Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Wetsuit optional.

The willow is too close to the house.

Nevertheless, she persisted.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

We survived Breitbartpocalypse!

You are either for trump or for democracy. Pick one.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The revolution will be supervised.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

Dinky Hocker shoots smack!

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

Han shot first.

Four legs? good! two legs? we’re not so sure…

All your base are belong to Tunch.

We can agree to disagree, but i’m right.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

I thought we were promised Infrastructure Week.

I’m only here for the duck photos.

Good luck with your asparagus.

We still have time to mess this up!

Screw the Judean People’s Front. Splitters.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

You are here: Home / Archives for Healthcare / COVID-19 Coronavirus
“COVID-19 is a novel disease for which treatment protocols are evolving and remain imperfect. With the internet’s eternal tropism towards bullshit, there will be plenty of false or misleading claims about ways of preventing, enduring or “curing” COVID-19 infections. Please don’t amplify them here. If you do have knowledge or experience you feel is of interest to the jackaltariat, please make sure you make it clear where that information comes from: sources, expertise, and so on.  It’s easy to get stuff wrong in a crisis and mistakes can create real harm. So be careful out there…and in here.”

COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: Sunday/Monday, Nov. 22-23

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COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: Saturday/Sunday, Nov. 21-22

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A Temple Full of Sociopaths

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This is astounding and infuriating:

A Hasidic synagogue in Brooklyn planned the wedding of a chief rabbi’s grandson with such secrecy it was able to host thousands of maskless celebrants without the city catching on.

Despite a surge in COVID-19 cases, guests crammed shoulder-to-shoulder inside the Yetev Lev temple in Williamsburg for the Nov. 8 nuptials — stomping, dancing and singing at the top of their lungs without a mask in sight, videos obtained by The Post show.

Organizers schemed to hide the wedding of Yoel Teitelbaum, grandson of Satmar Grand Rabbi Aaron Teitelman, from “the ravenous press and government officials,” says a detailed account in the Yiddish newspaper Der Blatt, the publication of the Satmar sect.

“Due to the ongoing situation with government restrictions, preparations were made secretly and discreetly, so as not to draw attention from strangers,” the paper reported in its Nov. 13 edition.

And they are PROUD of themselves. Seriously, fuck each and every single one of them, and I legit hope a bunch of them get sick and die. I am tired of being the bigger person, and these folks stay within their own community a good deal, so fuck them all.

There is only so much you can do to try to keep people safe.

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Pandemic Turkey Day: Sharing Is *Not* Caring, Unless It’s Health Info

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Pandemic Turkey Day: Sharing Is *Not* Caring

(Nick Anderson via GoComics.com)
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It’s probably too late to change the minds of those among your friends & loved ones who want a “real Thanksgiving, just like every other year”… but some people may still be indecisive, wondering whether the increased level of difficulty involved in ‘celebrating’ a not-always-stress-free BIG! FAMILY! EVENT! is really worth the effort. Give them whatever plausible arguments can be tailored to their excuses. Here’s some samples…

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COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: Friday/Saturday, Nov. 20-21

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The Coming Apocalypse

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Ed Yong, who has done really excellent work throughout the pandemic, has a tragic, terrifying piece up at The Atlantic just now, “The Hospitals Know What’s Coming.”

The story focuses on one institution, the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. It’s a major center of excellence, and as Yong reports was uniquely well-placed to deal with an epidemic:

After the SARS outbreak of 2003, its staff began specifically preparing for emerging infections. The center has the nation’s only federal quarantine facility and its largest biocontainment unit, which cared for airlifted Ebola patients in 2014. They had detailed pandemic plans. They ran drills. Ron Klain, who was President Obama’s “Ebola czar” and will be Joe Biden’s chief of staff in the White House, once told me that UNMC is “arguably the best in the country” at handling dangerous and unusual diseases.

But, as Yong meticulously reports, no amount of preparation can overcome a broad-based failure of basic public health measures.

In the past two weeks, the hospital had to convert an entire building into a COVID-19 tower, from the top down. It now has 10 COVID-19 units, each taking up an entire hospital floor. Three of the units provide intensive care to the very sickest people, several of whom die every day. One unit solely provides “comfort care” to COVID-19 patients who are certain to die. “We’ve never had to do anything like this,” Angela Hewlett, the infectious-disease specialist who directs the hospital’s COVID-19 team, told me. “We are on an absolutely catastrophic path.”

The Coming Apocalypse 1

 

That’s just from the top of the story. Read the whole thing–really. There are well-told human stories throughout, and my admiration for and sense of obligation to everyone working on the healthcare front lines of this have ratcheted way up from already high levels.

 

But the incidents and anecdotes are in service of the larger point, which is tragic and utterly infuriating. The conscious and willful failure of leadership that has persuaded so many people to ignore the risk has created the conditions for utter disaster. When–and it doesn’t appear to be an “if”–the disease exceeds hospital systems’ capacity the death toll will accelerate.
This will be bad everywhere, but worse in the places that are now hardest hit: the more rural states with fewer major hospitals to draw upon.
While cities like New York or Boston have many big hospitals that can care for advanced strokes, failing hearts that need mechanical support, and transplanted organs, “in this region, we’re it,” [critical care Dr. Dan] Johnson says. “We provide care that can’t be provided at any other hospital for a 200-mile radius. We’re going to need to decide if we continue to offer that care, or if we admit every single COVID-19 patient who comes through our door.”
Yong concludes his story with the same truth David Anderson keeps drumming into our thick skulls:
 It takes several days for infected people to show symptoms, a dozen more for newly diagnosed cases to wend their way to hospitals, and even more for the sickest of patients to die. These lags mean that the pandemic’s near-term future is always set, baked in by the choices of the past. It means that Ricketts is already too late to stop whatever UNMC will face in the coming weeks (but not too late to spare the hospital further grief next month). It means that some of the people who get infected over Thanksgiving will struggle to enter packed hospitals by the middle of December, and be in the ground by Christmas.
This is what makes this piece both a sober, meticulously reported and heart breaking story, and a call to action. It’s too late to deal with what’s heading at us, what will happen in the latter half of December and beyond remains subject to our choices, good or bad.
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On that happy note…open thread.
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Image: Gustave Doré, Jesus healing the sick, before 1883.

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Stay Home (Open Thread)

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I know Rachel isn’t everyone’s cup of tea (that’s okay — more tea for me!), but this is a powerful message about what’s at stake when people decide they’re bored with the pandemic.

As a natural-born homebody and introvert, I suspect I’m having an easier time than most weathering the social distancing and lack of galivanting, and even I’m fed up after eight months, so I get the restlessness.  The approaching holidays are making it worse. So I needed to hear Maddow’s message, and maybe you do too. Open thread.

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