Tag: coronavirus

Employees need masks even for at-home Zoom calls, Wisconsin agency says. Here’s why

In an email to employees sent out on July 31, the head of Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources not only reminded employees of Gov. Tony Evers’ mask order going into effect on Aug. 1, he also said that every DNR employee must wear a mask … even while on a teleconference.

“Also, wear your mask, even if you are home, to participate in a virtual meeting that involves being seen — such as on Zoom or another video-conferencing platform — by non-DNR staff,” Preston Cole said, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “Set the safety example which shows you as a DNR public service employee care about the safety and health of others.”

Evers’ executive order said that face coverings are required to be worn whenever a person is in an enclosed space — other than a private residence.

DNR spokeswoman Megan Sheridan spoke with McClatchy News and said that employees wearing masks while video conferencing with external partners sets a good example during the pandemic.

“By wearing a mask while video conferencing with the general public, we visually remind folks that masking is an important part of navigating the business of natural resources during this tumultuous time,” Sheridan said.

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Business is booming for NYC psychics amid COVID-19 pandemic

While storefronts are going bust across the Big Apple due to the coronavirus pandemic, New York’s psychics and fortune-tellers say they are seeing more clients — and making more money — than ever before.

Unlike most businesses, they thrive in times of uncertainty and despair.

“When there’s a big change in the world, or more uncertainty in the world, that is when people look for more certainty,” psychic Betsy LeFae told The Post. “Everyone now wants more certainty, and yes – that is when people tend to turn to psychics.

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Mississippi Coroner Says State’s Coronavirus Death Tally Is Misleading, Causing ‘Unnecessary Fear In The Public’

AMississippi county coroner said his state’s death count from coronavirus could be incorrect, telling residents that possible misreporting has led to “unnecessary fear in the public.”

Joshua Pounder, the coroner for DeSoto County in northwest Mississippi, wrote on his Facebook page Thursday night a breakdown of all causes of death in the county in July. He said he felt compelled to act because of the “many facebook google experts and politicians with politically driven agendas driven by money reporting information that is twisted and false to the public.”

The post, which has since garnered nearly 3,000 shares, described what Pounder called an “average month in Desoto county,” despite the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The coroner’s office recently completed reports for 144 deaths in July, Pounder wrote.

Pounder attributed the highest number of deaths to heart conditions, lung or vascular diseases and strokes, with 67 reported deaths. Pounder wrote that cancer was the second-highest, causing 30 reported deaths in the county.

Of the 11 causes of death Pounder listed, coronavirus was not among them. Instead, the 24 DeSoto County residents who had a positive COVID-19 test at the time of their death were included in the count of total deaths and attributed to causes other than the novel coronavirus, Pounder said.

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Without ‘Much More Aggressive Shutdowns,’ The New York Times Warns, COVID-19 Could Kill ‘Well Over a Million’ Americans

Without “much more aggressive shutdowns,” a New York Times editorial warns, “well over a million” Americans “may ultimately die” from COVID-19. The paper does not cite a source for that estimate, which seems highly implausible based on the death toll so far, projections for the next few months, the gap between total infections and confirmed cases, and a crude case fatality rate that continues to fall.

Independent data scientist Youyang Gu, who has a good track record of predicting COVID-19 fatalities, is currently projecting about 231,000 deaths in the United States by November 1. The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation projects 295,000 deaths by December 1. Assuming those projections prove to be about right, the Times is predicting that the death toll will quadruple during the months before an effective vaccine can be deployed, which might happen early next year.

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States have authority to fine or jail people who refuse coronavirus vaccine, attorney says

As drugmakers race to develop a vaccine against the coronavirus, several legal questions are emerging: could the government require people to get it? Could people who refuse to roll up their sleeves get banned from stores or lose their jobs?

The short answer is yes, according to Dov Fox, a law professor and the director of the Center for Health Law Policy and Bioethics at the University of San Diego.

“States can compel vaccinations in more or less intrusive ways,” he said in an interview. “They can limit access to schools or services or jobs if people don’t get vaccinated. They could force them to pay a fine or even lock them up in jail.”

Fox noted authorities in the United States have never attempted to jail people for refusing to vaccinate, but other countries like France have adopted the aggressive tactic.

The legal precedent dates back to 1905. In a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case, Jacobson v. Massachusetts, the court ruled Massachusetts had the authority to fine people who refused vaccinations for smallpox.

That case formed the legal basis for vaccine requirements at schools, and has been upheld in subsequent decisions.
“Courts have found that when medical necessity requires it, the public health outweighs the individual rights and liberties at stake,” Fox said.

In 2019, New York City passed an ordinance that fined people who refused a measles vaccination.

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We Need a Principled Anti-Lockdown Movement

Shell-shocked is a good way to describe the mood in the U.S. for a good part of the Spring of 2020. Most of us never thought it could happen here. I certainly did not, even though I’ve been writing about pandemic lockdown plans for 15 years. I knew the plans were on the shelf, which is egregious, but I always thought something would stop it from happening. The courts. Public opinion. Bill of Rights. Tradition. The core rowdiness of American culture. Political squeamishness. The availability of information. 

Something would prevent it. So I believed. So most of us believed. 

Still it happened, all in a matter of days, March 12-16, 2020, and boom; it was over! We were locked down. Schools shut. Bars and restaurants closed. No international visitors. Theaters shuttered. Conferences forcibly ended. Sports stopped. We were told to stay home and watch movies…for two weeks to flatten the curve. Then two weeks stretched to five months. How lucky for those who lived in the states that resisted the pressure and stayed open, but even for them, they couldn’t visit relatives in other states due to quarantine restrictions and so on. 

Lockdowns ended American life as we knew it just five months ago, for a virus that 99.4-6% of those who contract it shake off, for which the median age of death is 78-80 with comorbidities, for which there is not a single verified case of reinfection on the planet, for which international successes in managing this relied on herd immunity and openness. 

Still the politicians who had become dictators couldn’t admit such astonishing failure so they kept the restrictions in place as a way of covering up what they had done. 

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Neck gaiters may actually increase COVID-19 transmission, study finds

The U.S. hit another grim milestone on Monday with more than 5 million Americans now infected with the coronavirus. Although there is a push to increase testing and develop a vaccine, experts continue to suggest that if all Americans wore masks, the pandemic could be brought under control “within weeks.” In the spirit of that mission, a new study published in Science Advances is shedding light on which masks are most effective — and which may actually be hurting the effort to curb COVID-19.

The analysis, carried out by researchers at Duke University School of Medicine, relied on an “optimal measurement method” that uses a laser beam and cellphone camera to track the number of droplets that emerged from an individual while he or she wore a mask. Of the 14 masks, the two that proved least effective were a bandanna and what the researchers refer to as a neck fleece, also known as a neck gaiter.

The most secure mask, the N95, led to a droplet transmission of below 0.1 percent. But handmade cotton and polypropylene masks, some of which were made from apron material, proved beneficial, showing a droplet transmission ranging from 10 to 40 percent. One mask, which was knitted, released a higher number of droplets, with up to 60 percent droplet transmission. But none of the masks compared with the neck fleece, which had 110 percent droplet transmission (10 percent higher than not wearing a mask).

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Michelle Obama slips up, says COVID is an opportunity to change ‘how wealth is distributed’

During Wednesday’s episode of her new podcast, former First Lady Michelle Obama slipped up and appeared to reveal the Left’s true agenda behind the coronavirus pandemic. While talking to journalist Michele Norris, Obama said that the coronavirus pandemic was actually an opportunity to think about “how wealth is distributed” to lower-income essential workers.

“There’s kind of a new COVID vocabulary, isn’t it,” Norris said to start off the conversation. “There are also words that have always had some meaning, but that take on different meaning now, the word hero, the word essential.”

“I think we will forever think about the word ‘essential’ in a different way,” she added. “And, when we were told to stay home, they got up, got dressed, and went out into the world, risking their lives, to drive garbage trucks, to work in warehouses, to work in grocery stores, to work in hospitals. Often doing invisible, but yes, essential work, and I struggle with it because I’m not sure that we treat them like they’re essential.”

Obama immediately took this and ran with it with her response, showing once again that Democrats have no intention of letting this crisis go to waste.

“And that’s something that we need to, that’s a part of that reflection, that we need to do, you know. With ourselves, and, and as a community,” the former First Lady said. “And we have to think about that, in terms of how wealth is distributed.”

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‘Morality pills’ may be the US’s best shot at ending the coronavirus pandemic, according to one ethicist

It seems that the U.S. is not currently equipped to cooperatively lower the risk confronting us. Many are instead pinning their hopes on the rapid development and distribution of an enhancement to the immune system – a vaccine.

But I believe society may be better off, both in the short term as well as the long, by boosting not the body’s ability to fight off disease but the brain’s ability to cooperate with others. What if researchers developed and delivered a moral enhancer rather than an immunity enhancer?

Moral enhancement is the use of substances to make you more moral. The psychoactive substances act on your ability to reason about what the right thing to do is, or your ability to be empathetic or altruistic or cooperative.

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