RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events Coronavirus outbreak in China, and global pandemic

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My sourced facts, Iggy, your unpersuasive insults.

You try to spin WB but it’s just not true. Sure you might use a kernel of truth but than ignore anything that disproves or doesn’t fit your propaganda.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s inflated claim that there are 100,000 pediatric COVID-19 hospitalizations is incorrect, reports Politifact.
Sotomayor made the claim during oral arguments in a case involving the Biden administration's vaccine mandate for private businesses with at least 100 employees.
"We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition, and many on ventilators" due to the coronavirus, Sotomayor incorrectly stated on Friday at the court session.

According to federal data, there are only 3,342 children currently hospitalized for confirmed COVID-19, a number that goes up to 4,652 if suspected coronavirus cases are included, with both figures being less than 5% of the total the justice stated.
Even if all pediatric hospitalization cases since August 1, 2020 are added up, the number is 82,842, according to the CDC.
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky on Sunday said Sotomayor’s numbers are way off.

"Yeah," Walensky said during an interview with Fox News when asked whether there were fewer than 3,500 cases.
"But, you know, here’s what I can tell you about our pediatric hospitalizations now," continued the head of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"First of all, the vast majority of children who are in the hospital are unvaccinated, and for those children who are not eligible for vaccination, we do know they are most likely to get sick with COVID if their family members aren’t vaccinated," she said, pushing the Biden administration’s mantra that the unvaxxed are fueling the continued pandemic.

Politifact pointed out that the 100,000 figure Sotomayor cited may be referring to an American Academy of Pediatrics report that as of the end of December, "child COVID-19 cases are above 100,000."
However, that same report also stressed that "it appears that severe illness due to COVID-19 is uncommon among children."

Politifact acknowledged that the number of child coronavirus-positive admissions has gone up significantly since the omicron variant became dominant last month, but nowhere near the rate Sotomayor mentioned.

Walensky pointed out to Fox News that the numbers of COVID hospitalizations generally include those who go to hospitals for other reasons and then test positive while they are there, stating that "in some hospitals that we've talked to, up to 40% of the patients who are coming in with COVID are coming in not because they're sick with COVID but because they're coming in with something else and have had COVID or the omicron variant detected."

Walensky stressed that even though Sotomayor’s figures were incorrect, getting vaccinated is a still a good way to reduce the chances of hospitalization, stating that "the vast majority of children who are in the hospital are unvaccinated, and for those children who are not eligible for vaccination we do know they are most likely to get sick with COVID if their family members aren't vaccinated."

Over the last six weeks, the hypertransmissive Omicron variant of the coronavirus has generated its fair share of bad news in the United States.
Daily COVID-19 case counts more than three times higher than ever before.

A record number of new hospitalizations, pushing thousands of hospital systems nationwide to the breaking point.
And now, tragically, another 2,000 COVID-19 deaths, on average, every single day.

At the current rate, America will likely top its summer Delta peak of about 2,100 deaths per day later this week — and could break its all-time record (about 3,300 deaths per day) by the end of the month.
In other words, while Omicron itself might be less likely to cause severe illness, especially in vaccinated or previously infected people, America’s Omicron surge — the sum total of all the havoc the variant has wreaked — hasn’t been as “mild” as many had hoped.

But every coronavirus wave crests in due course, then starts to descend — and over the past few days, new signs have emerged from across the country that indicate the tide is starting to turn once again.

So here’s some good news about Omicron — namely, that the worst of its spread may be in the rearview mirror.
Case numbers are plummeting in New York City — and they’re falling even faster than they rose.
New York City was the first place in the U.S. to get slammed by Omicron: Between Christmas and New Year’s Day, reported cases there more than doubled, on average, from about 15,000 a day to about 33,000 a day.

Previously, America’s biggest city had never averaged more than about 6,200 cases in a single day. By Jan. 10, it was averaging more than 40,000.
But since then, transmission has fallen off a cliff.
According to data from the NYC Health Department — which is adjusted to reflect the date of diagnosis — the peak likely came on Jan. 3, when the average number of confirmed and probable cases hit 42,670.

As of Jan. 15, however, that number had plunged to 16,330 — a 62 percent drop in less than two weeks.
In the dozen days before the peak, the number of NYC cases was increasing at a rate of about 47 percent — meaning it's now going down faster than it went up.
This is encouraging because it suggests that once numbers in other parts of the country peak, those places too might see Omicron flame out even more swiftly and suddenly than it flared up in the first place.

In fact, if New York’s experience is any indication, the bulk of the current wave of transmission could effectively subside by the middle of February, about two months after it started.
By comparison, previous U.S. surges have taken about four months from start to finish.
Other cities are following NYC’s lead.
More good news: New York isn’t alone.

Right after Omicron exploded in New York, it started taking off in other dense, well-connected cities across the U.S.
Between Dec. 6 and Dec. 20, for instance, cases rose by 442 percent in Houston, 285 percent in Washington, D.C., 219 percent in Miami and 170 percent in Cleveland.
Over the last two weeks, however, cases have finally started to drop in most of these hard-hit cities: by 49 percent in Cleveland, by 20 percent in Washington, D.C., by 7 percent in Miami. In Houston, cases are down week over week.

Similar U-turns are also underway in Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia and Baltimore.

Meanwhile, even cities where cases have yet to officially turn are showing signs that they’re about to: a lower percentage of COVID tests coming back positive (Los Angeles); declining Omicron levels in sewage samples (the Bay Area).

Less vaccinated, more rural areas will take a little longer — but some may be starting to show improvement.
Because of how Omicron tends to spread — rapidly, through the densest places first — U.S. cities have been ahead of the curve; outlying areas have lagged. That largely explains why the states where the virus is now spreading the fastest are overwhelmingly rural: South Carolina, Oklahoma, Montana, North Dakota, Wisconsin, South Dakota, Alaska, Nebraska, Idaho, Wyoming. Such places tend to have below-average vaccination rates as well.

As Omicron spreads to less populated areas, the worry is that lower immunity levels and weaker health care infrastructure will lead to disproportionately high levels of hospitalization and death.

That dynamic certainly bears watching as the worst of today’s rising rural cases work their way through the system in the coming weeks.

Even so, at least three largely rural states with lower vaccination rates — Missouri, Georgia and Kentucky — may already be approaching plateaus of their own, with positivity rates that appear to be leveling off or even declining.

In fact, as researcher Conor Kelly has pointed out, positivity rates are now heading “in the right direction” across every region of the country.

A broader turnaround could be next, with other rural states not far behind.

The best news of all? Hospitalizations seem to be on the same downward trajectory.
As everyone knows by now, the most important metric isn’t how many people test positive for Omicron; the most important metric is how many of those people get sick enough to go to the hospital, or spread it to others who end up there.

By any measure, forcing U.S. hospitals to cope with 157,000 COVID-19 patients at once is an enormous burden — regardless of whether some percentage of those patients tested positive “incidentally” upon admission for another ailment. Patients with COVID must be kept separate from others, and health care workers who test positive must isolate no matter how mild their symptoms, leading to widespread staff shortages.

As the Atlantic’s Ed Yong recently explained, “In the short time since Omicron was discovered, the popular narrative about the variant has calcified around the idea that it is milder. That is true for individuals, and in comparison with Delta, but the variant certainly isn’t mild for unvaccinated people, for those who could develop long COVID from a supposedly 'mild' infection, and especially not for the health-care system as a whole.”

As hospitalization numbers typically lag cases by about two weeks, it will be some time before the extreme pressure on medical professionals lets up. And again, that process will take longer in most rural areas, which are closer to the beginning of their own surges than to the end — and where rates of hospitalization and death may be higher than in cities with higher vaccination rates.

U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy outlined on Sunday how “the next few weeks will be tough” as Omicron continues to rise in different regions of the U.S.

“The good news is that there are parts of the country — New York in particular, and other parts of the Northeast, where we are starting to see a plateau and, in some cases, an early decline in cases,” Murthy told CNN. “The challenge is that … the entire country is not moving at the same pace. The Omicron wave started later in other parts of the country.”

But the light at the end of the proverbial tunnel is starting to flicker, even now.

In New York City, for instance, the average number of daily COVID hospital admissions fell from about 1,000 on Jan. 5 to about 500 ten days later — a rate roughly on par with the decline in cases. Overall hospitalizations have been falling for several days; they’re now at their lowest level since Christmas Eve. ICU and intubation numbers are down as well.

More broadly, regional hospitalizations are starting to level off across the Northeast and Midwest. And while it’s a tentative sign of progress that may reflect delays in reporting due to holidays, the number of COVID patients nationwide has now declined for three days in a row — for the first time in more than a month.

It may be too soon, in short, to say that Omicron has peaked in the U.S. But the peak is coming — and it appears to be coming sooner rather than later.

An analysis of studies that focused just on stay-at-home orders found they were 2.9 percent effective at reducing mortality. Studies that gathered data on a broad number of government-imposed pandemic measures actually indicated that stay-at-home orders marginally increased COVID deaths.

The authors concluded that governments should abandon lockdown measures because of their negligible impact on mortality and the real societal damage they cause.

"While this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted," the researchers wrote. "In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument."

The study was published by Johns Hopkins's Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise. One of the study's authors, economics professor Steve Hanke, is a codirector of the institute.

ockdowns in the U.S. and Europe had little or no impact in reducing deaths from COVID-19, according to a new analysis by researchers at Johns Hopkins University.
The lockdowns during the early phase of the pandemic in 2020 reduced COVID-19 mortality by about 0.2%, said the broad review of multiple scientific studies.

“We find no evidence that lockdowns, school closures, border closures, and limiting gatherings have had a noticeable effect on COVID-19 mortality,” the researchers wrote.

Excess mortality is defined as the difference in the total number of deaths in a crisis compared to those expected under normal conditions. COVID-19 excess mortality accounts for both the total number of deaths directly attributed to the virus as well as the indirect impact, such as disruption to essential health services or travel disruptions.

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I would further like to see, based on the unconstitutional nature of the mandate in the first place, that all employees fired from their jobs should be given their jobs back and be compensated for lost wages for the time they were fired.

Whether policemen, firemen, teachers, military contractors, soldiers, or those employed in private businesses. This would make large employers think twice about playing this kind of pointless hardball ever again with employees. Essentially putting a gun to their heads, saying take the vaccine or lose your job and your career. For a vaccine that was proven months ago to not even work. It may have worked on the original "alpha" strain, but it clearly doesn't work on the Delta or Omicron strains. So it was clearly a purely political move --or political PURGE, of conservatives and moderates who wouldn't just obey.
That's what it was really about.

Displacing them, to consolidate Democrat power over those federal and contract branches, replacing them with loyal Democrat-Bolsheviks. And going along with that unconstitutional Biden/Democrat scheme and power play should carry a heavy legal and financial cost, in compensation and legal damages. This is again part of Democrat authoritarian power receding back from its Bolshevik high-water-mark. And thank God for that.

Officials from each of the military services have required all troops to receive a Covid-19 vaccination or risk dismissal from the armed forces, but the courts intervened when religious objectors to the vaccine argued their requests for waivers have not been dealt with fairly. The program has been in limbo since, although new service members must still be vaccinated.

According to the latest data released by the Defense Department, about 3,300 Marines, 1,800 soldiers, 1,800 sailors and 900 airmen have been booted from the ranks for refusing to get vaccinated.
The group of 20 GOP senators is demanding a full chamber vote on their proposal to dump the vaccine mandate, reinstate those dismissed troops and award them back pay. The lawmakers did not have any estimates on how many individuals would return to their jobs and how much the provisions would cost.

“Our recruiting goals are way short,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. “”We need more people in the military, not less. And this mandate is going to result in thousands, tens of thousands of able bodied Americans who are well-trained leaving the military because they chose not to get vaccinated.”
The lawmakers involved in the anti-vaccine effort argued that because most troops are young and healthy, the vaccine provides little to no value to their long-term fitness.

July 8, 2022.

According to federal government estimates released last month, nearly 1 in 5 adults who have had COVID-19 in the past were still experiencing at least one symptom of long COVID – fatigue, shortness of breath, brain fog, chest pain and headaches among others – as of mid-June. The number jumps to more than 1 in 3 when considering adults who have experienced the condition at any point in the pandemic after COVID-19 infection.


“These patients are sitting at home unable to work, unable to take care of their families,” says Drapeau, who had long COVID after contracting COVID-19 in December 2020. “Debilitated young people having to quit school – and they're faced with very limited options.”

That number could amass into a new wave of chronic illness that will continue to grow with guaranteed implications for the economy as well as health care systems. A Government Accountability Office report published in March found that long COVID has “potentially affected up to 23 million Americans, pushing an estimated 1 million people out of work,” and that number is likely higher now.
“Some of those patients are recovering so slow that you’re simply going to have a massive growth, gradual expansion of the total pool of these patients because they're not recovering fast enough compared to the new people added to the pool,” Kogan says. “So we're going to see a continuous, increased demand on our health care systems.”

In fact, one study published in May found that roughly half of people hospitalized with the coronavirus in Wuhan, China, at the start of the pandemic reported symptoms of long COVID two years later. Authors said it was the longest follow-up study to date.

While the study did find that the physical and mental health of the patients improved over time, it still suggested that coronavirus patients have poorer health and quality of life than the general population two years after hospitalization.....

August 10, 2023.

The percentage of adults in the United States experiencing long COVID has decreased, new federal data shows.

In early June 2022, 7.5% of Americans aged 18 and were experiencing long COVID, a condition that occurs when patients still have symptoms at least four weeks after they have cleared the infection. In some cases, symptoms can be experienced for months or years.

By mid-June 2023, that figure had fallen to 6%, according to a new report published Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

However, more than one in four -- 26.4% -- long COVID patients reported significant limitations in their ability to perform day-to-day activities in June 2023. The authors said this percentage has not changed much since the year before.

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My testicles are swollen and my girlfriend left me.

I should have listened to Nicki Minaj.

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Sen Ron Johnson, Covid-19 "second opinion" hearing, of doctors

https://rumble.com/search/video?q=senator%20ron%20johnson%20second%20opinion

These are doctors, nurses, and researchers who have struggled to provide effective life-saving care for patients, even as they were ordered by their hospitals and the state to provide medicines and therapies that don't work. At the threat of losing their jobs, their medical practice licenses, and their careers if they didn't comply. But many courageously provided that quality care and lost their jobs for it, to defy treatment that was aimed at maximizing profit and following a false narrative, rather than saving lives.

These are highly qualified doctors, and highly published and referenced doctors,highly regarded doctors and surgeons, heads of hospital boards, FOR DECADES, who are not easily dismissed as "conspiracy theorists" or quacks. There's a lot of good information here. The hearings are 5 hours total.

Once again OAN was the only network to broadcast these hearings in their entirety (and re-broadcast them two more times over the last week). The other networks barely, if at all, even mentioned them. Not even on Fox News or Newsmax. Which only diminishes my trust in the latter 2 networks.

I know you have faith in people like Malone but personally somebody that posts a fake video like he did where the parents had to sue to get it taken down isn’t a great source of information. As for Covid, we lucked out on it only being as bad as what it was. Even with that Covid lowered our national life expectancy.

Yes i have talked about Malone’s deception before and because you didn’t like that bit of truth you called me liar. We have different principles and attitudes about propaganda vs science. I don’t expect you to be rational anymore.