[News] Coronavirus

A place to discuss the now-global coronavirus outbreak.

I would discuss it with HR or a manager above you and express that "the candidate (without prompting?) disparaged our company policies and expressed a willingness to break them".

Robear wrote:

I would discuss it with HR or a manager above you and express that "the candidate (without prompting?) disparaged our company policies and expressed a willingness to break them".

As their god emperor would say, “Buh bye”.

Paleocon wrote:

He stated that he was among the first to return to the office and that he was indignant at the vaccination mandate our company put in place. I am not sure if this would be allowed by HR and our code of conduct as a criteria for evaluation, but it really does make me question his judgement.

What about "employment at will"? You can fire someone because you don't like their clothes. You certainly aren't obligated to hire someone.

I met with an HR rep online and expressed my concern. I clarified it by saying that I was concerned that his willingness to bring up such a divisive opinion completely unsolicited to someone he had just met demonstrated to me tact and judgement that was not up to the level I would expect from someone in the position currently in question. I asked her if letting this affect my assessment of his fitness for this customer facing position was allowed under our code of conduct. She thanked me for my clarification and told me that she would come back to me after having had an opportunity to talk it over with her colleagues and management.

Is that guy even a doctor? Who the f*ck is he to be reviewing medical decisions? Especially ones going back dozens of decades?

DeSantis, Rand Paul, etc, clearly have money invested in monoclonal antibody companies. There's basically no other explanation for this.

They know that they already have all the racist voters there are and are now courting the anti-vaxxer ones.

Diaz said it may be time to “review” those mandates, in place for such illnesses as mumps and measles. But he said there was a difference between long-tested vaccines and the new COVID-19 vaccine.

What a bunch of crack-pots. Let's bring back small-pox and polio while we're at.

Like they say. No money in cures…the money is in the treatments.

After a lengthy vetting process, Diaz was finally granted access to the algorithm for sustained grift.

Paleocon wrote:

He stated that he was among the first to return to the office and that he was indignant at the vaccination mandate our company put in place.

Sits for interview at Chick-fil-A.

"Ya know what really grinds my gears? When a chicken joint is closed on f*cking Sundays. That's just f*cked up!"

On your eval paper you state, "Stated strong objections to known company policies. Did not familiarize himself with policies/practices of our company. Cast doubt on his ability to disagree in a professional capacity without alienating coworkers/clients. Not a good fit for our culture."

That's a real top shelf answer right there.

Totally. Well played, dude. I am gonna plagiarize that sh*t, yo.

Top_Shelf wrote:

On your eval paper you state, "Stated strong objections to known company policies. Did not familiarize himself with policies/practices of our company. Cast doubt on his ability to disagree in a professional capacity without alienating coworkers/clients. Not a good fit for our culture."

I like this, but the one part that made me twitch a little was the reference to company culture.

"Not a fit for our company culture" has in practice too often been code for, "is the wrong color".

Not a fit for civil society.

*Legion* wrote:
Top_Shelf wrote:

On your eval paper you state, "Stated strong objections to known company policies. Did not familiarize himself with policies/practices of our company. Cast doubt on his ability to disagree in a professional capacity without alienating coworkers/clients. Not a good fit for our culture."

I like this, but the one part that made me twitch a little was the reference to company culture.

"Not a fit for our company culture" has in practice too often been code for, "is the wrong color".

Agreed.

A better statement would be, "Does not appear to be committed to our company values of diversity, equity and inclusion." That only works if the company has an actual DEI commitment. I'd wager that wouldn't fly at Joe Rogan Enterprises or whatever the name of the company was in Captain Planet that made $$$ dumping toxic waste into the Amazon. Koch Industries?

Top_Shelf wrote:

A better statement would be, "Does not appear to be committed to our company values of diversity, equity and inclusion." That only works if the company has an actual DEI commitment. I'd wager that wouldn't fly at Joe Rogan Enterprises or whatever the name of the company was in Captain Planet that made $$$ dumping toxic waste into the Amazon. Koch Industries?

Nice.

And just for full clarity, I don't mean to pick on the usage of "company culture". I've found myself using it or something awfully close to it in the past. I've had to make a conscious effort to avoid it to ensure that I'm not inadvertently using coded language when all I'm really trying to communicate is, "this guy is an absolute knucklehead and would drive the entire team nuts, hell no to him."

The Idaho Capital Sun has a series of excellent articles about their state's battle with COVID.

Dispatches from Idaho’s front lines: A hospital bed opens. Because someone died.

Idaho Capital Sun wrote:

...

Health care workers across the state are fighting an internal battle, on top of their fight to keep people alive and healthy.

Dr. Patrick “Paddy” Kinney, a family physician in rural McCall, is one of them.

He is distraught when his patients choose not to be vaccinated against a fast-spreading virus.

He is distraught when those patients later get COVID-19.

And he’s distraught that, when they come into the emergency room, they need a bed in “an overburdened system that’s about ready to topple,” he said in an interview last week.

For the past 18 months, Kinney said, he’s talked with his patients about COVID-19. Tried to answer their questions. Tried to assuage their concerns. Urged them to get vaccinated.

“But then, I’m also the guy that when they don’t make that decision (to get vaccinated) and they come in super sick to the ER, here I am again,” he said.

“A lot of them apologize, like, ‘I’m so sorry that I didn’t listen to you.’ And I don’t want them to say that they’re sorry. I’m sorry that they’re sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry about the position that they found themselves in. Clearly, I think that they’re paying the price for that decision. At the same time, I’m struggling with (whether) I could have done a better job explaining the risks and benefits of the vaccine to you.”

Kinney said it’s “really hard when I’ve got one of my patients in the ER … and they cannot even speak in full sentences because they’re short of breath, and they’re hacking and coughing, and they look scared and sick.”

Many health care workers told the Sun they struggle with the same mix of emotions. Vaccines are very effective at keeping people out of the hospital from COVID-19. Yet, many patients show up unvaccinated.

The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare’s statistics show that 91.6% of all hospitalizations for COVID-19 in Idaho since May 15 are among people who aren’t fully vaccinated. Hospital administrators and frontline health care workers have confirmed for months that almost everyone admitted to a hospital with COVID-19 is unvaccinated.

Health care workers still take care of everyone, regardless of vaccination status. Not only because they have to, but because they got into medicine, nursing and therapy to help people.

“I’m doing so at the expense of everyone else,” Kinney said. “When there’s not enough rooms, when there’s not enough nurses, when everybody’s exhausted, when the hospitals are at 105% capacity, when there’s three ICU beds left in the state, that is hard.”

His patients sometimes wait six to eight hours in the McCall emergency room for a bed to open up in Boise, where they need to go, he said. When the Treasure Valley hospitals are full, the patients are sent to Twin Falls.

But even those larger hospitals around the state are at a breaking point. When they’re full, they can no longer take patients from small hospitals like St. Luke’s McCall.

“I think it was Friday night or Saturday night, I had a bad COVID patient who needed to be admitted — again, 16 liters of oxygen and very sick, and he was ready to go at 9 p.m.,” Kinney said. “Now, I knew that he needed to be admitted, and the hospitalist down in Boise agreed that he needed to be admitted. There was not a bed available for him until 2 a.m.”

Kinney told the man he would keep doing his best to take care of him in the ER for the next five hours.

“What’s going to happen at 2 a.m.?” the man asked.

Kinney had to be honest. There’s one reason a bed opens up at 2 a.m., he said.

“There’s a chance that your bed is going to be made available by somebody else dying,” Kinney said.

The patient’s face was covered by an oxygen mask, but Kinney could see the man’s eyes. He was terrified.

The patient did get that bed in Boise at 2 a.m. But he declined rapidly. He, too, recently died, “making room for someone else,” Kinney said.

Idaho this week turned a grim corner in the pandemic.

The state activated “crisis standards of care” for North Idaho — a decision that will allow overwhelmed hospitals to triage patients and ration medical care to save as many lives as possible.

That decision will have a ripple effect throughout the state and the region, where hospitals and especially intensive care units are hanging on by a thread.

Health systems have begun to pull in more doctors and nurses to work in the hospital.

Kinney usually has 1,200 to 1,300 patients under his family practice clinic’s wing at any given time. He’s been the family doctor for some of those Idahoans since he joined St. Luke’s McCall in 2014.

“I managed their pregnancies, I delivered their babies … acted as their pediatrician and took care of multiple generations,” Kinney said.

He sees his regular patients in his clinic three days a week, takes on-call shifts at the hospital and works in the ER three or four times a month.

Now, the surge is taking him away from his usual patients.

“I’m going to be spending about 80% of my practice over in the ER,” he said.

For now, St. Luke’s McCall can take care of everyone who comes through the ER doors, Kinney said. But if Idaho enters statewide crisis standards, that may not still be true.

“The game changes a little bit, because at that point we’re admitting that we can’t care for everybody in the way that we want to,” he said.

Kinney is tired.

He keeps “wondering and trying to figure out why my patients disdain and refuse my advice, in just this one particular area, where they trusted me and in all the other areas of their care,” he said.

“We just don’t understand why people have trusted us for years, and they’ve gone through all manner of uncomfortable things on our recommendation. Right? Like every 10 years, they’ve agreed to letting us put a 6-foot camera up their butt for a colonoscopy,” he said. “Every year or three years or five years … they’ll get up in the stirrups, get a cold metal speculum put in their vagina for a Pap smear. And, you know, get a flu shot and get a pneumonia shot, get a shingles shot.”

Patients take medications their doctors prescribe to them, even when those medications might have side effects.

“They’re willing to accept it because they have trusted us (to know) that these things are worth it, and that it’s in their best interest,” Kinney said.

“And yet in this, it’s like you just say the words ‘COVID vaccine,’ and their faces change, their eyes glaze over,” he said. “They somehow feel like they’ve got better information than we do. And I don’t understand it, I really don’t. I don’t get it.”

Dispatches from Idaho’s front lines: ‘We are breaking’

Idaho Capital Sun wrote:

...

Idaho’s coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and deaths have risen for weeks. The daily body count has been in the double digits for a month. Idaho has now recorded more than 2,700 COVID-19 related deaths — about 490 since Aug. 1 alone.

Still, Idaho’s vaccination rate remains stuck at well under half the population, the lowest rate in the U.S.

Interviews with doctors and nurses suggest Idaho is stuck in a perfect storm of distrust that is sending people to their deaths.

The pandemic was a growth opportunity for the cottage industry of health misinformation, including some local doctors, unlicensed practitioners and ideological groups who have spread unsupported claims about COVID-19 and vaccines.

They declare that health authorities who contradict their claims are lying and can’t be trusted. So, many Idahoans follow their advice, reject the COVID-19 vaccine and ignore public health advice. And when they catch the coronavirus and end up hospitalized, these Idahoans argue with doctors and nurses, even as their organs fail and they can’t breathe.

One of Legg’s recent patients was an older woman with high blood pressure, diabetes and a suppressed immune system. She refused to go on a ventilator because she was convinced the hospital “would vaccinate her against her will,” Legg said. The woman survived, but even as she left the hospital, she kept a tight grip on her belief that the vaccine “would be what killed her,” Legg said.

Another patient, a middle-aged man, “just really fought against everything that we offered” to help him, Legg said.

He refused to be intubated until his heart was about to stop.

“Do you know the stress around trying to intubate a patient who was that desperate?” Legg said.

After he was on the ventilator, his family took up his battle.

“His family was just insistent that we were hurting him. And that what was going to save him was ivermectin,” Legg said. “They threatened litigation against us. Ultimately, we allowed them to get a prescription for ivermectin and bring it in. And, of course, he died shortly afterwards anyway.”

Dr. Jason Slade, a hospitalist at St. Luke’s Nampa, recently had a patient for weeks who said he wasn’t vaccinated because he was Christian and trusted God.

“God sends us a lot of miracles and things to use to deal with hard times. This may be a miracle God sent us,” Slade said to the patient, who was unconvinced.

The man’s health deteriorated. His lungs thickened and built up scar tissue. Oxygen couldn’t make it through anymore. The damage probably would not heal, Slade told the man, who demanded the doctor talk to one of his family members about treatments.

The family member didn’t know anything about the medications doctors were giving the man. Instead, she insisted they use “certain therapies” that don’t work, Slade said.

When he asked what her role was in health care, she told him, “My role is a mom, and I’ve done my research, and I’ve talked with other medical professionals, and I know about your protocols, and I don’t approve of them.”

A few days later, the man’s oxygen levels plummeted. Slade invited a family member to come to the hospital for what was likely to be a final visit.

“The whole family came down,” Slade said. “I went out to explain to them (what was happening), and it was an unpleasant interaction. They had lots of accusations, demands.”

The man eventually decided to go home with hospice care and died the day he went home, Slade said.

Slade, Legg and other health care providers are working overtime and witnessing death on a regular basis.

St. Luke’s Health System averaged four COVID-19 deaths per day this month alone, St. Luke’s Chief Physician Executive Dr. Jim Souza said Tuesday.

When patients and their families distrust health care workers, it adds to the emotional toll of these casualties.

“The health care system and health care workers, for all of our flaws — and we certainly have them — we still are here to help. We want you to live through an illness if you get it, we want you to survive,” Legg said. “We just want to help. That’s why we all went to medical school, that’s why nurses went to nursing school.”

The front lines of the COVID-19 war are hidden from view. The worst parts of the pandemic are happening inside the hospital walls.

The Idaho doctors and practitioners who are fomenting distrust in public health do not work with COVID-19 patients in hospitals.

And the public cannot see what’s happening because of privacy laws and visitor restrictions.

“People, when they hear the word epidemic or pandemic, I think in their mind they think of something like the bubonic plague. ‘Bring out your dead!’ and people dying in the street,” Slade said. “We have evolved in our society that the level of (suffering in) this pandemic has been able to be suppressed. You aren’t seeing this up close and personal because it concentrates in the hospitals. People that you personally know, they show up at the hospital, along with everyone else in the neighborhood. (And) we’re at a spot where we’re running out of physical space.”

The Sun visited Saint Alphonsus hospital in Boise the day Idaho declared crisis standards. Health care workers expressed relief that journalists were inside the hospital.

Until recently, Idaho health care workers, families of COVID-19 patients and COVID-19 survivors were the only ones who could bear witness — and, often, people would accuse them of lying.

“I want them to come and see how sick these people are,” said one local nurse. “For the patients that don’t want to be intubated and we watch them decline, it is like a slow descent into madness.”

The high-flow oxygen masks feel like “sticking your face out of a car window,” the nurse said, and it makes it hard to eat. So the patients lose weight and “just shrink into nothing,” she said.

“I wish everyone could see. I really think that if some 40-year-old guys had to come help me clean up the 40-year-old patients who are incontinent … and pooping themselves,” that might persuade them to get vaccinated, she said.

“It’s not a nice way to die. It’s not a gentle death,” she said. “It’s not a good death. It’s a lonely death. … But at this point, this is what people are choosing.”

Idaho is where I grew up. In my experience the people who live there are some of the most ignorant, stubborn people I've ever met. I've lost been remotely surprised by what's happening in Idaho and that they're one of the lowest vaccinated states in the country.

Idaho Capital Sun wrote:

The state activated “crisis standards of care” for North Idaho — a decision that will allow overwhelmed hospitals to triage patients and ration medical care to save as many lives as possible.

Thanks, Obama!

The province of Alberta says their ICUs are not overwhelmed and there is no shortage of beds. People are leaving the ICU as fast as they are arriving in the ICU. Of course, the province (which is basically trying to be Texas north) isn’t telling anyone the reason people are leaving the ICU is because they are dying, not because they are getting better.

I continue to be amazed (I don't know why at this point) at the level of denial present in these people and the alternate reality they continue to insist on and exist in....

Anti-Vaccine Cartoonist Ben Garrison Says He's Got Covid-19, Won't Go to Hospital

Garrison told Gizmodo wrote:

“15,000 have died as a result of the Covid vaccines and hundreds of thousands others have had serious side effects. The mainstream media will not mention a word of this—not one peep. Instead we get the ’safe and effective’ malarky over and over as well as government pushers urging us to take the free poison. Don’t do it. The Pfizer CEO certainly won’t. Bill Gates and his family won’t, either,”

Garrison told Gizmodo wrote:

“I would never go to a hospital with Covid. Robert David Steele did it a few weeks ago and they killed him. The hospitals get extra money for Covid death reports, which is necessary to keep fear ramped up,”

Garrison insists that the entire covid-19 pandemic response is really about government control, not public health—a recurring mantra in the covid hoaxer community. He repeated his false claim that vaccines don’t prevent covid-19, ad nauseam. “This is about vaccine passports, tracking, government control and tyranny,” Garrison added.

I'm not about to wish death on a person, not least of all because when they're wishing for it that hard themselves, it would be redundant of me.

Garrison told Gizmodo wrote:

“I would never go to a hospital with Covid. Robert David Steele did it a few weeks ago and they killed him. The hospitals get extra money for Covid death reports, which is necessary to keep fear ramped up,”

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/XAkjviN.gif)

JC wrote:

I continue to be amazed (I don't know why at this point) at the level of denial present in these people and the alternate reality they continue to insist on and exist in....

Anti-Vaccine Cartoonist Ben Garrison Says He's Got Covid-19, Won't Go to Hospital

They booed Trump for mildly supporting vaccines. The GEOTUS, Darth Cheeto, the MAGA Messiah himself, got booed at his own rally for suggesting that maybe people should get that vaccine he claims to have busted his ass to produce. Ben Garrison is just a guy drawing stupid cartoons that give magats a momentary chuckle about how much the stupid libs must feel owned by this one. He can't afford to be cast out for violating taboo.

JC wrote:

I continue to be amazed (I don't know why at this point) at the level of denial present in these people and the alternate reality they continue to insist on and exist in....

Garrison is especially delusional. He draws Trump as a buff, muscular Adonis.

We've reached the 'Red Covid' phase of the pandemic

In his victory speech after the 2020 election, Joe Biden said this: "I pledge to be a president who seeks not to divide, but to unify. Who doesn't see red and blue states, but a United States."

Roughly nine months into his presidency, however, red states and blue states have widely diverged on what should be the least political of issues: Vaccination rates for Covid-19.
Dubbing it "Red Covid," The New York Times' David Leonhardt writes:
"The political divide over vaccinations is so large that almost every reliably blue state now has a higher vaccination rate than almost every reliably red state. ... Because the vaccines are so effective at preventing serious illness, Covid deaths are also showing a partisan pattern. Covid is still a national crisis, but the worst forms of it are increasingly concentrated in red America."
New data from Gallup provides stark numbers to back up Leonhardt's claim.
More than 9 in 10 self-identified Democrats (92%) report that they have had at least one dose of one of the three vaccines for Covid-19. That number among Republicans? Just 56%.
That's a stunning data point that tells a very clear story: there are Republicans who are getting seriously ill -- and even dying -- as some sort of distorted political stance.
How did we get here? There's no single person to blame, but in my mind it's quite clear that former President Donald Trump and Fox News bear the lion's share of the responsibility.
Trump spent the first 16 months of the pandemic doing everything he could to downplay it. He insisted that the virus was "going to disappear." He was openly dismissive of mask-wearing; on the day he announced CDC guidance that people should wear masks indoors, Trump said that he had no plans to do so. "I just don't want to be doing -- I don't know, somehow sitting in the Oval Office behind that beautiful Resolute Desk, the great Resolute Desk," Trump explained. "I think wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens -- I don't know, somehow I don't see it for myself. I just, I just don't."
Trump also worked to make the debate about masking -- and steps to mitigate Covid-19 more generally -- about attempts by Democratic leaders to limit your freedoms. Lockdown orders were an abrogation of your rights -- as opposed to short-term attempts to slow community spread of the virus. Masks were nanny government trying to tell you what to do. Respected experts -- most notably Dr. Anthony Fauci -- were shills for the Democratic Party. Everything, in short, that people other than Donald Trump was telling you about the virus was bunk.
(That Trump was booed when he told a crowd earlier this year to get vaccinated tells you everything you need to know about the danger of fomenting distrust and feeding people lies.)
Meanwhile, Fox News served as a sort of force multiplier for the politicization of the virus. That charge was led by prime-time hosts Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, both of whom sought to cast the vaccine debate in terms of freedom abridged rather than a public health good. "We're not saying there is no benefit to the vaccine -- there may well be profound benefits to the vaccine," Carlson said over the summer, ignoring the scads of evidence that all three vaccines available for Covid-19 are not only safe but hugely effective in preventing serious illness and death from the virus. Carlson also regularly features anecdotal evidence of a person -- or persons -- with an adverse reaction to the Covid-19 vaccine, absent the context that the vaccine is, in the main, perfectly safe.
The result of all of this misinformation and politicization of Covid-19 is stark. The 12 states with the highest case rate for every 100,000 people are all run by Republican governors. The 13 states with the highest hospitalization rate per 100,000 residents are all run by Republican governors. The 15 states with the highest percentage of deaths per 100,000 are all run by Republican governors.
This isn't complicated. We are not just divided along political lines now. Our political divisions have created two entirely different Americas: One in which the vast majority of people are vaccinated and hospitalizations and deaths are low, and the other where the coronavirus continues to ravage the population.

The NYTs has had similar pieces about this. If they weren't endangering so many other people by overwhelming hospitals with their stupidity I'd be very OK with letting them kill themselves.

NYT wrote:

...

Since Delta began circulating widely in the U.S., Covid has exacted a horrific death toll on red America: In counties where Donald Trump received at least 70 percent of the vote, the virus has killed about 47 out of every 100,000 people since the end of June, according to Charles Gaba, a health care analyst. In counties where Trump won less than 32 percent of the vote, the number is about 10 out of 100,000.

And the gap will probably keep growing:

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/D6stBXJ.png)

Some of the vaccination gap stems from the libertarian instincts of many Republicans. “They understand freedom as being left alone to make their own choices, and they resent being told what to do,” William Galston has written in The Wall Street Journal.

But philosophy is only a partial explanation. In much of the rest of the world, vaccine attitudes do not break down along right-left lines, and some conservative leaders have responded effectively to Covid. So have a few Republican governors in the U.S. “It didn’t have to be this way,” German Lopez of Vox has written.

What distinguishes the U.S. is a conservative party — the Republican Party — that has grown hostile to science and empirical evidence in recent decades. A conservative media complex, including Fox News, Sinclair Broadcast Group and various online outlets, echoes and amplifies this hostility. Trump took the conspiratorial thinking to a new level, but he did not create it.

“With very little resistance from party leaders,” my colleague Lisa Lerer wrote this summer, many Republicans “have elevated falsehoods and doubts about vaccinations from the fringes of American life to the center of our political conversation.”

With the death count rising, at least a few Republicans appear to be worried about what their party and its allies have sown.

In an article this month for Breitbart, the right-wing website formerly run by Steve Bannon, John Nolte argued that the partisan gap in vaccination rates was part of a liberal plot. Liberals like Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Anthony Fauci and Howard Stern have tried so hard to persuade people to get vaccinated, because they know that Republican voters will do the opposite of whatever they say, Nolte wrote.

His argument is certainly bizarre, given that Democratic politicians have been imploring all Americans to get vaccinated and many Republican politicians have not. But Nolte did offer a glimpse at a creeping political fear among some Republicans. “Right now, a countless number of Trump supporters believe they are owning the left by refusing to take a lifesaving vaccine,” Nolte wrote. “In a country where elections are decided on razor-thin margins, does it not benefit one side if their opponents simply drop dead?”