Emergence of a Deadly Coronavirus

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It’s important to remember the FedEx people.I left a pint of good whiskey on a rock in the yard for my driver.They were very pleased.
No one wants homemade cookies anymore.

I left a pint of good whiskey on a rock in the yard for my driver.

They're using just about everything as hand sanitizer these days.

He plans on using it as an internal flush to kill the virus.

Huh. I've been using Lysol myself. Seems to be working so far.

Huh. I've been using Lysol myself. Seems to be working so far.

That's good to know, thanks.

Would the "medical and lost wage benefits" packages pay 100% of their expenses?

I always hear about co-pay in America but I'm not sure what that means.

I think it means they still have to pay some / a fair chunk of money for most services, out of pocket.

Maybe that would be waived in this case for healthcare workers, or maybe the benefit is automatically 100%.

Would it extend to their families, if they got sick and then their families became sick after?

(Yes, my mind always snowballs).

he state disclosed 1,050 Long Island nursing home residents have died from COVID-19, nearly 70% more than previously reported, as the state faces scrutiny over how it has protected vulnerable residents during the coronavirus pandemic.

Statewide, at least 4,813 people have died from COVID-19 in the state's nursing homes since March 1, 1,700 more than previously reported, according to the latest figures.

That number includes 457 residents who died in Nassau nursing homes, compared to 306 reported on Friday, and 593 in Suffolk nursing homes, compared to 317 previously reported.

he tally by the state Department of Health for the first time includes people believed to have been killed by the coronavirus before their diagnoses could be confirmed by a lab test and represents a dramatic increase in reported deaths at elder care facilities.

However, exactly how many nursing home residents have died remains uncertain because the list doesn’t include residents transferred to hospitals before dying. Long Island has 79 nursing homes, with a total of roughly 15,000 occupied beds on average, according to a Newsday analysis.

The new numbers confirm what advocates, family members and even nursing home operators have said — that the state’s original list severely underestimated the damage that COVID-19 had wreaked at many nursing homes.

Advocates say nursing homes have struggled to secure personal protective equipment, get enough tests for residents and have enough workers at facilities that were already short-staffed. Additionally, nursing home operators complain that a New York State Department of Health order from March 25 required them to accept COVID-19 patients being discharged from hospitals and an April 1 law granted nursing homes some immunity from civil and criminal liability.

They’re in a petri dish filled with this virus," said Susan Smith, whose father Louis Gair, 90, died April 20 after contracting COVID-19 at the Long Island State Veterans Home in Stony Brook. The facility, run by Stony Brook University for veterans and their dependents, had the most deaths of a nursing facility on Long Island.

The state list reported 53 deaths at the Veterans Home, including 48 confirmed and 5 presumed positive cases, although the facility reported to families on Tuesday night that there were 65 deaths among residents, including those who died at the hospital. That was an increase from 59 reported Friday.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Tuesday said nursing homes were doing a “phenomenal job” in difficult circumstances and defended the state’s response to the crisis at nursing homes, including orders in March barring visitors and providing PPE to nursing homes.

State officials said the March 25 directive was prompted by a fear that nursing homes might discriminate against virus patients the way HIV patients were discriminated against in the 1980s during the early days of the AIDS crisis. The intent of the guidance was to remind nursing homes of their fiduciary, legal and moral obligation to accept these patients, but also to note that under law they could transfer them if the nursing home lacked the space, staff or equipment to treat them.

The officials said the immunity from lawsuits clause in the state budget deal protects all health care workers, not just those in nursing homes, and was prompted by the desire to protect health care workers from out of state who were recruited to work in New York, and the hospital at which they worked, from being sued because they did not have a New York state license.

Advocates said the state needs to release more information about the extent of the outbreak inside a facility and offer more assistance to nursing homes.

The latest list could encourage facilities to send patients to hospitals when they shouldn’t, according to Richard Mollot, executive director of the Long Term Care Community Coalition, a non-profit advocacy group said

What kind of impetus does this give to nursing homes to send people off to the hospital?” Mollot said. “We always unfortunately see a lot of game playing in the nursing home industry, especially in New York, and this just exacerbates their ability to hide numbers.”

Mollot said the most useful information the state could release would be the number of cases currently being treated inside a facility.

A joint letter by AARP New York, SEIU 1199, NAACP and other organization on Tuesday called for Gov. Cuomo to marshall resources and policies for nursing homes and other long-term care facilities, similar to how the state helped hospital systems prepare for a surge in patients back in March and early April.

The numbers released Tuesday are “extremely upsetting. These are some of the frailest people in our society,” said Bill Ferris, AARP New York lobbyist. “The governor needs to act in the same coordinated, focused manner as he did for the hospital system.”

Cuomo and his administration on Tuesday said they’ve been focused on protecting nursing homes since early March.

As he has at previous news conferences, Cuomo emphasized that nursing homes that couldn’t safely care for virus patients from hospitals shouldn’t have accepted them. “We have alternatives,” he said.

“Everyone wants to point at the nursing homes now,” Cuomo said. “We knew the nursing homes would be a target … they are doing phenomenal work.”

“All it takes is one person, one staff person, one facility person who comes in to work on the air conditioning ... you do everything you can, but you can’t do everything,” he said.

Cuomo also added: “I would take all of those numbers with a grain of salt. What does ‘presumed death’ mean? … I think they are going to change over time.”

Nursing home operators didn’t contest the new numbers, but said a shortage of tests still hampers an accurate appraisal of how many residents died of the virus, rather than the many underlying ailments of the elderly residents.

“Testing is still not widely available,” said Michael Balboni, executive director of the Greater New York Health Care Facilities Association. “Second-guessing is the sport of the day, but it doesn’t necessarily contribute to factual information as to the numbers or for epidemiological study,” Balboni said. “I think in some ways, it’s pursuing a unicorn. No one is going to be truly satisfied with the authenticity of the final numbers.”

Stephen Hanse, CEO of the New York State Health Facilities Association, which represents the nursing home industry, said he welcomes the new way of tallying deaths.

“It is not a reflection of the care being provided in facilities, it is a function of the fact that you can’t practice social distancing in a nursing home,” Hanse said. “I can’t stand 6 feet away from a resident and provide care.”

After weeks of friction, he said he was glad Cuomo on Tuesday said nursing home workers are doing “phenomenal” work.

“People ask me who is to blame, what’s to blame,” Hanse said. “I am reminded of the saying that blame is a lazy person’s way of making sense out of chaos. I think that is really accurate here as we’re dealing with the highly contagious, invisible virus that knows no boundaries and truly preys on the most vulnerable in our community.”

Still, distraught family members and residents at facilities questioned why some facilities have been hit so hard.

Smith, whose father died at the Long Island State Veterans Home in Stony Brook, said it took days for her father to be tested after developing symptoms. She also said the facility should have isolated infected patients sooner.

Stony Brook University operates the facility. Dr. Ken Kaushansky, senior vice president of health sciences and dean of the Renaissance School of Medicine, said in a statement that the veterans home has “taken swift action since the beginning of this crisis to cohort infected patients. At the same time, we have been transparent about how the coronavirus is impacting our residents and employees.”

In a statement, officials at the veterans home said it was seeing a “small number of infections, but the rate has decreased significantly.”

In Nassau County, Fulton Commons Care Center in East Meadow had the most deaths, at 39. Previously, it had reported fewer than five deaths, which the state Department of Health had not been releasing because of concerns about privacy. The latest list includes those facilities.

Parker Jewish Institute on the Nassau-Queens border in New Hyde Park and Isabella Geriatric Center in Manhattan — one of New York City’s largest nursing homes with 705 beds — have reported the highest number of deaths: 71 and 64, respectively.

Audrey Waters, a spokeswoman for Isabella Geriatric Center, said in an email last week, "Isabella, like all other nursing homes in New York City, initially had limited access to widespread and consistent in-house testing to quickly diagnose our residents and staff. This hampered our ability to identify those who were infected and asymptomatic, despite our efforts to swiftly separate anyone who presented symptoms.”

Parker Jewish Institute did not respond to a request for comment.

New York's governor Cuomo ordered nursing homes to take in coronavirus patients.

Pataki, who served as NY’s governor from 1995 to 2006, told the Post that the state Health Department should never have issued an edict requiring nursing homes to accept coronavirus patients, when sick and elderly people are most at risk from COVID-19.

If we end up finding out that Covid is more damaging than we think and there is no vaccine or reliably effective non-invasive treatments (ie it ends up being a very bad thing that becomes part of the regular human condition), I wonder if someone will invent a helmet-like contraption that can be worn in public. I'm being serious.

Think of an "all-in-one" self contained helmet that would include an effective respirator and would also then shield the eyes and possibly even have a communicator to communicate with others in your family for example that would be wearing their own helmets (like motorcycle helmet communicators people use) and some sort of speaker to communicate with other people in your surroundings (e.g. store employees).

This kind of thing is sounding more attractive to me:

COVID-19 CAN DESTROY MENTAL HEALTH FOR NT'S AND ASPIES ALIKE

The mental toll of lockdowns appears to be growing as many states enter their seventh week of mandatory stay-at-home orders.

Even people who had no previous symptoms of anxiety or depression regularly report nightmares, panic attacks, and agoraphobia to friends and on social media. Many healthy American adults have not left their homes or apartments since March, apparently terrified by unceasing media coverage even though hospitalization and death data suggest the coronavirus poses low risks to them.

As the gap between those people who are terrified and those with a more complete understanding of the risks of the coronavirus increases, even relationships within families are coming under increasing pressure.

A college student in Colorado – who asked not to be identified – explained that when he returned home in March, he expected the worst. “My brother and I moved home to our house in south Denver,” he wrote in an email. “We accepted the fact that things could get ugly pretty quick and it would be best if we were all at home together.”

However, over the next several weeks, as the student realized that his actual risk of death from the coronavirus was very low and that his parents were also at low risk, he became increasingly frustrated. “My parents all this time had been disinfecting packages left by Amazon and ordering groceries greeting the delivery driver in an N95 mask,” he wrote. “My parents are both under 65 and have no underlying health conditions.”

After seeing results from a study of people in California that suggested death rates from the coronavirus were far lower than had been reported – the student decided to visit friends. “My parents called me and I told them I was at my friend’s house and they shouldn’t be worried,” he wrote. They told him to come home, but he had been drinking and didn’t want to drive. “What happened next shocked me, they called the police on me,” he wrote. Police officers “woke up my friend’s Dad after shining a spotlight in their bedroom window,” he wrote.

That night the student and his brother left their home; he didn’t speak to his parents for several weeks.

For younger children, parental anxieties can be even more crushing.

A New York City resident, who asked not to be identified, explained how his sister fled the city for a house in New Jersey and rejected his efforts to visit her. “This past weekend we were able to get to NJ for an hour of outdoor time with them,” he wrote. “My sister, a normally fit, energetic, and smiling woman, was nothing more than a pensive, pale, thin, and scared shell.” Her daughter and son, both elementary-school aged, are suffering from her fear, he wrote. “As the social one who would normally walk around NYC saying HI to just about anyone he has become cautious and despondent.”

A woman in Texas wrote that a good friend “is too frightened to leave the house… she won’t go out herself or allow anyone in who might bring the infection. She had two boys, 6 and 10, that she allows to ‘play’ with the neighbors, but they must stay on opposite sides of the street.”

Some parents have gone further. Increasingly, physicians agree that the coronavirus poses few serious dangers to children or young adults. On Sunday, Australia’s deputy chief medical officer said in a statement that “far fewer children are affected by COVID-19” than the flu. Countries including Israel, Denmark, and Germany are reopening some or all schools.

Yet with American governors going the other way and extending school closures, some parents are confining their children to homes or apartments and refusing to allow them outside even for short stretches, family members, friends, and neighbors say.

One New York City resident – who asked to remain nameless – provided screenshots of texts between his wife and one of their neighbors in which the neighbor explains she, her husband, and their 11-year-old son have not left the apartment since March 12, nearly two months ago. “[Our son] is busy with all his school and after school,” the neighbor wrote. To survive, they rely on occasional grocery deliveries, she wrote in the screenshot.

The resident fears for the child’s welfare, but he doesn’t know what to do. “This kind of fear is pervasive in Manhattan, or at least among the people left in Manhattan,” he wrote.

Source: Coronavirus lockdowns take grim toll on mental health of Americans

We are in our 51st day of quarantine. Seems like it was only yesterday. Not really feeling anxiety, just bored from being cooped up. My wife is an extreme extrovert NT and after a few weeks of quarantine, she began to become depressed and scared. By that time I had a fair understanding of the threat and mitigation strategies. So I decided we needed to get out and escape quarantine every once and awhile. So I took her out for a drive. Then a few days later, I took her for a drive to see our children 100 miles away (of course we keep social distancing protocols) so no hugging or kissing or even getting close. Then several days later, I took her shopping. Last week we escaped quarantine three times to go shopping. So the result is that she doesn't fear leaving home. We have our protocols, wearing N95 mask and plenty of hand sanitizing gel. But there is no anxiety or fear. She is able to see first hand that the world outside still exist and is ready and waiting for us.