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JFKA Forum Journals of the Plague Year?


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Beyond wearing a mask, social distancing, no crowds, I did the only other thing I know to do to fight covid.  I voted.  Short maybe 10 minute line a few minutes after 6:00 PM.  Maskless guy behind me was crowding the 6' bit.  Another 3-4 maybe more scattered throughout, at least distanced.  Given a q-tip to touch the screen with.  They were wiping them down after every use as well.

It felt good to express my constitutional right.  Hope it has an effect.

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I heard this song for the first time in a while today at lunch and though I wonder if the people who post on this forum ever had.  Given the state of the United States these days I though sharing it might be appropriate.  Maren Morris wrote it after the Charleston tragedy but didn't publish it or sing it publicly.  After the Route 91 Vegas slaughter she did as a response, donating all proceeds to the victims and their families.  She played that festival the night before those murders happened.  Vince Gill added his vocals to it and sent that version to her which is the radio version but the video of it is just a black screen with the title.  

 Since this is the plague thread it goes out to all the people who have been shot, beaten and cussed out over wearing a mask.

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=dear+hate+video&ru=%2fsearch%3fq%3ddear%2bhate%2bvideo%26form%3dPRUSEN%26mkt%3den-us%26httpsmsn%3d1%26msnews%3d1%26rec_search%3d1%26refig%3d78f1c6940f3b40a99b02fc15bb7a00fc%26sp%3d5%26ghc%3d1%26qs%3dAS%26pq%3ddear%2bhate%26sk%3dPRES1AS4%26sc%3d8-9%26cvid%3d78f1c6940f3b40a99b02fc15bb7a00fc&view=detail&mid=74ECCFC70FBD824CE16074ECCFC70FBD824CE160&&FORM=VDRVSR

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Important article at WaPo today.  It gets at the crux of the confusion in the M$M about Sturgis being a super spreader event-- the lack of appropriate contact tracing.

How the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally may have spread coronavirus across the Upper Midwest

Within weeks of the gathering that drew nearly half a million bikers, the Dakotas, along with Wyoming, Minnesota and Montana, were leading the nation in new coronavirus infections per capita.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/10/17/sturgis-rally-spread/

Edited by W. Niederhut
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4 minutes ago, W. Niederhut said:

Important article at WaPo today.  It gets at the crux of the confusion in the M$M about Sturgis being a super spreader event-- the lack of appropriate contact tracing.

How the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally may have spread coronavirus across the Upper Midwest

Within weeks of the gathering that drew nearly half a million bikers, the Dakotas, along with Wyoming, Minnesota and Montana, were leading the nation in new coronavirus infections per capita.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/10/17/sturgis-rally-spread/

Makes sense.

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11 hours ago, W. Niederhut said:

Important article at WaPo today.  It gets at the crux of the confusion in the M$M about Sturgis being a super spreader event-- the lack of appropriate contact tracing.

How the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally may have spread coronavirus across the Upper Midwest

Within weeks of the gathering that drew nearly half a million bikers, the Dakotas, along with Wyoming, Minnesota and Montana, were leading the nation in new coronavirus infections per capita.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/10/17/sturgis-rally-spread/

Would read the link W. but it want's me to sign in or subscribe.  Don't know why, I read WaPo articles elsewhere with no problem from time to time.

I thought at the time they were tempting fate.

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17 hours ago, Ron Bulman said:

Would read the link W. but it want's me to sign in or subscribe.  Don't know why, I read WaPo articles elsewhere with no problem from time to time.

I thought at the time they were tempting fate.

Ron,

     Half of the WaPo article is personal anecdotal stuff about people who were infected at Sturgis.

     Here are a few non-anecdotal excerpts...

 

October 17, 2020

Within weeks of the gathering, the Dakotas, along with Wyoming, Minnesota and Montana, were leading the nation in new coronavirus infections per capita. The surge was especially pronounced in North and South Dakota, where cases and hospitalization rates continued their juggernaut rise into October. Experts say they will never be able to determine how many of those cases originated at the 10-day rally, given the failure of state and local health officials to identify and monitor attendees returning home, or to trace chains of transmission after people got sick. Some, however, believe the nearly 500,000-person gathering played a role in the outbreak now consuming the Upper Midwest.

More than 330 coronavirus cases and one death were directly linked to the rally as of mid-September, according to a Washington Post survey of health departments in 23 states that provided information. But experts say that tally represents just the tip of the iceberg, since contact tracing often doesn’t capture the source of an infection, and asymptomatic spread goes unnoticed.

In many ways, Sturgis is an object lesson in the patchwork U.S. response to a virus that has proved remarkably adept at exploiting such gaps to become resurgent. While some states and localities banned even relatively small groups of people, others, like South Dakota, imposed no restrictions — in this case allowing the largest gathering of people in the United States and perhaps anywhere in the world amid the pandemic and creating huge vulnerabilities as tens of thousands of attendees traveled back home to every state in the nation.

Many went unmasked to an event public health officials pleaded with them to skip, putting themselves and others at risk, because they were skeptical about the risks, or felt the entreaties infringed on their personal liberties. Rallygoers jammed bars, restaurants, tattoo parlors and concert venues; South Dakota officials later identified four such businesses as sites of potential exposure after learning that infected people had visited them.


Despite the concerns expressed by health experts ahead of the event, efforts to urge returnees to self-quarantine lacked enforcement clout and were largely unsuccessful, and the work by state and local officials to identify chains of transmission and stop them was inconsistent and uncoordinated.

Those efforts became further complicated when some suspected of having the virus refused to be tested, said Kris Ehresmann, director of infectious-disease epidemiology at the Minnesota Department of Health.

Such challenges made it all but impossible to trace the infections attendees may have spread to others after they got home. Several infections tied to a wedding in Minnesota, for instance, “linked back to someone who had gone to Sturgis,” Ehresmann said. Those were not tallied with the Sturgis outbreak because “the web just gets too complicated,” she said.

“When it comes to infectious diseases, it’s often the case that the weakest link in the chain is a risk to everybody,” said Josh Michaud, an epidemiologist and associate director for global health policy for the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation. "Holding a half-million-person rally in the midst of a pandemic is emblematic of a nation as a whole that maybe isn’t taking [the novel coronavirus] as seriously as we should.”

The Aug. 7-16 gathering has drawn intense interest from scientists and health officials, and will likely be studied for years to come because of its singularity. It’s not just that Sturgis went on after the pandemic sidelined most everything else. It also drew people from across the country, all of them converging on one region, packing the small city’s Main Street and the bars and restaurants along it. And in contrast with participants in the Black Lives Matter protests this summer, many Sturgis attendees spent time clustered indoors at bars, restaurants and tattoo parlors, where experts say the virus is most likely to spread, especially among those without masks.

Attendees came from every state, with just under half hailing from the Great Plains and substantial numbers journeying from as far as California, Illinois and Arizona, according to an analysis by the Center for New Data, a nonprofit group that uses cellphone location data to tackle public issues. The analysis, shared with The Washington Post, shows just how intertwined the South Dakota rally was with the rest of the country — and how far the decisions of individual attendees could have ricocheted.
...

In the run-up to the rally, officials estimated that 250,000 people would come. The actual number, according to the South Dakota Transportation Department, was over 460,000 — down just 7 percent from 2019.

They came in the greatest numbers from South Dakota, source of an estimated 93,000 attendees, or a fifth of the total, according to calculations by the Center for New Data. Minnesota ranked second, with an estimated 31,000 people, followed by Colorado with 29,000. Many traveled hundreds of miles: 21,000 rallygoers are believed to have come from Texas, and 20,800 from California.
...

South Dakota, which had the most attendees, saw coronavirus cases surge within weeks of the rally’s Aug. 16 close, with the seven-day rolling average going from 84 on Aug. 6 to 214 on Aug. 27. The numbers remained elevated into October: The first day of the month, the seven-day rolling average was 434. The state is second in the nation in cases per capita behind North Dakota, with numbers high enough for the Harvard Global Health Institute to recommend stay-at-home orders.

But precisely how that outbreak unfolded remains shrouded in uncertainty.

Because symptoms of the coronavirus can take days to surface, rally attendees were unlikely to know they had been infected until returning home. Without a nationally coordinated contact-tracing strategy, the job of identifying chains of transmission was left to a patchwork of local and state health departments with varying approaches, leadership and staffing. Typically, such efforts focus on determining a person’s contacts after they became infectious — and stopping those people from spreading the virus — rather than on pinpointing the source of an infection.

Genomic sequencing, which other countries have harnessed to determine the path of an outbreak, has been underused in the United States. And because it requires culturing and sequencing active virus, the rally is too far in the past for it to be of service now, said Michaud, the Kaiser Family Foundation epidemiologist.

So even as the Dakotas and the Upper Midwest began seeing infections climb, it is impossible to say precisely how many of those cases originated at the rally — or how many of those might have ignited additional clusters elsewhere.

“This motorcycle rally was and is such a big thing that people come from miles and miles away and they come from right next door. And it’s not reported anywhere who they are, where they live,” said Benjamin Aaker, president of the South Dakota State Medical Association.

“Contact tracing on something like that is even harder than it is during normal circumstances,” he added.

But other countries offer examples of more robust and coordinated contact-tracing efforts, Michaud said. Japan uses what’s called retrospective contact tracing — working backward to determine where a person was infected and who else may have gotten the virus there, he said. It’s particularly effective in dealing with the coronavirus, which is often transmitted by a small number of people infecting many others in clusters.

It was “fairly obvious” that a gathering the size of the motorcycle rally represented a risk, Michaud said — and more rigorous contact tracing could have revealed the actual impact. It might also have prevented some of the secondary and tertiary spread.

Hospitals have seen the effects. David Basel, vice president of clinical quality at Avera Medical Group, which has locations on the east side of the state, said on Sept. 30 that facilities had been “busy, and we’re feeling it.” Covid-19 cases make up 10 percent of patients, he said.

“The thing that quite honestly scares us most is personnel,” he said. “If we started to lose personnel to them coming down with covid, that would be probably the biggest risk to us.”

Three of the four South Dakota counties estimated to have the highest share of Sturgis attendees also saw cases spike post-rally. The increase was most pronounced in Pennington County, which is just outside Sturgis. Its seven-day rolling average of new cases leaped from eight on Aug. 6 to 34 on Aug. 27.

State health officials, who linked 125 cases to Sturgis, have not tied the surge to the rally, however. They note it overlapped with school openings and end-of-summer restlessness.

“Anytime you’re bringing individuals together, you’re going to have times where you’re having covid-19 transmission,” state epidemiologist Joshua Clayton said last month. “That’s a risk whether you’re in South Dakota, or in other states.”

Noem, the governor, attributed the rise in cases to increases in testing, echoing President Trump’s explanation of growing U.S. infections. “That’s normal, that’s natural, that’s expected,” she told the Associated Press. She did not explain how extra testing could have accounted for the rise in hospitalizations in the state, which hit record highs in October.
 
And the increases in coronavirus infections spread beyond South Dakota, post-rally. In Crook County, Wyoming, Corinne Hoard started feeling sick a week afterward but isn’t sure whether she was infected there — or whether health officials counted her case as Sturgis-related.

Hoard, who said motorcycle riding is “kind of in my blood,” was mostly avoiding crowds but kept her annual tradition of going to Sturgis and attended a concert there, viewing it as safe because she sat outdoors. She started feeling sick a week afterward and went to the hospital after waking up one morning feeling like “death had crawled in the bed with me.”

 

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In other coronavirus news...I had a person from corporate spend last week with me and he tested positive for coronavirus over the weekend. I'm now quarantined from work and have to go through contact tracing through the state and get paperwork from them before I can go back to work.

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Hope you stay virus free Mark.  It's surging again.  Though still dismissed by many, a large part of the cause.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/20/us/coronavirus-cases-rise.html

https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/13/health/us-coronavirus-tuesday/index.html

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1 hour ago, Ron Bulman said:

Interesting analysis, and a methodology that could also be applied to the morbidity and mortality stats for the victims -- foreign and domestic-- of our "War on Terror" since 9/11.

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This post is not about the plague, but it is about the disastrous plague year here in Colorado.

Rocky Mountain National Park is now on fire, and they have evacuated the towns of Grand Lake and Estes Park, on the west and east sides of RMNP. 

I didn't get the alert in time yesterday to drive up to Estes Park to retrieve things from my in-law's cabin.

The National Forests along the entire Front Range from Denver to Fort Collins were closed to the public earlier this week.

It's an unprecedented disaster out here.

The only good news is that a cold front just moved into the state and it's supposed to snow Sunday, with temperatures around zero in the high country.

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11 hours ago, W. Niederhut said:

This post is not about the plague, but it is about the disastrous plague year here in Colorado.

Rocky Mountain National Park is now on fire, and they have evacuated the towns of Grand Lake and Estes Park, on the west and east sides of RMNP. 

I didn't get the alert in time yesterday to drive up to Estes Park to retrieve things from my in-law's cabin.

The National Forests along the entire Front Range from Denver to Fort Collins were closed to the public earlier this week.

It's an unprecedented disaster out here.

The only good news is that a cold front just moved into the state and it's supposed to snow Sunday, with temperatures around zero in the high country.

It does relate.  Those evacuated from Estes Park in particular have to travel, stay elsewhere, interact with others they wouldn't have otherwise.  Increasing their chances of transmission.  They can't shelter in place during a third wave.

California can certainly relate the last couple of years.  So can I.  My parents lost their retirement home on the lake in a forest fire in  1989.  Thankfully they were away that day.  Things were never the same.  Loosing animals and possessions is tough. 

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It almost makes you wonder does it not?

Scott Atlas is clearly Trump's go to guy on this issue today.

He is not an epidemiologist.  He is a radiologist.

But he advocates for herd immunity.  I think Trump might be moving for this without actually saying it.  And I  wish Biden had addressed the issue last night.  Because if that is what the Trump/Atlas agenda really is , they should say it.

 

 

Edited by James DiEugenio
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