COVID UPDATES. TIME TO DECIDE ABOUT SPREADING COVID

[Charon]

Oh Fauci or one of them, have now admitted that the aerosol droplets can and do stay on clothing for up to 2 or 3 days.

Cuz I read so many on covid forum bemoaning how cautious they have been.

In the way early days in Westchester, healthcare workers knew this. left all clothing outside their homes when returning. showered. Eventually moved into separate dwellings.

tis possible. We know from the healthcare workers they did have to wear same PPE in US. Esp the travelling nurses.

It is not over yet. Getting close I hope. Just stay vigilant.

[Hotrod77]

I agree, it's getting better but not over and if everyone gets to comfortable to quick, I'm afraid it will be back to where it was if not worse, I really hope it all goes away this year but definitely keep your guard up for sure and stay safe everyone

[Tigertail58]

I have not heard of anyone having a serious adverse reaction to the vaccine. I am trying to get an appointment.
I will take any of the 3 being used in the US. I hope we get through this with as few lives lost as possible.
I want to feel hopeful that this ends in 2021.

[Charon]

   

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s most recent press release on the “state’s progress during the Covid-19 pandemic” reports that 37,556 people have died from the disease in New York. The state health department’s Covid dashboard gave the same count last time I looked.


Nobody else with any knowledge of the situation thinks that this is New York’s actual Covid death toll. Right after checking the state site I consulted the New York Times, which said the state’s Covid fatalities numbered 45,957.  At the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, which is where Bloomberg News gets the deaths data for its Covid tracker, the tally was 46,420. Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which often reports deaths with a lag of several weeks and thus usually puts out lower numbers than the states do, had it at 45,514.

You can’t really call the state government’s lowballing of Covid deaths a coverup, given how widely available the alternative numbers are. These other numbers are all based on reports from government entities within the state — the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and county health departments — and there’s no indication that anyone in Albany has tried to halt this flow of information.


The mechanics of why the state’s numbers are lower also seem less than sinister. The New York City health department, which has clearly gotten lots of questions about why its estimates are so much higher than the state’s (the state says 20,001 New York City residents have died of Covid-19; the city reports 23,546 confirmed Covid deaths and another 5,044 probable ones), now offers a handy explainer at its data repository on GitHub. To wit: the state’s numbers are derived from its Hospital Emergency Response Data System and “daily calls to hospitals and other facilities that are caring for patients, such as nursing homes” — meaning that only deaths at hospitals and other care facilities are counted — while the city enlists the resources of its medical examiners and Bureau of Vital Statistics, which is responsible for reporting and analyzing all deaths in the city.

In other words, the state Department of Health has been running a real-time monitoring system, a useful thing in the middle of a pandemic but not a source of reliable vital statistics. That’s understandable given that in New York the state health department doesn’t do vital statistics. As is the case in about half the states, New York has decentralized public-health governance, meaning that the county and New York City health departments are responsible for figuring out how many people actually died of Covid-19 (and of everything else) and reporting that to the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. But instead of incorporating their more-complete tallies into its totals, the state just keeps putting out its own obviously wrong numbers.

This is weird, but not entirely unique. There are three other states (Nebraska, Kentucky and Missouri), where the state-reported death toll is about as low relative to the CDC’s as New York’s, and one (Oklahoma) where it’s even lower. But none of those states’ governors is in the midst of a high-profile brouhaha over Covid-death reporting, and it struck me that the reporting practices outlined above may shed some light on said brouhaha.

At issue is the reporting of Covid deaths among residents of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities in the state. New York has been reporting Covid deaths at nursing homes all along, a number that is also tracked by the CDC. But while many states last spring began publicly reporting all Covid-19-related deaths among long-term-care residents, including those that occurred at hospitals, New York did not.


It wasn’t as if a person couldn’t come up with a rough estimate of the total death toll among New York nursing-home residents. Last summer, when I looked into these matters for a column, state and CDC data indicated that a bit less than 47% of the New Jersey nursing-home and long-term care residents who had died of Covid had died in hospitals, and it seemed reasonable to assume a similar percentage for the state next door.

Last month, New York Attorney General Letitia James finally got the Cuomo administration to cough up partial estimates of hospital Covid deaths among nursing home residents, and last week the state health department released a full accounting in response to a freedom-of-information lawsuit filed by the Empire Center, a conservative Albany think tank. According to this data, 37% of all confirmed and presumed Covid-19 deaths among residents of long-term care facilities in New York occurred outside of those facilities. The overall death toll, 14,771, was thus smaller than this outsider would have estimated before the state released the numbers.

It also comes to about 32% of the state’s total deaths from Covid-19, going by the Johns Hopkins estimate, which is well below the 36% national average reported by the Covid Tracking Project. That’s relevant because critics have repeatedly pointed to Cuomo’s March 25 advisory that nursing homes could not deny re-admission or admission of patients “solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19” as a major driver of deaths in the state. If that policy really played a big role, one would expect nursing-home residents to make up a greater share of deaths in New York than other states, and they don’t. Also, estimates of actual infections (as opposed to positive Covid tests) indicate that New York’s spring Covid wave peaked before March 25 and declined rapidly after that. The nursing-home policy, which was rescinded in early May, may have made things worse, but the high Covid-19 death toll in and outside of nursing homes in New York last spring seems attributable far more to federal, state and local officials’ failures to act before mid-March than to anyone’s actions after that.

The New York nursing-home “scandal” has nonetheless become bigger news than ever since the New York Post reported last week that top Cuomo aide Melissa DeRosa had said in a call with Democratic lawmakers that the administration had been reluctant to release the full numbers on nursing-home deaths out of fear that they would “be used against us” by federal prosecutors. Again, this is weird. The numbers just weren’t that bad, and the state’s withholding of them will surely play worse in court, if it comes to that, than prompt release would have.

Seen in conjunction with the state’s habit of reporting obviously wrong overall Covid-19 death totals, though, a pattern begins to emerge. Given that they are now ignored by much of the media, and have no effect on the official totals maintained by the CDC, the main audience for the state’s lower numbers by this point has got to be the governor himself. Apparently nobody in Albany wants to be the one to tell famously prickly Andrew Cuomo that the state’s Covid-19 death toll needs to be revised upwards by more than 20%.

At least, that’s my theory. I emailed both the state health department and Cuomo’s press office to ask if they had a better explanation for the discrepancy between the state’s Covid death count and everybody else’s, and had yet to hear from them when this column was published. They didn’t have a huge amount of time to respond, though, so I will update here if they get back to me.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

hxxps://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-19/cuomo-s-covid-19-death-count-problem-goes-beyond-nursing-homes

[Charon]

Now? People on the covid forum are upset that they went through this battle of their lives. And now state that their loved ones whom died of covid and covid pneumonia, are now getting death certificates stating: cause of death pneumonia and an no mention of the virus.

No idea what the powers that be are up to with fudging numbers. These are hearts and souls that you are tampering with. I don't know why people need covid on the death certificate. But they want it to say covid now. They know that the word covid explains to many of us the horror and terror and pain that these people have gone thru. Still are going through.

[Levi517]

From everything I’ve read, Covid cases and deaths are greatly underreported in the US and around the world, either through misdiagnosis or lack of resources. But even with the irregularities, let’s not forget the situation we’re still in. In the US, 55,000 new daily cases, 1,700 deaths daily. Worldwide 380,000 new cases, almost 9,000 deaths daily.
Despite the exciting promise of the vaccines, we’re still in the pandemic and need to do our part to protect our loved ones, neighbors and ourselves.

[Charon]

*This could be why people on covid forum want their diagnosis to include covid if it was covid.*

COVID-19
For Covid ‘Long Haulers,’ Battling for Disability Benefits Adds Aggravation to Exhaustion
By David Tuller
MARCH 10, 2021


Rickie Andersen took a brief break from work in March after she fell ill. Her cough, fever and chills were typical covid-19 symptoms, but coronavirus tests were so scarce she could not obtain one to confirm the diagnosis.

After Andersen returned to her job as an information systems project manager in the San Francisco Bay Area, she struggled with profound fatigue, cognitive difficulties and other disabling complaints. For six months, she tried to keep awake during meetings and finish basic tasks that took much longer than before.

Finally, she decided to retain legal help so she could take advantage of the disability insurance coverage offered as an employee benefit. “I realized this is not going to be a short-term thing,” Andersen said.

Hundreds of thousands of people around the world are experiencing what is being called “long covid” — a pattern of prolonged symptoms following an acute bout of the disease. Many have managed to continue working through accommodations like telecommuting, cutting down on hours and delegating responsibilities.

Others have found it impossible to fulfill their professional obligations and are making the tough decision to stop working and seek disability benefits. But as they pursue the application process, they are discovering a particular set of challenges.


Given the lack of testing in the first months, many “long haulers,” like Andersen, have no laboratory proof of infection. While antibody tests can provide such evidence, their accuracy varies. Moreover, many of the reported symptoms, including fatigue and cognitive impairment, are subjective and not clearly linked to specific organ damage.

Beyond that, compiling a thorough record for a disability application and navigating the bureaucratic hurdles require sustained brain power, something many long-haul patients can no longer muster. Barbara Comerford, a New Jersey disability lawyer, said she received dozens of inquiries starting last fall from long haulers seeking advice on filing for disability and often citing what is being called “brain fog” as their main complaint.

“Most are people calling to say, ‘I thought I could do it. I can’t. My mind doesn’t function for more than really brief periods of time,’” Comerford said. She gave a presentation to the New Jersey State Bar Association in mid-February on how to develop evidence for such cases.

In the U.S., close to 30 million people have tested positive for the coronavirus, although many cases of infection are asymptomatic. What proportion might be affected by long-term illness isn’t known. Scientific understanding of the phenomenon is in its infancy.

In January, The Lancet reported that around three-quarters of more than 1,700 covid patients who had been hospitalized in Wuhan, China, reported at least one ongoing symptom six months later. More recently, investigators from the University of Washington reported in JAMA Network Open that around 30% of 177 patients who had tested positive for the coronavirus still reported symptoms when they were surveyed one to 10 months later.

The Social Security Administration provides long-term disability to American workers who qualify under its strict criteria, but applicants often get turned down on the first try. A few states, including California and New York, provide short-term disability benefits, in some cases for up to a year.

Tens of millions of Americans also have private disability coverage, most often as part of their employment benefit packages.

The maximum currently available to an individual through the Social Security Disability Insurance program is just over $3,000 a month. A typical private long-term disability plan might cover 60% of a beneficiary’s base salary, with a much higher maximum amount.

Sandy Lewis, a pharmaceutical industry researcher, fell ill last March with what she assumed was covid. She recovered but relapsed in April and again in May.

Through her employer-based insurance coverage, she received short-term disability for November and December, but the insurer, Prudential Financial, rejected her request for an extension. Soon after, she was diagnosed with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, or ME/CFS, a debilitating illness that can be triggered by viral infections.

Lewis, who lives outside Philadelphia, is planning to appeal Prudential’s rejection of the short-term extension and apply for long-term disability. But the matter is unlikely to be resolved before fall. The situation has left her feeling “devastated,” she said, and in serious financial distress.

“This has been such an arduous journey,” she said. “I have no income and I’m sick, and I’m continuing to need medical care. I am now in a position, at 49 years old, that I may have to sell my home during a pandemic and move in with family to stay afloat.”

In Lewis’ case, a Prudential reviewer noted that her symptoms were “subjective” and that there were “no physical exam findings to correlate with any ongoing functional limitations,” according to Cassie Springer Ayeni, an Oakland disability lawyer who is representing her as well as Andersen.

Prudential would not comment on a specific case. Evan Scarponi, chief claims officer, said in a statement that “our collective understanding of covid-19 and any associated long-term effects are still evolving” but that Prudential is “well-versed in evaluating both subjective and objective aspects of disability claims.”

Lawyers and advocates in the field expect the numbers of covid-related long-term disability applicants to rise this year. But it’s still too soon to detect any such increase, said a spokesperson for the American Council of Life Insurers, a trade association. Workers typically must be unable to work for half a year before becoming eligible for long-term disability benefits, and applying can itself be a lengthy process.

Brian Vastag, a former Washington Post science and health reporter with ME/CFS, stopped working in 2014 and then sued Prudential after it rejected his long-term disability claim. Insurance companies, he said, can easily find reasons to dismiss applications from claimants with chronic illnesses characterized by symptoms like fatigue and cognitive impairment.

“The insurance companies will often say, ‘There’s no objective evidence, so we have nothing to support your claim,’” said Vastag, who won his case against Prudential in 2018. “I’m worried about the long-covid patients who can’t work anymore.”

Claimants can appeal a rejection. If the insurer rejects the appeal, claimants have the right to sue, as Vastag did. However, most such cases fall under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974. Because this federal law requires a losing insurer to pay the unpaid claims but does not provide for punitive or compensatory damages, critics argue it incentivizes the denial of coverage.

In the event of litigation, the court’s role is to assess the already existing evidentiary record. That means it is essential to present a robust case in the initial application or during the administrative appeal before any litigation begins, said Ayeni, the disability lawyer for Andersen and Lewis.

“It’s the only shot to build a record for the courts, to develop a full body of evidence,” she said.

However, a successful disability case ultimately depends on documenting inability to work, not on obtaining a specific diagnosis. To augment the medical evidence, Ayeni often sends clients for neuropsychological testing, investigations of lung function and other specialist assessments. She also gathers affidavits from family members, professional colleagues and friends to confirm patients’ accounts.

In Rickie Andersen’s case, the strategy worked. Recognizing how complicated the application process was likely to be, she sought legal help early on. The insurer contracted by her employer approved her for short-term benefits late last year and granted her application for long-term benefits in February.

“I knew all of it was completely exhausting, so it wasn’t something I thought I could do on my own,” Andersen said.

This story was produced by KHN, which publishes California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation.

[Charon]

COVID pandemic causing heavier drinking, unwanted weight changes and sleeping problems
This survey reveals a secondary crisis that is likely to have persistent, long lasting effects.

Just sayin.

[Orange rabbit]

I can attest to the unwanted weight change! LOL
And it’s for real. Maybe I ate more this past year because I was in sweats and baggy pants and never had to put my suit pants on. But I did gain weight that I did not want.
OR

[Hotrod77]

its defiantly caused some serious added stress to a lot of us, and although i believe its slowly getting better it will take extra time for us to heal we just have to hang in there we are all in this together and gota be here for one another, im here for anyone that needs to vent or is anxious or just needs to chat about it..prayers and peace to all our family here.