All COVID news in here. If you don’t want to read anything depressing this evening, maybe open the first link, but skip all the others.
March 16: “…the authors find evidence of fairly significant change, but all before the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in humans. This means that the ‘generalist’ nature of many coronaviruses and their apparent facility to jump between hosts, imbued SARS-CoV-2 with ready-made ability to infect humans and other mammals, but those properties most have probably evolved in bats prior to spillover to humans.”
May 27: “Isabella had felt like a bit of a black sheep in her conservative, COVID-flippant family. Even so, she was shocked when she found out that her great-aunt and great-uncle had died after not getting vaccinated. Both had been eligible for a dose since the beginning of January.”
November 2: “Mariano Quisto, a remote community leader in Peru’s dense Amazon rainforest, first learned of the global pandemic in October when health workers arrived by boat at his isolated village with vaccines.”
November 11 (Twitter thread): “My brother died of COVID on Monday. I’ve learned he left the hospital early, against doctor’s recommendation. He never told me that part. He let me think he was getting better. For 9 days, I did what I could to help him. In the end, he died alone. I’m on another planet now.”
(Compiled into an article on DailyKos for easier reading, if necessary.)
November 23: ““I have been on ivermectin for 16 months, my wife and I,” Dr. Bruce Boros declared at the end of the meeting at the World Equestrian Center in Ocala. “I have never felt healthier in my life.” Two days later, the 71-year-old cardiologist fell ill with COVID-19.”
November 23: ““If you look at healthcare systems that have actually mandated this, they’ve retained over 99% of their workforce,” he said in support of the mandates during an August press event. “Their workforce does go along when the employer requires it.” […] Fierce Healthcare will update this list as more deadlines are reached and hospitals share their numbers.”
November 24: “With more than a month to go to close out the year, the CDC has recorded 386,233 COVID deaths in 2021 through Tuesday, more than the 385,343 counted in 2020 […] The paper cited experts as saying the cause was not just persistently low vaccine uptake but also the relaxation of safety measures such as wearing face masks and avoiding indoor gatherings, with many people wrongly assuming that vaccines alone had effectively ended the crisis.”
November 24: “When she went to the emergency room because half her body had gone numb, the ER doctor offered to book her an appointment with a counselor. Another doctor told her to try removing her IUD, because, she remembers him saying, “hormones do funny things to women.” When she asked her neurologist for more tests, he said that her medical background had already earned her “more testing than I was entitled to,” she told me. Being part of the medical community made her no different from any other patient with long COVID, her eventual diagnosis.” (Most of the medical professionals interviewed for this article are, unsurprisingly, women — but not all.)
Humanist+Humorist 