Tag: coronavirus

NY Health Department sued for ‘hiding’ COVID-19 death stats of nursing home patients

The state Health Department is illegally withholding information about the number of nursing home residents who died of COVID-19 in hospitals so it can intentionally undercount fatalities and tout New York’s response to the pandemic, a new lawsuit charges.

The Empire Center for Public Policy, an Albany-based think tank, filed a Freedom of Information Law request for the data on Aug. 3 and was later told that it couldn’t have the records until Nov. 5, the court papers filed Friday allege.

The explanation given was that “a diligent search for responsive documents is still being conducted,” according to the Empire Center’s suit filed in Albany state Supreme Court.

But daily tallies of all nursing home residents who’ve died from the coronavirus, “both within nursing home facilities and elsewhere,” are contained in the state’s Health Emergency Response Data System, or HERDS, according to the suit.

The Empire Center says there’s “no reason” why the Health Department “hasn’t already disclosed the information” and accuses officials of “hiding it without justification.”

The Empire Center also alleges that the state’s official count of at least 6,600 COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes “omits potentially thousands of nursing home residents who died in hospitals after being transferred from their nursing homes.”

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Biden, CNN’s Cooper mocked after breaking social distancing rule during town hall commercial break

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Thursday were mocked on social media after a former producer at the network flagged that the two men moved closer to each other, breaking social distancing guidelines, as the network went to a commercial break during a town hall event.

“Joe Biden and Anderson Cooper are making a point of social distancing during the CNN Town Hall while on the stage. But when they think they’ve gone to commercial break, they get so close to each other that Biden is whispering in Cooper’s ear,” wrote former CNN senior digital producer Steve Krakauer in a tweet that included video. 

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Say What?! CDC director just testified masks might be more effective than vaccine at fighting COVID-19

First, Don’t wear a mask! They won’t help you. In fact, they might even kill you (because you’re too stupid to know how to wear one safely).

Then, Wear your mask! It’s the law! It still won’t help you, but it will save everyone around you!

And now (from the head of the CDC no less, in testimony before Congress Wednesday), Wear your mask! It’s the only thing guaranteed to save you!

“I might even go so far as to say that this face mask is more guaranteed to protect me against COVID than when I take a COVID vaccine, because the immunogenicity may be 70%. And if I don’t get an immune response, the vaccine is not going to protect me. This face mask will.” — CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield

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Moderna expects to make 20 million doses of coronavirus vaccine by 2020 end

Moderna said on Friday it was on track to produce 20 million doses of its experimental coronavirus vaccine by the end of the year, while maintaining its goal of readying 500 million to 1 billion doses in 2021.

Vaccines and treatments are seen as essential in controlling the Covid-19 pandemic that has shown no signs of slowing and killed over 944,000 people worldwide.

A handful of vaccines, including those from Pfizer and AstraZeneca, are also being tested in large studies.

Moderna had enrolled 25,296 participants out of a planned 30,000 in its late-stage study as of Wednesday.

The company is working with Switzerland’s Lonza Group and Spain’s Laboratorios Farmacéuticos Rovi to make the vaccine outside the United States.

Moderna has a vaccine supply deal in place with the U.S. for 100 million doses, and has finished advanced talks with the European Union for the vaccine.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention anticipates that 35 million to 45 million doses of vaccines from the first two companies to receive authorization will be available in the United States by the end of this year.

Moderna plans to seek emergency authorization for its vaccine’s use in high-risk groups if it proves to be at least 70% effective, its chief executive officer told Reuters earlier this week.

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The WHO is monitoring online conversations and emotions, using “social listening” to change COVID narratives

The World Health Organization is collaborating with an analytics company to scan people’s social media conversations for “coronavirus misinformation;” something the WHO calls “social listening.”

The global health organization says that it’s not only fighting the pandemic but also the conversations people are having about it.

According to the WHO, there’s an “infodemic” – an overload and spread of misleading information, so much so that it decided that to tackle misinformation, it needs to employ various tools, including social listening, with machine learning monitoring.

“Countering fake news or rumors is actually only responding or mitigating when it’s too late,” said Tim Nguyen, a technology expert helping the WHO’s unit titled Information Network for Epidemics (EPI-WIN). “What we’ve put in place in the beginning of the pandemic is what we call a social listening approach.”

The company has been creepily scanning more than 1.6 million social media posts each week to monitor online conversation. It then uses machine learning to classify information into four topics; cause, illness, interventions, and treatments. The WHO’s aim is to learn the coronavirus topics that are gaining popularity so that it can then create its own content to counteract and attempt to change the narrative.

The WHO’s “social listening” goes beyond analyzing people’s conversations for content, it also tries to analyze their emotions. Through language analytics, the technology detects emotions such as sadness, acceptance, denial, and anxiety. With such insights, the WHO hopes to come up with effective strategies to adjust coronavirus narratives.

“What we’ve learned now, after two and a half months of doing this kind of analysis, is that there are recurring themes and topics that are coming back over and over again,” Nguyen explained. “What that means to us is that we need to re-push information at different times. People may not understand it the first time when we push it, but when the questions and issues come up later, it means it’s time to push it out again.”

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COVID-19 emails from Nashville mayor’s office show disturbing revelation

The coronavirus cases on lower Broadway may have been so low that the mayor’s office and the Metro Health Department decided to keep it secret.

Emails between the mayor’s senior advisor and the health department reveal only a partial picture. But what they reveal is disturbing.

The discussion involves the low number of coronavirus cases emerging from bars and restaurants and how to handle that.

And most disturbingly, how to keep it from the public.

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Victorian Government Pushes New Bill to Detain ‘Conspiracy Theorists,’ Anti-Lockdown Protesters, and Families

The Victorian government will debate a new bill in the State Parliament this week which would hand authorities the power to forcibly detain “conspiracy theorists” and people suspected to likely spread coronavirus, such as anti-lockdown protesters and their close contacts.

If passed, the Omnibus (Emergency Measures) Bill will allow the state to detain anyone they suspect of being “high risk” or likely to negligently spread COVID-19, either if they have the virus or have been in contact with an infected person.

According to The Age, a state government spokesman said the rule could be applied to “conspiracy theorists who refuse to self-isolate or severely drug-affected or mentally impaired people who do not have the capacity to quarantine.”

Those detained could then be placed in quarantine facilities, such as hotels, where they can be monitored by authorities.

On Sunday police fined 200 people and made 74 arrests during an anti-lockdown protest in Melbourne. Could this bill lead to the mass-forced quarantining of similar anti-lockdown protesters?

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