No Vax No Heart

Posted on by Thor

A hospital patient with has not had the COVID vaccine and has no intention of getting vaccinated, was denied a heart transplant. The Boston hospital defended itself explaining that most hospitals around the country have similar vaccine requirements to improve the patients chance of survival.

Brigham and Women’s Hospital declined to comment on the patient’s case, citing patient privacy laws. But it pointed to a response that it posted on its website in which it said the Covid-19 vaccine is one of several immunizations required by most U.S. transplant programs, including a flu shot and hepatitis B vaccines.

The family of the patient is turning this into a political issue to raise money on GoFundMe. They have raised $77,000 as of January 27, 2022.

The hospital said research has shown that transplant recipients are at higher risk than non-transplant patients of dying from Covid-19, and that its policies are in line with the recommendations of the American Society of Transplantation and other health organizations. There is a scarcity of donor organs, so transplant centers only place patients on the waiting list whom they deem the most likely to survive with a new organ. “Given the shortage of available organs, we do everything we can to ensure that a patient who receives a transplanted organ has the greatest chance of survival,” the hospital said.

Bail

Posted on by Thor

10,000 Americans died from COVID-19 last week. Over 860,000 Americans have died so far which is three times the number of casualties from World War II. 10000 deaths are like experiencing 3 to 4 devastating plane crashes every day, for the month, with about 90 people dying in each crash.

Despite this 25% of Americans refuse to get a life saving vaccine. Some journalist on the Bill Mayer show pronounced that she is done with COVID. She used to spray the Pringles cans, (who actually eats Pringles?) She stripped her clothes off fearing COVID might be on her clothes. She thought that when she got the vaccine life would return to normal. Now, she is over it.

She is of the new group of Americans that fit into the “Vaxed and Done” camp.” She is inconvenienced and only thinks of herself.  She really isn’t thinking about the true sacrifices of doctors and nurses all across America who are burnt out from having to watch so many people needlessly die.

Media like to point out that Omicron is less deadly than Delta. In the case of the original strain of COVID, if there are 10,ooo infections, and each patient then infects 1.1 other people, and of those 0.8% might result in death, in one months time you might expect 129 deaths. If the virus is more deadly like Delta then the number of deaths might rise to 193 in a month. If the virus is 50% more contagious like Omicron then in that case there would be 978 deaths.

The virus is controllable with simple masking, distancing and vaccines. However many Americans consider this an inconvenience. America has proven incapable of rationally responding as a society. 1 out of every 375 Americans has died from COVID and they continue to do so. a mask is 25 cents and the vaccine is free, yet that is a bride too far. Another 50,000 to 300,000 Americans will die from COVID by March 2023.

Doctors and nurses are trying to bail out the life boat while others not only refuse to bail but are actively trying to sink the boat.

William Cranshaw wrote in 1625, “Abhor more that poison wicked opinions that the pestilence us not infectious, that each can do whatever he wants, that avoiding persons and places, and diligent use of means for preservation, are needless and of no use…”

Supreme Court Wants Workers Dead

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On January 13, 2022 the Supreme Court blocked president Joe Biden  from enforcing a sweeping vaccine-or-test requirements for large private companies. The mandate required that workers at businesses with 100 or more employees get vaccinated or submit a negative Covid test weekly to enter the workplace. It also required unvaccinated workers to wear masks indoors at work

The rulings came three days after the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) emergency measure for businesses started to take effect.

Liberal Justices Elena Kagan, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor dissented, writing that the majority has usurped the power of Congress, the president and OSHA without legal basis. “In the face of a still-raging pandemic, this Court tells the agency charged with protecting worker safety that it may not do so in all the workplaces needed,” they said in their dissent. “As disease and death continue to mount, this Court tells the agency that it cannot respond in the most effective way possible. Without legal basis, the Court usurps a decision that rightfully belongs to others. It undercuts the capacity of the responsible federal officials, acting well within the scope of their authority, to protect American workers from grave danger,” they wrote.

President Joe Biden, in a statement, said the Supreme Court chose to block requirements that are life-saving for workers. Biden called on states and businesses to step up and voluntarily institute vaccination requirements to protect workers, customers and the broader community.

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer has decided it is time to get the hell out of dodge. He is retiring.

After Pulse: Jennifer Foster

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Jennifer Foster is the owner of a company called Foster Productions which creates digital content. She is involved with the One Orlando Alliance. She had been active in the LGBTQ community since he moved to Orlando in 2001.

She started an Human Rights Campaign (HRC) in Orlando in 2004. She was on the local board for 10 years and on the national board for 8 years. It was a full time volunteer job. Once a month community members would meet at Pulse. Any time they needed to have an event they would ask Barbara Poma if they could have it at Pulse. There was room for socializing in one room, conversation in another and someone on a microphone in another. They always said yes. HRC Connect was a monthly LGBT community event. It got bigger an bigger.

Jennifer’s phone woke her up at about 4:30AM On June 12, 2016. She heard it vibrating. She started reading her text messages. A friend was asking if is she was OK. He had also left a voice mail in which he was sobbing. He needed to be sure she and her partner were not at Pulse. At 5AM she was still scrolling through messages and realized they needed to turn on the TV. Something was wrong. They sat in the living room trying to make sense of everything. It felt like a personal attack on her life, on her marriage, on the LGBT community, everything she had been fighting for. It was obvious that this was targeted at Pulse. It was Latin Night. What friends might have been there? She started texting and calling to check to be sure people were OK. Nothing made sense.

She called her tight knit group of friends that morning. Blood was needed so they went to One Blood on Michigan. They stood in line with thousands of other people. Cases of water were unloaded, they were given bananas and cookies, and sun block. She took pictures with her phone of the humanity, the beautiful outpouring our community, the response. There were brown people, and white people and gay people and straight people and old people and young people it was our community. This happened to all of us. The cities and the community’s response bears this out. They could not donate blood. They were sent home.

Back at home they drank wine and cried and ranted. They couldn’t stop watching the news. She realized that the community wasn’t ready for something like this. She called a community leader and they met the next day putting together lists of organizations and figuring out who ran what, and who knew, who and how everybody was working together, and what they were doing. That list didn’t exist. Everyone was out there doing their own thing. They started calling people and asking what they needed. Vigils were being planned and every organization called the mayor but all these organizations began overtaxing City Hall with all their separate  requests and demands. They were trying to create a funnel for information so the city could make an announcement once. Everyone’s fears and misconceptions were addressed. They got all the organizations in a room so they could ask questions. That was the first meeting of what is now the One Orlando Alliance on the Thursday after, the 16th of June. People met to communicate, collaborate. and help solve problems, to share information. to avoid duplication of things that were happening. It was a way to manage the chaos.

There were 18 organizations to start. 33 people showed up. People were there from the City, the County, the FBI, the Department of Justice, Seminole County Emergency Response Team, a team from Edelman. The goal was to create an equal hierarchy. At that meeting they were able to connect leaders with each other. By the end they all decided they have to work together. There was pre-Pulse but this was a post Pulse world. They set up a closed Facebook group to stay connected. All this was to happen behind the scenes. They were a coalition of community leaders. The strength and resolve created that day continues.

 

Crealde Urban Sketching Class

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Starting January 30, 2022 I will be teaching 6 Urban Sketching classes on Sundays starting at 9:30AM at Crealde School of Art. These sketches were a demo to sow how to do panoramas and think about foreground, mid ground and background in each sketch. I find that by having students work smaller they tend to finish more sketches and some might finish a spread like this in the course of a class.

I walk around each time I finish a stage of each sketch to show my progress and how long I take for each step. When I meet each student one on one I then often share quick sketch suggestions for the scene they are working on at the time.

We work outside which is a safer working environment. I wear masks even outside at this point in the pandemic. I have upgraded to wearing a KN-95 held in place with the cloth mask Pam made for me right at the start of the pandemic. I let students remove their mask if they are socially distanced outside but insist they put it back on if they get within 6 feet of another student or myself.

For a second time Pam and I hopefully have dodged a COVID bullet. A co-worker tested positive but an at home test has thankfully shown a negative result so far. A second at home test will likely be taken today. These test are expensive so we need to figure out how President Biden’s Plan to have insurance companies cover the cost works out in practice. I suspect lots of robo calls and red tape.

Anyway it is nice to get out of the studio on Sundays and enjoy the sun and breeze while sketching with like minded students. It is a breath of fresh air even if I am wearing a mask.

Hong Kong to kill 2000 Hamsters after COVID outbreak

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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

Posted on by Thor

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?

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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

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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

Posted on by Thor

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.