Tag: covid-19

12,000 NYC Students Banned From School For Not Consenting To Random Covid Testing

Today in “how far can your rights be infringed upon before people start to push back” news…

About 12,000 New York City students are being prevented from attending in-person learning because their parents “failed to sign consent forms for weekly random testing”, Bloomberg reported last week. The students are part of a larger group of 190,000 pre-school through elementary students who returned to classrooms in December. 

While about 60,000 pre-school and kindergarten students are exempt from testing, there are still about 130,000 students who are required to participate in random testing. 

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Mask Mandates Seem to Make CCP Virus Infection Rates Climb, Study Says

Protective-mask mandates aimed at combating the spread of the CCP virus that causes the disease COVID-19 appear to promote its spread, according to a report from RationalGround.com, a clearinghouse of COVID-19 data trends that’s run by a grassroots group of data analysts, computer scientists, and actuaries.

Researchers examined cases covering a 229-day period running from May 1 through Dec. 15 and compared the days in which state governments had imposed mask mandates and the days when they hadn’t.

In states with a mandate in effect, there were 9,605,256 confirmed COVID-19 cases, which works out to an average of 27 cases per 100,000 people per day. When states didn’t have a statewide order—including states that never had mandates, coupled with the period of time masking states didn’t have the mandate in place—there were 5,781,716 cases, averaging 17 cases per 100,000 people per day.

In other words, protective-mask mandates have a poor track record so far in fighting the coronavirus. States with mandates in place produced an average of 10 more reported infections per 100,000 people per day than states without mandates.

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Last man to share jail cell with Jeffrey Epstein died last month of COVID

The last man to share a cell with Jeffrey Epstein died last month in a Bronx apartment after catching coronavirus at a jail for cooperating witnesses.

Efrain “Stone” Reyes, 51, was found dead in bed on Nov. 27 at his mother’s apartment, the NYPD confirmed. In August 2019 he shared a cell with Epstein, only to be transferred to the privately-run Queens Detention Facility the day before the accused sex trafficker hanged himself, according to his family and Bureau of Prisons records.

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Moderna COVID-19 vaccine may cause side effects for those with cosmetic facial fillers: FDA

People with cosmetic facial fillers could experience swelling and inflammation with one of the coronavirus vaccines, the FDA advisory committee noted.

According to the committee, several trial participants with fillers have already experienced side effects. A California-based dermatologist said the reaction was immunological, ABC7 reported on Thursday.

“Your immune system which causes inflammation is revved up when you get a vaccine, that’s how it’s supposed to work,” said Dr. Shirley Chi, who noted the side effects were easily treated by medical personnel.

“So it makes sense that you would see an immune response in certain areas where they see some substance that is not a naturally occurring substance in your body.”

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‘Super Gonorrhea’ is spreading like wildfire thanks to COVID-19

2020 hasn’t been kind to anyone, but it’s almost over. Unfortunately, if you find yourself with a case of “Super Gonnorhea” you might feel the effects of this terrible year for an extended period of time. Doctors are now warning of the increasing spread of the antibiotic-resistant strain of STI, and they’re blaming the coronavirus pandemic for helping it gain momentum.

According to a report from The Sun, the problem has gotten so bad that the World Health Organization has taken notice. The issue is that as the coronavirus pandemic was ongoing, many clinics and hospitals used antibiotics in the treatment of patients and to prevent the cross-infection of hospitalized individuals. That overuse of antibiotics has given a boost to antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea, according to WHO.

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Unsolved Murders On The Rise In 2020 Due To COVID-Related Challenges

It should come as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention over the last year that police are solving less murders as a result of new challenges that have been created by Covid-19. 

In fact, homicides rose almost 40% for the country’s 10 largest police departments in the first 11 months of 2020, the Wall Street Journal reported this weekend. The report noted that detectives across the country have been “overwhelmed” by the rise in homicides after the rate had been falling since the 1990s.

Covid has made traditional police work, including face to face interviews, difficult to undertake. This comes amid a year where civil unrest has been high and the public’s trust of police has sunk. 

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World Health Organization Pledges Not To Find ‘Guilty’ Party During Coronavirus Investigation In China

A team of scientists leading a World Health Organization mission to China to investigate the origins of the novel coronavirus is not looking to assign guilt to the communist regime over its failure to prevent the pandemic, a member of the delegation says.

“This is not about finding a guilty country or a guilty authority,” Fabian Leendertz, a scientist at the Robert Koch Institute, Germany’s infectious disease agency, told Agence France-Presse (AFP), the French media outlet.

“This is about understanding what happened to avoid that in the future, to reduce the risk.”

Leendertz and a team of 10 other scientists will visit Wuhan, China in January to investigate how the virus jumped from animals to humans, according to AFP.

Most scientists believe that the virus transmitted from an animal to a human at one of Wuhan’s open-air food markets. Western health officials have long criticized the Chinese government for doing little to regulate the food markets, which can be breeding grounds for viruses like the coronavirus.

Health officials in the U.S. have accused the World Health Organization (WHO) of failing to confront Chinese leaders for withholding information about the coronavirus early on in the pandemic.

The WHO said in a statement citing Chinese officials on Jan. 14 that there was no evidence that the virus spread from person-to-person contact. That assurance, which is now known to be false, likely slowed the response of health officials outside China at a crucial point in the pandemic.

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University of Florida researchers find no asymptomatic or presymptomatic spread

Four researchers from the University of Florida Department of Biostatistics co-authored a study published online by the Journal of the American Medical Association. They performed a meta-analysis of 54 studies looking at the household secondary attack rate of SARS-CoV-2. According to the CDC, the secondary attack rate is the number of new cases among contacts divided by the total number of contacts.

The researchers confirmed that SARS-CoV-2 is more contagious than other coronaviruses, with a secondary attack rate of 16.6% (95% CI 14.0%-19.3%) compared to 7.5% (95%CI 4.8%-10.7%) for SARS-CoV and 4.7% (95%CI, 0.9%-10.7%) for MERS-CoV.

Their findings also confirmed the attack rate is higher to adult contacts compared to child contacts and to spouses compared to other family members.

The secondary attack rate for symptomatic index cases was 18.0% (95% CI 14.2%-22.1%), and the rate of asymptomatic and presymptomatic index cases was 0.7% (95% CI 0%-4.9%), “although there were few studies in the latter group.” The asymptomatic/presymptomatic secondary attack rate is not statistically different from zero, and the confidence interval is technically 0.7 ± 4.2, resulting in a range of -3.5%-4.9%, but attack rates cannot be negative, so it is truncated at 0.

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