Hong Kong to kill 2000 Hamsters after COVID outbreak

Hong Kong authorities said on January 18, 2022 that they will kill about 2,000 small animals, including hamsters, chinchillas and rabbits, after 11 hamsters tested positive for the coronavirus at a pet store where an employee and costumer were also infected.

The city will also stop the sale of hamsters and the import of small mammals, according to officials from the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department. The pet shop employee tested positive for the delta variant on Monday, and several hamsters imported from the Netherlands at the store tested positive as well.

Customers who purchased hamsters from the store after Jan. 7, 2022 will be traced and be subject to mandatory quarantine and must hand over their hamsters to authorities to be put down, officials said. Customers who bought hamsters in Hong Kong from Dec. 22, 2021 will be subject to mandatory testing and are urged not contact others until their tests have returned negative. If their hamsters test positive, they will be subject to quarantine.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), animals do not appear to play a significant role in spreading the coronavirus. But Hong Kong authorities said they are not ruling out transmission between animals and humans. Minks are the only known animals to have caught the virus from people and spread it back, according to Dr. Scott Weese at Ontario Veterinary College. 17 million potentially infected minks were killed in Denmark back in November 2020.

Nearly 18,000 people have signed a petition calling for an end to the mass killing. Thousands have volunteers to adopt the animals.

C Section 27

Newsweek reported that an unvaccinated 27 year old mother of 6 from Texas, died of COVID-19 after giving birth. Her husband had tested positive for COVID shortly after New Year’s Day 2022. She was pregnant with the couple’s sixth child at the time.

Soon she began to feel unwell and experienced shortness of breath and chest tightness, her husband told news outlet ABC 13.

After a visit to the hospital on January 4, 2022 the mom was immediately admitted because her oxygen levels were low. She was then diagnosed with pneumonia due to COVID-19.

Within days, doctors performed an emergency C-section to deliver the couple’s baby, a boy called Koda born at 25 weeks, according to a GoFundMe donation page set up for the family. This story caught my eye since Koda was the name of the bear Cub I worked on at Disney Feature Animation for the film, Brother Bear.

The mother’s condition began to improve over the following weeks, but then suddenly deteriorated. She died shortly afterwards, in mid-January 2022.

The father told ABC 13 that both he and his wife had not been vaccinated against COVID as “it all happened so fast and it was being pushed on us very fast,” saying: “She was pregnant and so she had some concerns.”

Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said in August 2021 that the COVID vaccines were “safe and effective,” including for those who are pregnant and breastfeeding. CDC analysis at the time did not find an increased risk of miscarriage among nearly 2,500 pregnant women who received an mRNA COVID vaccine before 20 weeks of pregnancy. Unfortunately, health messaging dos not always reach those who most need to hear it in time. There are also others who simply do not want to hear or understand the science.

The Peak?

Hospitalizations in the United States may have peaked, the highest day being January 14, 2022 with almost 152,000 Americans hospitalized for COVID-19. Actually, I wrote that hopeful first sentence yesterday and, I was dead wrong, the number of hospitalizations has slipped even higher. We may not be at the peak yet, but hopefully soon.  As of January  18, 2022 over 153,000 Americans are hospitalized with COVID-19. More people are hospitalized with COVID-19 now than at any other time in the pandemic.

Some think that hitting the peak would mean that we are in the clear. However that is NOT the case. If the downward slope is more gradual that the initial ascent, then you can see more cases and death through out the decline than you saw during the rise. More people die as after reaching the peak of Everest that on the ascent to the peak.

America is seeing way more hospitalizations than any other developed country. This is likely because vaccination rates are so low in America. Our World in Data reported that of all the countries included in its analysis, the U.S. has the lowest proportion of its population that is fully vaccinated and also the lowest rate of booster shots administered.

“Overall, a smaller percentage of reported cases were hospitalized compared to the Delta wave (about 2% versus about 5%), but there were more total hospitalizations due to significantly greater case numbers,” a report by New York City’s health department concluded last week.

Another problem is that the Omicron variant hit America as we were still in the midst of a huge Delta spike. Thankfully Omicron displaced Delta, infecting far more people while being a bit less deadly.

The Omicron variant is less likely to lead to hospitalization than other variants, data suggests, but it’s so transmissible that hospitalizations are spiking anyway because so many people are being infected all at once.The hope is that the numbers will drop as fast as they spiked upwards to reach this peak. Those unvacinated who survive will have some level of immunity going forward. Those who were fully vaccinated and boosted who also get infected may develop “super immunity.”

Winter Surge

The Omicron blizzard that continues to sweep across America will find just about everybody this winter.

“Omicron, with its extraordinary, unprecedented degree of efficiency of transmissibility, will ultimately find just about everybody,” Dr. Anthony Fauci told J. Stephen Morrison, senior vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Those who have been vaccinated … and boosted would get exposed. Some, maybe a lot of them, will get infected but will very likely, with some exceptions, do reasonably well in the sense of not having hospitalization and death.”

Those who are not vaccinated are “going to get the brunt of the severe aspect of this,” Fauci added. Across the United States, at least one in five eligible Americans — roughly 65 million people– are not vaccinated against Covid-19. Only 23% who are fully vaccinated are also boosted, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

US Food and Drug Administration acting commissioner Dr. Janet Woodcock said at a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing on January 18 2022, “I think it’s hard to process what’s actually happening right now, which is: Most people are going to get Covid… and what we need to do is make sure the hospitals can still function, transportation, you know, other essential services are not disrupted while this happens.”

Dr. Fauci pointed out that there are 5 stages of the pandemic and we are still in phase 1. He cautioned against thinking we are further along than we actually are. The first phase of the pandemic—or the “The truly pandemic,” according to Fauci—is “where the whole world is really very negatively impacted as we are right now.”

The following four steps are deceleration, control, elimination, and finally eradication.

Deceleration will be a slowdown in the number of newly confirmed cases.

Control refers to endemicity. That means that COVID-19 would become integrated into the broad range of infectious diseases we commonly experience, like the flu or the common cold.

Elimination comes when the virus still exists in the world but it has been eradicated from certain regions or countries.

Eradication will be nearly impossible to reach.

Children’s Mental Health

The CDC has recommended that schools cancel extracurricular activities football, wrestling, choir and band during the COVID surge.

The CDC released its updated guidance for COVID-19 prevention in schools on January 13, 2022, along with a map that shows 99% of US counties are at high-risk for transmission of the virus.

CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said in a statement, the agency “prioritized academics over athletics because of the increased risks involved in some extracurricular sports.  When followed, our school guidance has been incredibly effective.  In the fall, 99 percent of schools were able to remain open during the intense delta wave of COVID.”

The CDC gives football and wrestling as examples of high-risk sports and says that “high-risk extracurricular activities are those in which increased exhalation occurs, such as activities that involve singing, shouting, band, or exercise, especially when conducted indoors.”

Put simply however, schools, students and parents are ignoring the guidance. They argue that children’s mental health is more important than the children’s. actual health. “As we say in Tennessee, that dog won’t hunt,” said Dr. William Shaffer, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Lets face it, most people are over this pandemic and want life to return to normal, but the pandemic isn’t done with us.

Omicron Shrinkage

Gizmodo reported that a man claimed that his dick shrank after a bout with COVID-19. Sexual dysfunction may be another added bonus in the long list of unexpected and unpleasant effects of the coronavirus.

The Slate-run sex advice podcast How to Do It discussed the harrowing tale of an anonymous letter writer who was suffering from what’s come to be known as “COVID dick.” The writer, who identified as a heterosexual man in his 30s, said that he had gotten very sick and was hospitalized from covid-19 last July. After he was discharged, he began experiencing erectile dysfunction (ED). He described himself as above average in penis size before covid-19, but his penis had shrunk about 1.5 inches and that he had “become decidedly less than average” after his bout with COVID.

A study from November 2021, for instance, found that men with COVID-19 were about three times as likely to develop a new case of ED than those who didn’t catch COVID-19. Some research has suggested that the risk may be nearly six times higher, yet other estimates are smaller, suggesting around a 20% increased risk. A small percentage of people with long COVID, including women, have also reported sexual dysfunction as one of their symptoms. And sometimes, ED can indeed lead to shrinkage, especially if it’s caused by physical damage and scarring that causes the penis to stop becoming regularly erect.

The November study, found that slightly less than 5% of men in the sample were diagnosed with ED after COVID-19.

 

Insurrectionists Retreat

753 people have been charges in the Capitol Hill Insurrection so far. The first indictments of sedition have now been leveled against members of the the Oath Keepers. This is a defining moment in the year long investigation by the Justice Department.

On January 6, 2021 members of the Oath Keepers, in their paramilitary gear, walked up the capitol steps single file with their hands on each others shoulders to work their way through the crowd. Many of these military wanna bees were already facing charges for storming the US Capitol building.

To deny they stormed the capitol will be hard to deny since this is the most photographed crime in history.

FBI investigators and DC federal prosecutors have worked diligently building the case, with the help of cooperators and the benefit of internal communications among the Oath Keepers. Federal prosecutors have been criticized by legal experts, Democratic lawmakers, Donald Trump critics, and media pundits for going easy on many of the the rioters.

These charges mute the the talking point from those downplaying the events of January 6, 2021, that the attack on the Capitol wasn’t an insurrection because nobody has been charged with sedition. The sedition case against the Oath Keepers highlights that there were hardened groups of alleged criminals within the mob that essentially planned for war. The Oath Keepers’ leader, who by the way shot his own eye out, is quoted as telling his supporters that they should prepare for a “bloody” operation and that they would need to “fight” in a “war.” Prosecutors added more details of how the Oath Keepers allegedly stockpiled weapons at a nearby hotel in Virginia, just in case they needed to deploy a “quick reaction force” into DC. Prosecutors say, that the Oath Keepers wanted to stop the transfer of presidential power from Trump to Joe Biden.

This band of miscreants lead by the sore looser of a former president. lost the battle on January 6, 2021 and will be tried for sedition.

Sedition is defined as follows… If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.

Marijuana Cure?

In a study published in study published in the Journal of Nature Products, Oregon State researchers found two cannabis compounds, cannabigerolic acid and cannabidiolic acid, could prevent SARS-CoV-2 from infecting human cells.

The study found that two compounds found in commonly found in hemp, cannabigerolic acid (CBGA) and cannabidiolic acid (CBDA), prevent coronavirus from entering cells that typically line internal organs and skin in a lab setting.

In the study, these acids were able to bind to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, the same target used in COVID-19 vaccines and antibody therapy. Once bound, this step could block a critical step in the pathogen process used to infect the cell.

“That means cell entry inhibitors, like the acids from hemp, could be used to prevent SARS-CoV-2 infection and also to shorten infections by preventing virus particles from infecting human cells” said Richard van Breemen, a scientist with Oregon State’s Global Hemp Innovation Center, College of Pharmacy, and Linus Pauling Institute.

Both cannabis compounds were found equally effective against the SARS-CoV-2 alpha and beta variants. Van Breemen hopes this trend seen in his findings will apply to other existing and future COVID-19 variants.

Van Breemen states these compounds can be taken orally. To him, they have the potential to prevent and treat infection by SARS-CoV-2. The researchers did not study THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, due to campus rules prohibiting research using controlled substances. Van Breeman sought to temper public perception that recreational marijuana would have the same effect on preventing a COVID-19 infection as ingesting an oral supplement, noting in an interview with Vice News published Thursday that, when heated, the chemical profile and properties of the compound change.

The bottom line is that smoking weed will not cure COVID-19.

Gallery 4 Secure Enclosure

Democratic Represantative Katherine Clark is asking the House sergeant at arms to require maskless members of Congress to cast their votes from “isolation boxes” in the House gallery above the main floor, citing the rapid spread of the Omicron coronavirus variant.

In a January 11, 2022 letter, Assistant House Speaker Katherine Clark said “fines have proven insufficient to prevent some Members from repeatedly violating” the House’s mask-wearing rules, which include a $500 fine for the first offense and $2,500 for each offense after that.

“This commonsense step will not only protect our dedicated House staff from Members who refuse to follow House rules, but it will also allow those members to continue to fulfill their constitutional duty to vote on matters before the House.”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican who has repeatedly ignored the masking rules, was dismissive of the idea. The congresswoman, who has said she’s unvaccinated, was recently barred from Twitter for spreading misinformation about COVID-19 and the efficacy of the disease’s vaccines.

The fines for failing to wear a mask are deducted from members’ paychecks. Greene and a fellow Georgia Republican, Rep. Andrew Clyde, have together lost over $100,000 from their salaries over violations of the rule, which Clark noted in her letter.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer is also advising members to wear N95 or KN95 masks on the House floor, regardless of vaccination status, and is strongly discouraging congregating during votes. The isolation boxes were initially created to allow members of Congress who had tested positive for the coronavirus to attend votes, which was important as Nancy Pelosi sought to whip votes for the speakership in 2021.

Lawmakers Who Tested Positive, Isolating: January 2022

12/19/21 Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) tested positive. isolation until 1/2/22.

12/19/21 Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) tested positive. isolation until 1/2/22

12/19/21 Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO) tested positive. isolation until 1/2/21

12/18/21 Rep. Matt Cartwright (D-PA) tested positive. isolation until 1/1/22

12/21/21 Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) tested positive. isolation until 1/4/22

12/21/21 Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) tested positive. isolation until 1/4/22

12/21/21 Rep. Antonio Delgado (D-NY) tested positive. isolation until 1/4/22

12/22/21 Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC) tested positive. isolation until 1/5/22

12/22/21 Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) tested positive. isolation until 1/5/22

12/22/21 Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) tested positive. isolation until 1/5/22

12/26/21 Rep. Kaialiʻi Kahele (D-HI) tested positive. isolation until 1/5/22

12/27/21 Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL) tested positive. isolation until 1/6/22

1/4/22 Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) tested positive. isolation until 1/9/22

1/4/22 Rep. Jim Hagedorn (R-MN) tested positive. isolation until 1/18/22

1/5/22 Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-CA) tested positive. isolation until 1/10/22

1/7/22 Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX) tested positive. isolation until 1/12/22

1/8/22 Rep. Young Kim (R-CA) tested positive. isolation until 1/13/22

1/8/22 Rep. Sean Casten (D-IL) tested positive. isolation until 1/13/22

1/8/22 Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN) tested positive.. isolation until 1/13/22

1/9/22 Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) tested positive .isolation until 1/14/22

1/10/22 Rep. John Katko (R-NY) tested positive. isolation until 1/15/22

1/10/22 Rep. Ben Cline (R-VA) tested positive. isolation until 1/15/22

1/10/22 Rep. Rick Crawford (R-AR) tested positive. isolation until 1/15/22

1/10/22 Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) tested positive for a second time, but first as a member of Congress. isolation until 1/15/22

1//10/22 Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-MD) tested positive. isolation until 1/15/22

1/11/22 Rep. Daniel Webster (R-Fl) tested positive. isolation until 1/16/22

1/11/22 Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY) tested positive. isolation until 1/16/22

1/13/22 Sen. Brian  Schatz (D-HI) tested positive. isolation until 1/18/22