Two things keep circling in my mind as I put clean sheets on the bed and fold laundry-
Amber Schmidtke, PhD wrote in her weekly Covid-19 report (yes, Covid is still a thing in our world), “..Friday afternoon seemed like the right time for the United States Centers Disease Control and Prevention to give up on controlling or preventing a disease that has killed 900,000+ Americans. It was at that moment that any concern for protecting the immunocompromised, children under the age of 5, people with underlying medical conditions fell away. It was a moment when people who care deeply about narrowing disparities in health by race, rural versus urban, socioeconomic class, etc, were abandoned.”
She continues, “We aren’t winning. Look at Japan and say with a straight face that there was nothing more we could do. The politicians and enablers who caused this are expecting you to look away, to forget what they’ve done.” Sadly I think she is right. Her thoughts on using hospitalization rates to manage responses is spot on as well.
The other thing on my mind comes from historian Heather Cox Richardson, PhD. In her daily “Letters from an American” she wrote yesterday about the gyrations being done by Tucker Carlson, Rudy Giuliani, and Putin sycophant Donald Trump. All three have publicly worshipped Putin, but now find that with the dictator’s failure to quickly pummel the Ukrainians into submission and establish a Kremlin puppet government, things aren’t so pretty for their pro-autocracy stance. Yesterday at the Trump cult rally held by CPAC, Trump was asked what he would do about Ukraine and he answered, “Well, I tell you what, I would do things, but the last thing I want to do is say it right now.”
Considering the fact that he stole highly classified documents, and gleefully gave U.S. intelligence information to the Russian foreign minister, these are riveting words from the “stable genius” himself.
Watching the schools prepare to reopen in rural Washington County Georgia is like watching someone pour gasoline on top of an already burning fire. As Covid-19 rates soar in a county that stubbornly refused to access tested and proven vaccines when a state-run vaccination site was set up in the county, the Board of Education is choosing the path of least resistance on healthy safety requirements.
The highly contagious Delta variant will find multiple classrooms ripe for explosive spread. The risk of exposure could be easily reduced if school leaders were willing to take one necessary step to protect those who cannot be vaccinated and those who refuse to be vaccinated-require masks in all indoor situations.
How bad is it in Sandersville and other communities in the county? Bad. Very bad.
Covid-19 risk of exposure, CDC tracking map
The CDC rates the risk of transmission as high. According to the CDC, the percentage of people in the county fully vaccinated is a dismal 7.7 percent despite the easy access to the vaccine provided by the state in the spring when eligibility was expanded. School age students between 12-18 years old are fully vaccinated at a rate of 9 percent. If teachers and staff are in the age group of 18-65, only 9.4 percent of that age cohort have chosen to be fully vaccinated before returning to the classroom, cafeterias, hallways, and buses.
Still, Superintendent Rickey Edmond and the Board of Education are confident that letting 1405 students in the primary and elementary schools, 760 in the middle school, and 880 in the high school, sit in classrooms and move through hallways without a mask on is OK (because let’s be honest, it will not be possible to keep every child in a hallway distanced or properly masked). There is a Virtual School option only offered to grades 5-12, with limited capacity and criteria for acceptance, that will have 20 students.
The reported cases of Covid-19 in the seven days preceding August 2 are up 161.54 percent. The percent of tests that are positive has climbed by 15.63 percent. Local hospital admissions are up a full 200 percent. Schools haven’t had the first student in a classroom and the caseload is soaring in a county with great doctors but limited hospital services.
Washington County GA school bus
Late yesterday, a news report posted on Georgia Public Radio’s site summed it for me. Amber Schmidtke, PhD., a microbiologist tracking and explaining Covid data for mere mortals like me, said, and I am adding emphasis to her statement”So when this starts to happen [children becoming sick and requiring hospitalization] in a bigger way in Georgia and kids who were previously healthy are on ventilators, I don’t want school superintendents to claim that there was no way this could have been predicted,” Schmidtke said. “We have plenty of warning that the situation in 2021 is more dangerous than a year ago for children.Willingly choosing to endanger children by not doing the bare minimum of disease control and prevention should be treated the same way as knowingly allowing someone drunk to drive a school bus and organizations that do so should be held to account.”
Teachers and staff are preparing now for open houses in Washington County schools, with classes starting Friday. In a community with a rising case load, doubled Covid hospitalizations, low vaccination rates, and school leaders willing to, as Dr. Schmidtke suggests, let a drunk drive the school bus, they are providing the ideal breeding ground for very sick children, families, teachers, and staff.
Real data and solid research matter. Read it. Share it. Use it. The information below is taken directly from the link in this post.
Results from Survey 4 (administered March 9-10, 2020)
Experts predict a four-fold rise in reported cases in the US over the next week. They predict 1819 total cases (80% uncertainty interval: 823-6204 cases) of COVID-19 will be reported by the CDC on Monday March 16th, more than 4 times the CDC reported number of cases as of Monday, March 9th.
The majority of experts (20/21, 95%) expect COVID-19 will reach community-level spread in the US
Experts expect that community-level spread will occur in the US within 3 weeks (80% uncertainty interval: 0-10 weeks).
Experts anticipate 44 US states will report cases of COVID-19 within one week (80% uncertainty interval: 39-48 states).
Experts believe that only 13% (80% uncertainty interval: 4-30%) of all COVID-19 infections (symptomatic and asymptomatic) in the US were reported to the CDC as of Monday, March 9th.
This implies that as of the beginning of this week there were between 1410 and 10575 undiagnosed infections with COVID-19 in the US. 6. Experts believe that nationwide hospitalizations for COVID-19 will peak in May. 7.
The above results include answers from 21 experts.
Donald Trump isn’t afraid to use hate speech, but words grounded in science, facts, and evidence scare him and his followers so much that he is banning the use of seven words by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The words are:
What are Trump and his followers so afraid of? Evidence and science-based research to protect a fetus from the Zika virus? Providing state of the art care to populations vulnerable to infection like transgender citizens of the United States? Diversity is what makes us a stronger country.
Thought-control and strangleholds on some of the world’s best health researchers, whose slogan is, “CDC 24/7 Saving Lives, Protecting People”™?
Call, email, Tweet, and Facebook your members of Congress and use every one of these words in your comments.
