Masks Work

Posted on by Thor

Masks work. COVID is airborne. COVID variant XBB.1.5 (Kraken) now accounts of 75% of cases in the north east. Kraken is the most transmissible variant of CODID to date. It does not care if you have been previously infected or if you have been vaccinated. If you breath air you will become infected unless you wear a quality and well fitted  N95 mask.

Masking during the pandemic means that you care about protecting other and protecting yourself. American society does not pivot fast enough for people to recognize the benefit of masking as case numbers exponentially rise. Wearing a mask protects you from inhaling airborne virus and it also protects others because you may be infected but not know it.

The science of masks is NOT complex, nor is it conflicting. Science shows very clearly that masking is effective in reducing transmission of SARS-CoV-2. This has been shown in laboratory studies, natural experiments, modelling studies and randomized controlled trials. Masking is most worthwhile when COVID rates are high (which they will be in the coming weeks) and when vulnerable people are around.

Evidence for masking is strong, consistent and clear. A high-quality, well-fitting mask which meets a filtration standard (like an N95) works better than a home-made cloth mask with gaps round the sides, but even the latter is a lot better than nothing.

Mass Infection is not the Solution

Posted on by Thor

The politicians solution of mass infection or herd immunity is not the way to end the COVID pandemic. The Trump White House first embraced this far-reaching support for a dangerous and discredited herd immunity via mass infection strategy inside the White House. Unfortunately Joe Biden has also embraced this insanity since it is the easiest thing to do. He proclaimed the pandemic was over on National TV.

The fact is that the infected are getting re-infected with increasing worst outcomes. COVID does not boost the immune system it turns out it is destroying peoples immune systems. Though people might survive the first infection of COVID, they are more likely to become infected by other viruses. This is why people are suddenly catching horrible cases of the flu and RSV.

Non-COVID excess deaths are on the rise. No one knows the cause of the excess mortality in the midst of the pandemic. XBB.1.5 is spreading rapidly and the public has been lulled into abandoning all health protection measures like social distancing and wearing masks. The are done with caring and are easily persuaded to go about life as if the pandemic were over. In a football game this week a player is in critical condition after a cardiac arrest that left him lying of the field. The game went on as normal once his body was dragged off the field. He reamins in critical condition. This is how politicians treat their constituents. Dispose of the bodies and go about as if there was no pandemic. People will believe anything you say if you say it often enough. We learned that from 45.

Congress votes to cut 8 billions dollars that was slated for COVID. Political leaders continue to lie saying the pandemic is over, yet in Japan they just recorded the highest number of deaths in a single day since the start of the pandemic. Ignore the gaslighting of politicians if you hope to remain uninfected.

Mask up with quality well fitting N95 masks folks. the next couple of months are going to be rough. I don’t try and look for subtle reasons to mask, or no mask,I mask in all situations, indoors and outdoors  when around others. When I wear the mask often it becomes easier to forget I am wearing it.

2022 Pandemic

Posted on by Thor

2022 was a crazy roller coaster ride. Nine tenths of the work I did since march 2020 has been pandemic related. The pandemic is not over but there seems to be a news black out related to the subject. Complacency, ignorance and pandemic fatigue has set in as everyone wants life to return to “normal”. People are gathering in tight groups without wearing masks to allow the virus to spread.

I am waiting to see what happens in China with a huge population that was largely protected from previous infection and has a very low vaccination rate. Of course news is not very reliable coming out of that Communist county. They have stopped daily reporting on the number of cases and they are no longer testing for new variants. Whatever happens in China will soon spread to the United States since this country had done the worst job at handling the health crisis. Over 1 million Americans have died from COVID since the start of the pandemic and about 2,500 people continue to die every week.

2023 looks like it might offer much of the same. Strap in because it looks like it will be another rough ride. Could the pandemic wind down in 2023? Perhaps, but no one really knows for sure. Those who claim they know what lies ahead are lying. Wishful thinking helps misinformation flourish.

Times Square Selfie

Posted on by Thor

Rain and the Kraken (XBB.1.5)  COVID variant did not stop thousands of people from gathering in Times Square for the New Year’s Eve ball drop. The city of New York does not have COVID requirements for outdoor events. There were no restrictions and no public health safety precautions taken.

People are wishing that the pandemic were over and a wishing wall was set up in Times Square. People could write their wish for the year on a post it note and stick it on the wall. About 80,000 notes were collected and those notes rained down on the crowd at midnight. One fellow wished his girlfriend might be healthy in the new year. She was battling COVID-19 and pneumonia. More than 1 ton of confetti is typically dropped in Times Square to bring in the new year.

Do superspreader events still exist? Yes they do. The United States defunded and scaled back its testing and contact tracing programs in early 2022, and in doing so, the public was encouraged to ignore just how widespread COVID is. The simple fact is, that the media no longer reports about superspreading events. After over a million deaths, Americans want to blissfully ignore the ongoing carnage of over 2000 deaths a week. Right now China may be experiencing over 9000 deaths a day, but the government needs to spin that in a positive light.

In a matter of a week, right before the New Year’s celebrations,  the XBB.1.5 variant has become the dominant variant in New York. It now accounts for over 50% of reported COVID cases. With at home testing there are many more unreported cases. The number of people hospitalized for COVID has risen to over 45,000 which is the highest it has been since February of 2022. The pandemic is NOT over.

COVID is still a leading cause of death in the U.S., indicating that substantial transmission is still occurring. The simplest way to avoid infection is to avoid superspreader events.

 

 

 

Kraken XBB.1.5

Posted on by Thor

Happy New Year.

XBB.1.5 nicknamed Kraken, is the cause of an increase in Covid cases and hospitalizations in New York. This new variant is a recombinant or combined version of two Omicron variants and has an increased level of transmissibility and is highly immune evasive.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) didn’t notice this variant until it  accounted for 40% of new infections in the United States. They were blindsided by the sudden surge. Cases have been doubling exponentially. From literally nowhere, XBB.1.5, aka the Kraken variant, has leapt to 40% of sequences on the US CDC’s weekly-updated variant tracker page. Last week, it wasn’t even listed as a variant.

Why are these figures so stunningly bad? For the simple reason that if you take a hyper-transmissable variant like XBB.1.5 and add a Delta variant like lethality to it, the country, or indeed the entire planet, could be facing an unprecedented and potentially irreversible disaster. The lethality of XBB.1.5 is unknown. It has a great affinity to ACE2, so likely it will be able to infect the lungs and the cardiovascular system with worse outcomes than previous Omicron variants.

XBB.1.5 has a “greatly enhanced” ability to bind to cells. It is a sub variant of Omicron but far more transmissible. “We’re projecting that it’s going to be the dominant variant in the Northeast region of the country and that it’s going to increase in all regions of the country,” said Dr. Barbara Mahon, director of the CDC’s proposed Coronavirus and Other Respiratory Viruses Division, in an interview with CBS News. More than 70% of infections in the regions spanning New Jersey through New England are now from XBB.1.5, the agency projected. Kraken is quickly spreading in Florida, Texas and Washington State.

Hospitalizations continue to tick upwards all across America. The Kraken is coming at a time when most of the public has abandoned masking and every other simple and basic mitigation measure. The Kraken is here to open the New Year. It is is resistant to many of the monoclonal antibody drugs that doctors had relied on earlier in the pandemic.  Omicron has caused more death than any other variant since the start of the pandemic simply because of the huge number of people infected.

The latest bivalent boosters appear to offer better “neutralizing activity” for Omicron variants, including XBB. So if you haven’t had your booster, it is advisable for the new year. The CDC has quietly begun recommending masking indoors but we all know that recommendation will go largely ignored and the lemmings will crowd together and infect one another. At home tests may prove less effective in detecting the new variant. One test, DxTerity’s saliva test for the virus, has proven itself useless.

Crealde casual

Posted on by Thor

This is another casual sketch to demonstrate that the figure does not need to fill the page when doing a sketch on location. I will usually one of these for each student to show how I might approach the scene they are sketching. I seldom push these to a finish. The main thing I stress is how to block in a scene quickly without getting caught up in minor details to start.

I am also pointing out how to set the stage. You can see a faint hint of the space under the tent and that mirrors the shape of the top of the table. The student is maskless So I make sure to sketch from a distance outdoors.

China Wave

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China’s Zero COVID policy has crumbled after protests in the streets over what the American media called a draconian policy. The same people who considered the zero COVID policy as heavy handed are now gleefully pointing out that millions will become infected once that policy was reversed. China is going to far as to insist that people go to work even if they know they are infected.

I for one was happy to see China trying to do something about the pandemic. However Omicron is so infectious that a zero COVID policy was impossible to enforce. Up until the Zero COVID policy reversal, China saw few infections since the initial outbreak in Wuhan. The Chinese New Year was a massively effective way that the virus spread in the first weeks of the pandemic. Chinese workers would travel far to be with family for the new year celebrations.The same mass exodus is about to happen now that the virus is spreading rapidly in the vaccinated and population. The Chinese New Year celebrations are on January 22, 2022, it will be a super spreader event.

Spiraling infections in China have led to shortages of cold medicine, long lines at fever clinics, and at-capacity emergency rooms turning away patients. China has stopped genomic sequencing of the virus strains in the country.The danger is a new variant of the virus developing.

America has decided that it needs to insist that any person flying from China must test negative for COVID. Italy has also decided to test all passengers coming in from China. On a recent flight into Italy half of the passengers tested positive for COVID-19. The virus does not respect borders or walls. Had flight been stopped in the first week of the pandemic then the virus might have been contained, but that opportunity has long passed. Around 9,000 people in China are probably dying each day from COVID-19, UK-based health data firm Airfinity said on December 29, 2022.

If there is a new variant coming in from China it will have free reign to spread in America in a few weeks. No border wall will stop it.

COVID Abducts Santa

Posted on by Thor

Hospitals are on high alert after the Christmas anticipating a surge of COVID infections associated with holiday gatherings. Flu cases seem to have peaked in the United States, but COVID cases are on the rise. The Omicron variant is still responsible for the new surge in cases.

The advise given is that everyone should test for COVID prior to any gatherings. The White House has warned that the pandemic is far from over, and people should take precautions. The White house response coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha stressed that the stakes are even higher since we now face a trio of threats, COVID, Flu and RSV.   Americans however prefer politics over personal protection or caring about others.

A new study had found that children are the primary spreaders of the virus. While children were being protected at home skeptics claimed that children could not get COVID and they were too small to spread the disease. SO children were sent back to cramped classrooms to infect one another and then their parents. Both asymptomatic and symptomatic children carry high levels of the virus and they can spread it. Children are infectious and no one is trying to protect them. These same children are then taken to sit in a strangers lap, namely Santa so that he might breath in their face and they in his.

Children act as reservoirs for the virus and new variants. The viral load in children is the same as the viral load in adults. There is no difference. Exactly how many children are being infected is unknown since wide spread testing has been dismantled. Masking is effective for children and adults in stopping the spread of the virus.

COVID 19 related pediatric emergency room visits have risen every year of the pandemic. One fifth of all pediatric deaths occurred during the Omicon surge of the virus.

“It’s no longer fair even to insinuate that Covid doesn’t affect children, that Covid deaths are only in unhealthy children or kids with risk factors. That’s just not true, by the data.” said Jason Kane, a pediatrician and associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Chicago Comer children’s hospital. Allowing your children to become infected is not the way to protect them from this deadly virus.

 

 

Maskless

Posted on by Thor

During the pandemic, I hold most of my Crealde Urban Sketching classes outdoors. These sketches were done on the back patio of the studio. I would always demonstrate how to work fast, so these sketches were done in 5 minutes each. I demonstrate how to use every tool in the toolbox, including quick watercolor washes, to block in a sketch. To this day I am always mask when I teach students.

Students on the other hand have a choice at this stage of the pandemic, and many choose to go maskless when outdoors. I miss the masked days. It is impossible to draw a nose too large when you sketch a mask instead. It makes drawing faces so much easier. I however tend not to approach a student unless they mask up while I offer advice. So far this approach has worked since to the best of my knowledge I have not been infected.

I continue to sacrifice holiday gatherings and social events,which used to be what I sketched every day prior to the pandemic. I remain in a holding pattern, waiting to see what this year’s winter surge will look like. On the other hand, after 3 years of the pandemic it is becoming tiring to document the everyday horrors and ineptitude of the public response to this ongoing health crisis. As the proverbial artist canary in the coal mine I realize that people are happy to ignore the virus even though it continues to kill over 300 people a day.

Corpses Carry COVID

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Since the beginning of the pandemic, people have suspected that corpses carry COVID. Now there is a study that verifies this. A corps is infectious up to 17 days after death according to a study published in the International Journal of Legal Medicine. The study shows that a corpse can carry a significant amount of the virus. They found that dead hamsters can transmit the virus to cage mates.

Researchers found that six of the 11 corpses they tested had high amounts of virus in their noses and lungs after they died. Researchers found the most virus in the lungs, as opposed to the upper respiratory tract, and said gases that build up after death can be released through any orifice, including the mouth, and may carry disease.

Embalming can help prevent transmission, as will the Japanese practice of “angel care,” which is plugging the mouth, nose, ears, and anus with cotton pads.

Those who are most at risk are morticians and health care workers. If you are at a funeral, you should be cautious around your loved one’s remains. Of course you are much more likely to become infected from friends and relatives at a funeral rather than a corpse. You should take the usual precautions at a funeral, wear a quality and well fitted kn95 or n95 mask indoors. If there is poor ventilation indoors then step outside for air. Social distance, and wash your hands often.