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Category: Health

Florida government may be censoring Covid-19 data in order to promote re-opening of state

Florida government may be censoring Covid-19 data in order to promote re-opening of state

USA Today reports: The scientist who created Florida’s COVID-19 data portal wasn’t just removed from her position on May 5, she was fired on Monday by the Department of Health, she said, for refusing to manipulate data. Rebekah Jones said in an email to the USA TODAY Network that she single-handedly created two applications in two languages, four dashboards, six unique maps with layers of data functionality for 32 variables covering a half a million lines of data. Her objective…

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Donald Trump is lying about taking hydroxychloroquine, a lot of people say

Donald Trump is lying about taking hydroxychloroquine, a lot of people say

Vogue reports: President Donald Trump announced at a White House event on Monday that he has been taking the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine for “a couple of weeks” as a preventive measure against COVID-19. A lot of people don’t believe him. Immediately after the startling announcement, dozens of critics took to Twitter to doubt the president’s claim. “Raise your hand if you think that Trump is lying about taking #Hydroxychloroquine,” tweeted the widely followed health advocate Peter Morley. “I’m gonna go…

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Preventing a Great Depression will cost $10 trillion. Here’s how it can happen

Preventing a Great Depression will cost $10 trillion. Here’s how it can happen

Derek Thompson writes: Last week, House Democrats unveiled their latest pandemic-relief package. The bill combines aid for families, a bailout for struggling cities and states, and additional funds for testing, tracing, and hospitals. The price tag is about $3 trillion—and it comes just weeks after the president signed an economic-relief package worth about $2 trillion. Republicans have assailed the bill as a profligate wish list. Even Americans who are suffering from the health and economic ravages of the pandemic may…

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Over 100 million in China’s northeast face renewed lockdown

Over 100 million in China’s northeast face renewed lockdown

Bloomberg reports: Some 108 million people in China’s northeast region are being plunged back under lockdown conditions as a new and growing cluster of infections causes a backslide in the nation’s return to normal. In an abrupt reversal of the re-opening taking place across the nation, cities in Jilin province have cut off trains and buses, shut schools and quarantined tens of thousands of people. The strict measures have dismayed many residents who had thought the worst of the nation’s…

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Trump taking potentially deadly hydroxychloroquine ‘because I think it’s good’

Trump taking potentially deadly hydroxychloroquine ‘because I think it’s good’

  The Associated Press reports: President Donald Trump said Monday that he is taking a malaria drug to protect against the new coronavirus, despite warnings from his own government that it should only be administered for COVID-19 in a hospital or research setting due to potentially fatal side effects. Trump told reporters he has been taking the drug, hydroxychloroquine, and a zinc supplement daily “for about a week and a half now.” Trump spent weeks pushing the drug as a…

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The coronavirus pandemic shows us it’s time to rethink everything. Let’s start with education

The coronavirus pandemic shows us it’s time to rethink everything. Let’s start with education

George Monbiot writes: Imagine mentioning William Shakespeare to a university graduate and discovering they had never heard of him. You would be incredulous. But it’s common and acceptable not to know what an arthropod is, or a vertebrate, or to be unable to explain the difference between an insect and spider. No one is embarrassed when a “well-educated” person cannot provide even a rough explanation of the greenhouse effect, the carbon cycle or the water cycle, or of how soils…

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Pentagon contractors’ report on ‘Wuhan lab’ origins of coronavirus is bogus

Pentagon contractors’ report on ‘Wuhan lab’ origins of coronavirus is bogus

The Daily Beast reports: A shocking report suggesting that the coronavirus was “release[d from] the Wuhan Institute of Virology” in China is now circulating in U.S. military and intelligence circles and on Capitol Hill. But there’s a critical flaw in the report, a Daily Beast analysis reveals: Some of its most seemingly persuasive evidence is false—provably false. Multiple congressional committees have obtained and are scrutinizing the 30-page report, produced by the Multi-Agency Collaboration Environment (MACE), a part of Sierra Nevada,…

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Coronavirus, ‘Plandemic’ and the seven traits of conspiratorial thinking

Coronavirus, ‘Plandemic’ and the seven traits of conspiratorial thinking

No matter the details of the plot, conspiracy theories follow common patterns of thought. Ranta Images/iStock/Getty Images Plus By John Cook, George Mason University; Sander van der Linden, University of Cambridge; Stephan Lewandowsky, University of Bristol, and Ullrich Ecker, University of Western Australia The conspiracy theory video “Plandemic” recently went viral. Despite being taken down by YouTube and Facebook, it continues to get uploaded and viewed millions of times. The video is an interview with conspiracy theorist Judy Mikovits, a…

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A pandemic plan was in place, but Trump abandoned it — and science

A pandemic plan was in place, but Trump abandoned it — and science

Jason Karlawish writes: President Obama was bothered. It was the summer of 2009 and he was in a meeting at the White House to talk about preparations for an expected autumn outbreak of swine flu. Elbows on the table, he thumbed through the pages of a report on preparations for it. “So,” he asked no one in particular, “if you guys are so smart, how come you’re still making this in eggs?” he asked, referring to the nearly century-old process…

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The choice between staying home indefinitely and returning to business as usual now is a false one

The choice between staying home indefinitely and returning to business as usual now is a false one

Julia Marcus writes: In the earliest years of the HIV epidemic, confusion and fear reigned. AIDS was still known as the “gay plague.” To the extent that gay men received any health advice at all, it was to avoid sex. In 1983, the activists Richard Berkowitz and Michael Callen, with guidance from the virologist Joseph Sonnabend, published a foundational document for their community, called “How to Have Sex in an Epidemic.” Recognizing the need for pleasure in people’s lives, the…

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Health-care workers can they teach us about the safest way to lift a lockdown

Health-care workers can they teach us about the safest way to lift a lockdown

Atul Gawande writes: In places around the world, lockdowns are lifting to various degrees—often prematurely. Experts have identified a few indicators that must be met to begin opening nonessential businesses safely: rates of new cases should be low and falling for at least two weeks; hospitals should be able to treat all coronavirus patients in need; and there should be a capacity to test everyone with symptoms. But then what? What are the rules for reëntry? Is there any place…

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New Zealand edges back to normal

New Zealand edges back to normal

The Washington Post reports: Half of New Zealand’s cabinet gathered this past Monday morning in the round meeting room on the top floor of the Beehive, the tiered 1970s landmark here that houses the government’s executive branch. The other half called in on Zoom. Running the meeting was Jacinda Ardern, the liberal prime minister who has won international renown for her empathetic leadership during the global coronavirus pandemic. Next to her was Winston Peters, the wily politician almost twice her…

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Bats aren’t our enemies

Bats aren’t our enemies

Timothy Treuer, Ricardo Rocha, and Cara Brook write: Bats get a bad rap. From horror films to tabloid pages to Halloween, media and cultural depictions of our planet’s only volant, or flying, mammals have long generated and reinforced unfounded fear. Their evident role as original source of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that produced the COVID-19 epidemic has exacerbated their unfortunate public image and even led to calls and active measures to cull or harass bat populations. Such hostile attitudes make it…

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A $74 billion investment in testing, tracing and isolation could quickly rescue the economy

A $74 billion investment in testing, tracing and isolation could quickly rescue the economy

Alex Tabarrok and Puja Ahluwalia Ohlhaver write: With the unemployment rate at its highest level since the Great Depression — 14.7 percent and climbing — many Americans are clamoring to reopen the economy, even if it means that thousands of daily covid-19 deaths become part of the backdrop to life. It’s time to move on as “warriors,” President Trump has said, because “we can’t keep our country closed down for years.” We, too, favor markets and share the president’s eagerness…

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How sunlight, the immune system, and Covid-19 interact

How sunlight, the immune system, and Covid-19 interact

Markham Heid writes: Last month, during a now-infamous press conference, Donald Trump speculated about the ways in which sunlight and chemical disinfectants could help protect people from the threat of Covid-19. Trump seemed to suggest that injecting disinfectants could have some utility — a comment that drew immediate scrutiny and scorn. Much less attention was paid to the president’s statement that sunlight might safeguard people from the virus. “Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous — whether it’s ultraviolet…

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Covid-19: A seven-week roller coaster of ill health, extreme emotions, and utter exhaustion

Covid-19: A seven-week roller coaster of ill health, extreme emotions, and utter exhaustion

Paul Garner writes: In mid March I developed covid-19. For almost seven weeks I have been through a roller coaster of ill health, extreme emotions, and utter exhaustion. Although not hospitalised, it has been frightening and long. The illness ebbs and flows, but never goes away. Health professionals, employers, partners, and people with the disease need to know that this illness can last for weeks, and the long tail is not some “post-viral fatigue syndrome”—it is the disease. People who…

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