind, not so much in denial as in defiance of the thought that any of this could possibly apply to them. The people that fly into rages upon being asked to wear a mask to protect other people and stop the spread of the disease would, paradoxically or not, also fly into a rage if the people serving them were not wearing masks themselves. This is because these people are fucking unwell, but it is also because that facile distinction between themselves and other people is a load-bearing one. It holds up the whole gilded edifice, until it doesn’t.

It was probably inevitable that Trump would get the virus, because the country is still awash in it and because he has refused to protect himself or others from it. It is, again, not really much of a metaphor that he himself seems to have become something of a vector for its spread in his own gilded circles. This is not a complicated story, or a long one. It’s the nature of a virus to spread, to move blindly from one person to the next, absolutely and always as illimitable as it is permitted to become.

Another excellent piece from David J. Roth, who has moved from analysis of the highly paid mediocrities of sports to the highly paid mediocrities of the current administration with great ease.

#defector #david j roth #rip deadspin #coronavirus #mask debate

[alexsmitposts]

America Under Total Censorship Lockdown as it Circles the Drain The United States is under a broad censorship lockdown. News from regional press is blocked from national coverage, stories are crushed, certainly Facebook and Google ban and delist, but now at a level that should be unimaginable. The stories run in two areas, seemingly unrelated, that being BLM protests and the other COVID-19. Both are political issues for sure. One strange, certainly inexplicable move has been made by the Trump regime, starting July 16, 2020. Trump has ordered defunding of COVID-19 testing, something that will certainly cripple efforts to rein in the pandemic, and he has also ordered massive cuts to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), ending their ability to report test numbers, hospitalizations and deaths. He then issued an executive order to hospitals to stop reporting COVID-19 data to the appropriate agencies and to channel data directly to his political staff. This will be the painful story as there is a reason for these actions, ignored entirely by the press, but first we need to establish the extent and severity of censorship from the ground up. We will cover a number of stories that should have been followed, certainly investigated and ask some hard questions. Real news reaches a very few and with it warnings, to be careful. Even the FBI, once the enforcers of corporate rule in America, is left out of the loop. There may well be a hideous secret being kept from Americans and the world about how bad things are in the US and any who threaten that secret may well face the fate of so many who have died reporting facts that make the Deep State uncomfortable. As a journalist, I regularly get whistleblower reports, certainly on a daily basis. Many are outrageous and conspiratorial and weeding between credible and insane is taxing in a world where “insane” is the norm. However, a pattern has made itself perfectly clear. Let us take a few anecdotal issues and see where we go. This week, in Detroit, a man convicted of two murders was released. It seems the police detective who handled the case back in 2002 faked everything, witnesses were coached, evidence fabricated, a man spent 16 years in jail and was obviously innocent. The story was reported but what wasn’t reported is that the same Detective Sergeant had done this before. All complaints were quashed by police officials, and many of his fake cases were featured on reality television. Up to half of the “solved” murder cases in Detroit, once “Murder Capital of the World,” involved this corrupt cop, who is still “on the job,” meaning hundreds are in prison for decades, even life, who are innocent. It also means this is still going on. Worse still, who did the killings? We now suspect that a criminal group within the police may be running a “murder for hire” organization and has been doing so for years. There are no investigations, and no one is asking why. Who are their clients? On a broader national issue, there is a huge but largely unreported controversy in Portland, Oregon. President Trump and Attorney General William Barr have sent several hundred armed personnel to Portland to act as fake police against protesters there. No one is sure where these men come from, the fake police, not the protesters, though this is a valid question also, but they seem to be prison guards. It is illegal in the US for the federal government to send police to a state. It is illegal for prison guards, who are not police, to exercise arrest power outside the walls of a prison as they are not “certified” and “sworn” law enforcement officers within the state where they are, in this case, deployed. This is a massive constitutional crisis. Then something more curious happened. Senator Ted Cruz, a comic figure, tweeted a photo of those arrested by these fake police. Photos of a dozen young men, all white, claiming they were Antifa operatives. In the Tweet, Cruz referred to their “mullet” haircuts. The “mullet” is a style often ridiculed. Those wearing this hairstyle are invariably rural, deeply conservative, and poorly educated. They are classic “Trump base.” There was little evidence, other than sketchy news stories, that Antifa even existed. It is now clear that the all-white violent demonstrators are hired thugs from among the rural poor, hired from “Trumpland.” This is a common GOP practice dating back to Watergate and Donald Segretti. The same story came up in Grand Rapids, Michigan when violent demonstrators began looting during a Black Lives Matter demonstration in June. Those arrested were white, had arrived from across the state, and had been paid $300 each by political organizers. Guessing whose political organizers isn’t too difficult. These facts were delisted by Google, the Tweets were taken down and Facebook posts were erased as well. No press follow-up was done and both police and prosecutors have since “disappeared” those arrested. On June 1, 2020, a Ukrainian truck driver who had worked for a CIA sponsored militia fighting against Donbass separatists, plowed his vehicle into protesters in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Bogdan Vechirko failed to kill anyone, but shocking video showed 2000 peaceful demonstrators running for their lives. All reporting ended there. We found that Bogdan Vechirko was not jailed and that no legal action has been taken. Worse still, no one has asked why. A month later, in Seattle, an Eritrean immigrant plowed his white Jaguar into protesters killing two. His family has strong ties to CIA sponsored war lords. The video is among some of the most horrific ever filmed with those he struck at 100 miles per hour flying high in the air. He was chased down by a witness who pulled his vehicle over miles away. Press was told he is under arrest. No details are available. He may be out on bail; no details are available. Where he lives, anything about his family or background is withheld. He is a ghost. Only days ago, a Trump supporter entered a convenience store outside Lansing, Michigan. State law requires anyone entering a store to wear a mask. When confronted by a shopper, the Trump supporter pulled out a large kitchen knife, just the thing used for buying cigarettes and milk, and stabbed the 77-year-old shopper repeatedly. The video from the store is withheld as is the name of the victim and any witnesses. It gets better. In moments, police found the perpetrator and an officer pulled his car over. This was in an affluent neighborhood, in front of the perpetrator’s home. The perpetrator got out of his vehicle with a butcher knife in one hand and a large screwdriver in the other. The police officer, a woman with 22 years’ experience, demanded he drop his weapons. His replies, maniacal and haunting, are unforgettable, like something out of a horror film. As he ran toward the officer, she fired more than a dozen shots, hitting him 8 times as he slashed at her. He barely went down even then but died at the scene. Now the incident has been “un-happened.” There are no facts about who this was, why this happened or how the perpetrator, a well-paid state employee, became a terrorist. We have dozens more such incidents daily in the US, some are legitimate, angry people under pressure while others are theatrical with the perpetrator’s ghosts. As a juxtapose, when a wealthy couple in St. Louis pointed weapons at demonstrators near their magnificent home, media reported on every aspect of their lives, story upon story for weeks. These are all tabloid level stories that should have driven media to shake every tree, question families, show photos of victims and bloody crime scenes. This is how the media makes money, as the saying goes, “if it bleeds-it reads.” Not anymore, not when perpetrators are clearly not what they seem to be. Where are we going? Well, we are certainly going to take this one home. So, why is there a massive crackdown on reporting? Is it tied to police murders? Yes, maybe it is but we don’t think so. Is it tied to COVID-19? We have held off thus far in asking questions about censorship of COVID-19’s impact on the US. We will ask some of those questions now. We have both facts and “alternative facts” hitting the media regarding the pandemic. As COVID-19 levels skyrocket in states like Arizona, Florida, California and two dozen others, reporting becomes, not just contradictory but insanely so. In Florida the governor, DeSantis, claims that 98% of the state’s hospital beds are currently empty. The graphs he publishes are all over Twitter and Facebook, placed there by political trolls. At the same time, however, the largest hospitals in Florida report that they are at 119% of capacity and are overrun with COVID-19 patients. Rebekah Jones, a medical statistician fired for disputing faked data ordered by Governor DeSantis, says deaths are being not just underreported but on a large scale. Easily available video of overflowing hospital wards and licensed “real” medical professionals complaining of lack of medicines and equipment, can be found but are never reported on mainstream media. We do know this, the only drug that treats COVID-19, Remdesivir, is virtually unaffordable, is totally controlled by Jared Kushner and that the State of Florida, in the midst of a massive outbreak of COVID-19, exhausted all supplies over a week ago and Washington isn’t sure when they can release more. This isn’t being reported either. We are also told that those who die are often over 80 years old but massive anecdotal evidence, including regular reports by experts, cite the large number of young victims who are seriously ill. However, their serious illness and hospitalization is not reported and their deaths, if they are dying, are unreported as well. In fact, none of the data received can be depended on, not just in Florida but in dozens of states that seem to be “sitting on” numbers hospitalized and even fatalities. This censorship is driving many to openly shun needed precautions leading to massive increases, all documented, of COVID-19 infections. Why? Conclusion As a test against censorship and misreporting, algorithms are run, based on total tested, total tested positive, total hospitalized, total cured and those who die. As more are tested, more with lesser symptoms, the percentage of infected who later die is continually lowered or was until the beginning of July 2020 when numbers hit a plateau. When COVID reporting began to yield usable data, around mid-April 2020, death rates of those infected were at an unrealistic 36%. Testing levels, through presidential interference, were extremely low, something that would seal America’s role as a failed state. As testing increased, the percentage of recovered compared to deaths followed a predictable curve, which would flatline at some point. With testing levels, after months of interference, substantive enough to give a meaningful result and death levels somewhat modified by the use of Remdesivir, the death percentage “flatlined” at 7 percent. Thus, if a state like Florida were to have 10,000 new cases in a day, with an average of 7% dying, this would mean that eventual death levels would hit 700 a day for this state alone. This figure would be modified by higher or lower numbers testing positive or by lower death rates for larger numbers of younger infected. No such figures are reported. Using figures already proven, many states are reporting very inconsistent figures when looking at testing-hospitalizations-recoveries and deaths. Simply put, they are lying, underreporting by as much as 50%. Florida is clearly one of these. It is clear that the press has yet to do any statistical analysis on COVID-19. Why? There is also significant evidence that the medical community is aware of these inconsistencies. Respected medical professionals have come forward repeatedly with claims of underreporting and, more serious as well, their own theories that COVID-19 is a biological weapon. Attempts to debunk professionals by medical quacks and charlatans backed by conservative think tanks fill the media, while respected professionals are boycotted entirely. Could the US be hiding 100,000 additional COVID-19 dead? A recent leak from the CDC now predicts 800,000 dead by the end of 2020. From the Daily Beast: “If someone had suggested five months ago that we would be seeing more than 3 million cases and 135,000 COVID-19 deaths in the US by mid-July, I wouldn’t have believed it. But now it’s distinctly possible that, five months from now, half of all Americans could have been infected with SARS-CoV-2, and more than 800,000 Americans may die in this extraordinary outbreak. That is what many of our most prominent public-health experts now expect.” However, as of this writing that figure is 143,042, or is it? Is there a lie so big that the United States would find it offensive to perpetrate? I think we all know that answer.

[twistedorbeez]

OCD Journal // 27th February, 2022

27th February 2021 is the day my Real Event OCD obsessions started. This is a dumb personal post, but I feel like it would be wrong for me to ignore today, as it's been exactly a year since then. I still remember the gut wrenching anxiety I got, the intrusive thoughts, the constant and unrelenting compulsions, the feelings of complete and utter despair and confusion, I remember the thoughts that it would never get better and that there was no other way out other than suicide. I remember how for a few days my family didn't know what was happening, but every time they looked at me - every time they spoke to me - I had tears behind my eyes and unforgiving guilt and anxiety. I remember my dad would make me these microwave sausage muffins, and I would only eat less than a whole one for an entire day. I stopped eating because the anxiety was too much. I remember walking around the park field with my dad and dog, and I remember going to my nan's and trying to hide the pain I felt every second.

I remember the day it 'changed': we (my family) were at a family-friend's house like we were every week. I was hugging my mum, and I began to quietly cry, and she smiled and jokingly said 'are you winging?' and that's when I broke down crying loudly. My mum freaked out and so did my dad - my dog kept jumping up at me and licking me to make me stop crying, my dad tried to grab my dog so my mum could pull me away into the bathroom. She held me on the toilet and kept asking what was wrong and all I could say was 'everything'. I had never ever cried to my parents before like that or even insinuated that I felt suicidal in any capacity (actually, I remember maybe half an hour before this, my parents were talking about suicide for some reason, and my mum said to me something like 'You'd never do that would you?' and I said 'Maybe' and then she was like 'What do you mean 'maybe'? Don't ever say that!' but I played it off as a joke, I think). The next day she filled out something on the NHS to get me an appointment with a doctor.

My parents, dog, family-friend and I went out late to watch the sun set, probably as a treat for me to make me feel better. We had the Victorious soundtrack playing in the car at the time. We took so many pictures. The view was beautiful, but the thoughts wouldn't stop, even then. I remember the thoughts and fears flashing in my head. I remember being in the car, when my mum began to read out the questions for the form on her phone, and when the question came to 'is your child suicidal?' I couldn't say anything; my mum said she'd just put 'yes' because the silence was clear; I still remember the quiet gasp my dad made.

I remember the day I had the phone consultation with the doctor, I had just gotten out from doing a COVID test and we were walking back to the car when they called. I remember being unable to speak due to poor shyness and anxiety, and I also remember my parents leaving me alone in the car and walking the dog for a bit so I could talk to the doctor in private. I remember finally explaining things - yet still being unable to explain the true contents of my thoughts due to anxiety, guilt and poor disgust. I remember her asking me what my interests were, and I also remember her telling me how she also loved The Kinks. And, most of all, I remember her saying to me 'have you heard of obsessive-compulsive disorder?'

More happened, I got referred to this 8 week mental health course that I enjoyed, especially because it meant I got to leave school early (I also got referred to camhs, but amazingly they still haven't been in touch). I remember my mum buying me a stuffed dog toy called Rufus, and I'd hug him profusely. I remember the way I could only drink Lucozade. I remember lying on the floor, wrapped in a blanket in front of the fake-fire in our family-friend's house whilst my family played country music that we listened to ever since I was little. I remember so much.

A lot about me has changed. But not really. I'm definitely a better person, I think, but I don't feel much better. It's been a year, and honestly, I'm grateful that I don't have the anxiety all the time like I used to, but when I do get it, it's chronic. I'm better than I have been at certain points, but honestly, I still just don't want to be alive. I'm trying so hard not to cry whilst writing this, but I've been unsuccessful. In fact, me, my mum, and our dog are at that family-friend's house right now and I'm sat on the couch, but before I had to run into the toilet again to hide the fact I was crying, much like what happened a lot a year ago. I remember lying on the bathroom floor, crying, thinking there's no way out other than suicide. My thoughts and fears are still unrelenting, in fact, 2021 was the year I cut myself for the first time. But after all of that, I wouldn't change that year at all. There was bad, and there was good, even if some good was bittersweet.

So, where do we go from here?

I'm not sure. But I hope it's a better place.

#tw sui #tw suicide #ocd #actually ocd #actually mentally ill #mental health #mental health awareness #mental illness #obsessive compulsive disorder #personal #vent #tw vent #camhs #tw camhs #i love my family #tw sh #tw self harm #ocd journal

[grimsvoid]

What The Fuck Is My Life Right Now?

TW: Self Harm, Suicidal Thoughts

About 3 weeks ago my girlfriend broke up with me. She said there were some things about her that she thought she could change but realized she couldn’t. I had gone over to her place for the night because I was trying to get away from some drama at home and then I woke up in the morning to her breaking up with me. I spent a few nights at a hotel because I knew if I immediately went home I was going to do something really stupid but when I went back home I immediately relapsed on my self harm. It was the worst relapse of my entire life. I didn’t leave the house for a few days and kinda shut some people out. The few people I was willing to talk to I know I annoyed them to death because I just didn’t want to be alone. I was afraid of what I would do if I was alone. I haven’t cried that much in my entire life. I cried almost all day long for a week. When I finally went back to work a week after we broke up I had to see her and it was very difficult. We decided to still be friends because at the end of the day I still really care about her and if I can’t be the person she loves anymore I still want to be a part of her life. I was doing good until I took my break and then it was just me alone with my thoughts. Right as I was about to clock back in I started crying for the first time ever at work. I went over on my break by almost 30 mins. Thankfully one of my friends was able to call me and calm me down or I probably would have had to go home early. She ended up quitting about a week and a half later due to unrelated reasons and even thought it’s a bit easier not seeing her every shift I still miss seeing her. I started talking to another coworker who I’ll call K a little bit ago and they’re actually my ex’s ex. We got along very well and started hanging out after work. We spent the night in a hotel for my friend’s birthday and we said that we liked each other and wanted to date so we planned something for 2 days later. I couldn’t get a ride home until after my shift so I went back to their place and spent some time with them before I had to go to work. Things started getting serious and we ended up making out and then next thing I know we had sex. I was a stupid shit and didn’t use protection. Once we were done I had to go to work but when I got to work I realized that I didn’t have my non slip shoes so they didn’t let me work that day so I asked if it was alright if I came back for a little bit and they said yes. When I got back K said that after we had sex that they thought it was awkward for a few different reasons one of them being that we have a mutual ex and they called off our date for the next day. That really fucked me up so back to the hotel I went. That hotel has pretty much turned into my safe place lately. I’ve spent more time at that hotel over the past few weeks than I have at home. My best friend from kindergarten came over with me too because not only did all of that happen that day and he was willing to be there for me but we both found out we got exposed to covid. We ended up testing negative in the morning thankfully. Later in the day K called me and told me that they had relapsed with their self harm so I offered to get them an uber to come over so they weren't alone. They came over and we talked for a bit while my best friend was trying to find a hook up real quick lmao. We started out just talking a bit then we were cuddling and then we ended up making out. I honestly hadn’t felt such mixed signals before. Eventually my friend came back to the room and he took a shower. While he was in the shower K and I ended up making out again. And once again I just had no idea what the fuck was going on. K expressed to me that they felt suicidal and were afraid of being alone so I stayed up all night while K and my best friend went to sleep so that if anything happened I was awake and could be there immediately. Nothing happened that night and I ended up walking K to work since our work is literally right next to the hotel. K ended up coming back over after work and I got really stupid and got really messed up and I can’t remember hardly anything that happened that night. What I can remember is crying to K about everything that was happening and how I was just really confused. Going to sleep and waking up a few hours later and then very stupidly calling my ex and telling them everything that had happened. Thankfully she was cool with it and actually thought it was funny that I got with her ex. What I cant remember but was told later was that I had told K that I wanted to kill myself that night. I called my best friend and had blamed him for everything. I don’t understand why I did any of that because really this second situation doesn’t have me suicidal at all and this is definitely not my best friend’s fault. K came over a few more times before I left my hotel room a few days ago. Each time we ended up cuddling and making out. I actually just got home a few hours ago from K’s place and we were cuddling for a bit then they sat on my lap and we kissed a few times. I just honestly don't understand what’s going on here and I don’t know how to ask them what’s going on. I know that K is talking to other people but their actions with me seems to suggest that they still might want something more or maybe I’m just reading it wrong I really have no idea. Maybe they’re just bored and I’m easily accessible? Even if we don’t end up dating I’m fine with what’s going on between us but if it’s at all possible that we could end up dating I really want to date them. I’m just so confused right now. I have no idea what’s going on anymore and I have no idea what the fuck my life is anymore. I don’t really know what the fuck is going on in general or this situation and I don’t really know how to ask or find out.

#depression #love #relationships #breakups

[dipulb3]

Biden grapples with balancing optimism and tough talk on pandemic's outlook

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/biden-grapples-with-balancing-optimism-and-tough-talk-on-pandemics-outlook/

Biden grapples with balancing optimism and tough talk on pandemic's outlook

Biden has opted for a more measured approach than his predecessor, showing up to promote vaccine announcements and appearing at a vaccine site or a laboratory, but mainly saving the hard questions for his closed-door daily briefing on the pandemic.

That has left a gap in the messaging about how and when America might pull out of the crisis — and glosses over the challenge and exhortation that a president can uniquely deliver in times of national calamity.

Even one senior White House official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to be more candid, acknowledged in an interview with Appradab that the public may not yet understand that the variants will require “more public involvement and sacrifice than people probably have registered in their own mind.”

Experts are also noticing missed opportunities for Biden to help the country rise to the challenge.

“This country’s really been in an abyss, and we’re trying to climb our way out,” said Laura Kahn, a Princeton University expert in leadership during epidemics. “A little bit more public communication would be helpful.”

Said another health expert, who is close to the White House: “They’re painting way too rosy of a picture.” The source, who requested anonymity to speak more frankly, added that the administration isn’t doing enough to sound the alarm about the threat of variants and the challenges that could lie ahead.

Administration officials have chafed at that criticism, insisting they are taking the variants seriously without inciting public panic.

Should officials “get up every morning and hold a press conference and say, ‘I’m absolutely terrified’?” said one senior administration official not authorized to speak on the record about the matter. “Do you want to sound the alarm and get everybody upset? Or do you want to do your job?”

Biden obliquely acknowledged the tragedy at hand this week in a visit to the National Institutes of Health.

“We’re in the middle of the war with this virus,” Biden said in that visit. “It’s going to take time to fix, to be blunt with you.”

But just how much time? It’s a question the Biden team doesn’t appear keen to tackle too directly. Even the administration’s health experts, tucked into their Zoom boxes for thrice-weekly updates, deliver scholarly assessments of where the US stands, offering little on the existential question of when life might return to normal.

There is no shortage of reasons why a leader might want to keep his or her distance from the details right now, given how volatile the situation is.

“As the President told the nation Thursday after visiting the vaccination center at the National Institute of Health, and as he says internally regularly, we are driving a whole-of-government response to the pandemic — guided by the science, by ambitious goals, and with clear public communication,” Andy Slavitt, senior adviser to the White House Covid-19 Response Team, said in a statement to Appradab Friday. “This is a national emergency. Our focus is on vaccinating people quickly and equitably, increasing testing, and opening schools and businesses. We will be transparent with the American people about our progress. It won’t be easy and we will face setbacks. However, we continue to make real progress every day until Americans feel safe once again.”

Covid-19 by the numbers

For the science-driven administration, forecasting the future is particularly challenging because the current picture is a muddle.

Coronavirus cases are trending down, and vaccinations are ticking up. But the US is struggling to get a handle on the threat posed by new variants. Experts — both inside and outside the White House — are still far from certain that America is finally clawing its way out of the pandemic.

“This is a race to get the vaccine out there broadly enough and fast enough that it eliminates the chance of spread of even more strains,” said Dr. Bala Hota, an infectious disease specialist at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. “We’re not out of the woods yet.”

One thing is certain: over the last two weeks, the US has seen a huge improvement across all major metrics experts have used to track the pandemic.

As of Friday, the seven-day average of daily cases is down more than 22% from the previous week, and average deaths are down more than 15%, according to Johns Hopkins University data.

Hospitalizations have declined nearly 13% and the percent positivity rate at 6.19%, according to the Covid Tracking Project.

As of Friday, only one state — Alaska — was showing an upward trend in Covid-19 cases.

While the Biden administration has made a major push to reduce the spread of disease by launching mass vaccination sites, taking strides to ramp up vaccine production and promoting safety measures, such as mask wearing, many experts said it’s still too soon to say that those actions are driving the improving trends.

“Any kind of policy that is implemented at the beginning of January, you wouldn’t probably see anything that quickly,” said Nandita Mitra, a professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.

Health experts said the trends were likely improving for reasons unrelated to Biden’s policy initiatives. Cases are leveling off after holiday-related spikes and it’s too soon to see fallout from new potential super spreader events, such as Super Bowl parties.

“We’re now a month past the holiday and everybody has gone back to their bubble,” Hota said.

Vaccines are also making their way to more Americans. More than 48 million shots have been administered so far, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The pace of vaccinations has been picking up steadily from week to week, which experts attributed partly to vaccine makers growing more adept at vaccine production and partly to states streamlining their distribution efforts.

But it’s hardly time to celebrate.

Case numbers have been so high in these last two months that if you take just the first 10 days of February, the US has had more new cases than it had for the entire month of March, or April, or May, or even June of 2020.

“Now is not the time to look at those curves, in my view, and breathe a sigh of relief. We have a ways to go,” Slavitt said on Appradab this week. “We know that this thing has been unpredictable for the last year. I think it’s still going to be unpredictable.”

Unpredictable variants

The unpredictability ahead has already led to some careful hedging from the White House.

Biden announced Thursday that the US will have purchased enough doses to vaccinate 300 million Americans by the end of July. White House aides quickly followed up with a clarification: vaccines aren’t vaccinations. Even though the doses will be available by July, it’s unclear when nearly all Americans will actually be vaccinated.

The administration didn’t offer details about how thorny challenges like vaccine hesitancy and variants swirling in the US could impact America’s path to normality or when the end of this pandemic may be in sight.

“The Biden administration is going to have to address this issue and we’ve got to stop basically telling people we’ve turned the corner,” said Michael Osterholm, who advised Biden’s team during the transition and is the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “At the rate we’re at right now, this is going to be a huge challenge.”

Digging out

While then-President Trump was keen to take center stage in the coronavirus response, it often ended in disaster. He undercut scientists, peddled unproven miracle cures and even appeared to suggest injecting disinfectants might ward off the virus.

Biden advisers are now facing a beleaguered American public, suffering whiplash after Trump-era promises that things were just on the brink of getting better.

“I think the country has lived through a long period of over-promises, false deadlines, dates that have no basis in science, and I don’t think you’re going to hear that from this White House,” Slavitt said on Appradab this week. “We don’t want to try to forecast the future.”

An administration official insisted Biden has been forthright with Americans, pointing to the President’s previous comments, including a line in his inaugural address in which he said, “We are entering what may well be the toughest and deadliest period of the virus.”

Since then, Biden and his team have continued churning out policy initiatives aimed at pulling America out of the crisis. Their signature effort remains a $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill that awaits approval from Congress.

Even with those interventions, experts said it’s difficult to predict the next turn the virus will take.

A year into the pandemic, the nation has a higher level of immunity than it did last year, which could help slow — but not stop — the infection rate, some health experts said.

“We certainly have not reached herd immunity, but we probably have at least somewhere around a third of the population that’s been exposed that might have some short-term immunity,” said Dr. Amanda Castel, a professor in the department of epidemiology at George Washington University.

But the variants — along with human behavior — could easily send cases climbing again.

“I worry that people have a false sense of reassurance because things are trending down and then all of the sudden you see people loosening restrictions in certain areas and people relax a little more,” Castel said

Some states and cities have begun to relax Covid restrictions, even though caseloads remain high.

North Dakota and Iowa have both rolled back their statewide masks mandates. New Jersey and New York City are loosening restrictions on indoor dining. New York state is planning to reopen arenas and stadiums this month, at limited capacities. And Ohio announced it is bringing back self-service buffets.

“I understand why there’s this unbridled enthusiasm to get back to some semblance of a new normal,” Osterholm said. But “people do not realize what a curve ball the variants have thrown us.”

Appradab’s Amanda Watts contributed to this report.

[sinrau]

Many American public-health specialists are at risk of burning out as the coronavirus surges back.

Ed Yong July 7, 2020

Shutterstock / Arsh Raziuddin / The Atlantic

Saskia Popescu’s phone buzzes throughout the night, waking her up. It had already buzzed 99 times before I interviewed her at 9:15 a.m. ET last Monday. It buzzed three times during the first 15 minutes of our call. Whenever a COVID-19 case is confirmed at her hospital system, Popescu gets an email, and her phone buzzes. She cannot silence it. An epidemiologist at the University of Arizona, Popescu works to prepare hospitals for outbreaks of emerging diseases. Her phone is now a miserable metronome, ticking out the rhythm of the pandemic ever more rapidly as Arizona’s cases climb. “It has almost become white noise,” she told me.

For many Americans, the coronavirus pandemic has become white noise—old news that has faded into the background of their lives. But the crisis is far from over. Arizona is one of the pandemic’s new hot spots, with 24,000 confirmed cases over the past week and rising hospitalizations and deaths. Popescu saw the surge coming, “but to actually see it play out is heartbreaking,” she said. “It didn’t have to be this way.”

Popescu is one of many public-health experts who have been preparing for and battling the pandemic since the start of the year. They’re not treating sick people, as doctors or nurses might be, but are instead advising policy makers, monitoring the pandemic’s movements, modeling its likely trajectory, and ensuring that hospitals are ready.

By now they are used to sharing their knowledge with journalists, but they’re less accustomed to talking about themselves. Many of them told me that they feel duty-bound and grateful to be helping their country at a time when so many others are ill or unemployed. But they’re also very tired, and dispirited by America’s continued inability to control a virus that many other nations have brought to heel. As the pandemic once again intensifies, so too does their frustration and fatigue.

America isn’t just facing a shortfall of testing kits, masks, or health-care workers. It is also looking at a drought of expertise, as the very people whose skills are sorely needed to handle the pandemic are on the verge of burning out.

To work in preparedness, Nicolette Louissaint told me, is to constantly stare at society’s vulnerabilities and imagine the worst possible future. The nonprofit she runs, Healthcare Ready, works to steel communities for outbreaks and disasters by ensuring that they have access to medical supplies. She started revving up her operations in January. By March, when businesses and schools started closing and governors began issuing stay-at-home orders, “we were already running on fumes,” she said. Throughout March and April, she got two hours of sleep a night. Now she’s getting four. And yet “I always feel like I’m never doing enough,” she said. “Like one of my colleagues said, I could sleep for two weeks and still feel this tired. It’s embedded in us at this point.”

But the physical exhaustion is dwarfed by the emotional toll of seeing the imagined worst-case scenarios become reality. “One of the big misconceptions is that we enjoy being right,” Louissaint said. “We’d be very happy to be wrong, because it would mean lives are being saved.”

The field of public health demands a particular way of thinking. Unlike medicine, which is about saving individual patients, public health is about protecting the well-being of entire communities. Its problems, from malnutrition to addiction to epidemics, are broader in scope. Its successes come incrementally, slowly, and through the sustained efforts of large groups of people. As Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at the University of Florida, told me, “The pandemic is a huge problem, but I’m not afraid of huge problems.”

The more successful public health is, however, the more people take it for granted. Funding has dwindled since the 2008 recession. Many jobs have disappeared. Now that the entire country needs public-health advice, there aren’t enough people qualified to offer it. The number of epidemiologists who specialize in pandemic-level infectious threats is small enough that “I think I know them all,” says Caitlin Rivers, who studies outbreaks at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

The people doing this work have had to recalibrate their lives. From March to May, Colin Carlson, a research professor at Georgetown University who specializes in infectious diseases, spent most of his time traversing the short gap between his bed and his desk. He worked relentlessly and knocked back coffee, even though it exacerbates his severe anxiety: The cost was worth it, he felt, when the United States still seemed to have a chance of controlling COVID-19.

The U.S. frittered away that chance. Through social distancing, the American public bought the country valuable time at substantial personal cost. The Trump administration should have used that time to roll out a coordinated plan to ramp up America’s ability to test and trace infected people. It didn’t. Instead, to the immense frustration of public-health advisers, leaders rushed to reopen while most states were still woefully unprepared.

When Arizona Governor Doug Ducey began reviving businesses in early May, the intensive-care unit of Popescu’s hospital was still full of COVID-19 patients. “Within our public-health bubble, we were getting nervous, but then you walked outside and it was like Pleasantville,” she said. “People thought we had conquered it, and now it feels like we’re drowning.”

The COVID-19 unit has had to expand across an entire hospital wing and onto another floor. Beds have filled with younger patients. Long lines are snaking around the urgent-care building, and people are passing out in the 110-degree heat. At some hospitals, labs are so inundated that it takes several days to get test results back. “We thought we could have scaled down instead of scaling up,” Popescu said. “But because of poor political decisions that every public-health person I know disagreed with, everything that could go wrong did go wrong.”

“I feel like I’ve been making the same recommendations since January,” says Krutika Kuppalli, an infectious-disease physician who works in public health. The last time she felt this tired was in 2014, after spending three months in West Africa helping with the region’s historic Ebola outbreak. Everyone who experienced that crisis, she told me, was deeply shaken; she herself suffered from post-traumatic stress upon returning home.

The same experts who warned of the coronavirus’s resurgence are now staring, with the same prophetic worry, at a health-care system that is straining just as hurricane season begins. And they’re demoralized about repeatedly shouting evidence-based advice into a political void. “It feels like writing ‘Bad things are about to happen’ on a napkin and then setting the napkin on fire,” Carlson says.

A pandemic would have always been a draining ordeal. But it is especially so because the U.S., instead of mounting a unified front, is disjointed, cavalier, and fatalistic. Every week brings fresh farce, from Donald Trump suggesting that the country should do less testing to massive indoor gatherings of unmasked people.

“One by one, people are seeing something so absurd that it takes them out of commission,” Carlson says.

Public health is not a calling for people who crave the limelight, and researchers like Rivers, the Johns Hopkins professor, have found their sudden prominence jarring. Almost all of the 2,000 Twitter followers she had in January were other scientists. Most of the 130,000 followers she now has are not. The slow, verbose world of academic communication has given way to the blistering, constrained world of tweets and news segments.

The pandemic is also bringing out academia’s darker sides—competition, hostility, sexism, and a lust for renown. Armchair experts from unrelated fields have successfully positioned themselves as trusted sources. Male scientists are publishing more than their female colleagues, who are disproportionately shouldering the burden of child care during lockdowns. Many researchers have suddenly pivoted to COVID-19, producing sloppy work with harmful results. That further dispirits more cautious researchers, who, on top of dealing with the virus and reticent politicians, are also forced to confront their own colleagues. “If I cannot reasonably convince people I’ve been friends with for years that their work is causing tangible harm, what possible future do I see on this career path?” Carlson asks.

Other scientists and health officials are facing the wrath of a nation on edge. Unsettled by months of stay-at-home orders, confused by rampant misinformation, distraught over the country’s blunders, and embroiled in yet more culture wars over masks and lockdowns, Americans are lashing out. Public-health experts—and women in particular—have become targets. Several have resigned because of threats and harassment. Others face streams of invective in their inboxes and on their Twitter feeds. “I can say something and get horrendously attacked, but a man who doesn’t even work in this field can go on national TV and be revered for saying the exact same thing,” Popescu said.

Some critics have caricatured public-health experts as finger-wagging alarmists ensconced in an ivory tower, far away from the everyday people who are suffering the restrictive consequences of their advice. But this dichotomy is false. The experts I spoke with are also scared. They’re also feeling trapped at home. They also miss their loved ones. Louissaint, who lives in Baltimore, hasn’t seen her New York–based parents this year.

“I feel like I’m living in at least three realities at the same time,” Louissaint told me. She’s responding directly to the pandemic, trying to ensure that patients and hospitals get the supplies they need. She’s running an organization, trying to make sure that her employees keep their jobs. She’s a Black woman, living through a pandemic that has disproportionately killed Black people and the historic protests that have followed the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery. During the ensuing reckonings about race, “I’ve been pulled into so many conversations about equity that people weren’t having months ago,” Louissant said.

“Someone said to me, ‘I hope you’re getting tons of support,’” she added. “But there’s no feasible thing that anyone could do to make this better, no matter how much they love you. The mental toll isn’t something you can easily share.”

These laments feel familiar to people who lived through the AIDS crisis in the ’80s, says Gregg Gonsalves, a Yale epidemiologist who has been working on HIV for 30 years and who has the virus himself. “I have friends who survived the virus but didn’t survive the toll it took on their lives,” Gonsalves told me. “I’m incredulous that I’m seeing this twice in my lifetime. The idea that I’m going to have to fend off another virus … like, really, can I have just one?”

But Gonsalves added that HIV veterans have a deep well of emotional reserves to draw from, and a sense of shared purpose to mobilize. His advice to the younger generation is twofold. First, don’t ignore your feelings: “Your anxiety, fear, and anger are all real,” he said. Then, find your people. “They may not be your colleagues,” he said, and they might not be scientists. But they’ll share the same values, and be united in recognizing that “public health is not a career, but a mission and a calling.”

Despite the toll of the work and the pressure from all sides, the public-health experts I talked with are determined to continue. “I’m glad I have a way in which I can be useful,” Rivers said. “I feel like it’s my duty to do what I can.”

The Pandemic Experts Are Not Okay

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