COVID Again Rampant in Jax

[jaxlongtimer]

For the unvaccinated who claim it's about their personal freedom and that they aren't impacting others, consider that healthcare rationing, complete with the feared "death panels," is now taking place, starting with Idaho, a typical "red" state that has looked the other way while COVID runs rampant.  Ironically, it was GOP'er Sarah Palin that raised the issue (as a lie) to scare supporters of Obamacare and now it's mostly GOP governors that are making it a reality.

‘Sophie’s choice, over and over’: Death panels are the new phase of the pandemic

Remember “death panels”? Well, they’re back, and this time, they’re real.

“Death panels” was a phrase coined by Sarah Palin, the folksy-talkin’ former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate. She imagined that Obamacare would cause health bureaucrats to ration out medical care, after first sitting in judgment of who was most deserving to receive it.

This was awarded the “Lie of the Year” in 2009, as it was nowhere in any legislation. It was a right-wing fever dream.

But now a version of it has come true — in Idaho. Hospitals in northern Idaho are so flooded with COVID-19 patients that the state has declared an emergency, called “crisis standards of care.” It means when you show up to the emergency room, you may get treated based preferentially on who is most likely to live.

“If your mother has a heart attack, someone will have to assign her a point score designating how likely she is to survive,” the Idaho Falls Post Register wrote, describing the scheme last winter when it was first being contemplated. “If it isn’t high enough, she might not get an ICU bed, and a COVID patient will get it instead.

“We will ask the nurses and doctors who’ve broken their backs trying to save us to make that Sophie’s choice over, and over, and over.”

This past week the 200-bed hospital in Coeur d’Alene had 218 patients — so many it was treating patients in hallways and running out of oxygen to help them breathe, The Associated Press reported.

“What about the people who need emergency care but, because of the exploding COVID crisis here, can’t get it?” asked the Coeur d’Alene Press. “Do we just let them die?”

The answer to that is: “Yes.” Letting them die is actually the plan. The GOP governor of Idaho said it was “an unprecedented and unwanted point in the history of our state.” But he made no moves to try anything else, such as requiring vaccinations for anyone (he earlier had banned the governmental use of “vaccine passports” in the state). It’s a red state, and so for the most part they’re letting the virus rip and run.

Remember years ago when a tea party debate audience cheered the idea of letting someone without insurance die? What’s happening in Idaho is even worse because it’s so preventable.

Doctors in Idaho have said their COVID-19 patients are almost all unvaccinated. “We don’t have any vaccinated patients here,” an ICU doc in Boise told The Associated Press. “Misinformation is hurting people and killing people.”

Idaho ranks last in the percentage of its population having at least one dose of coronavirus vaccine, at only 45%. The U.S. is about 63%; Washington state 69%.

But Idaho is not the only place where the “death panel” concept is creeping into the conversation. The main hospital in Yakima is seeing a record number of COVID-19 patients, almost all unvaccinated. They’re raising the specter of rationing care there, too — something the chief medical officer said has never happened at the hospital.

“I sure hope we don’t get there, but that’s where we’re heading,” he warned in The Yakima Herald-Republic on Wednesday.

When I wrote last week about a COVID-19 skeptic and anti-vaxxer who had died of the disease, asking whether society should care, I heard from a slew of readers furious because their own medical care is being delayed or cut off — a diffuse version of the triage going on in Idaho.

“Am I angry? You bet I am,” wrote Mike Morrissey, of Snohomish, who says his cardiac surgery has been put off indefinitely due to a flood of COVID-19 patients. “My heart is failing without intervention. I can’t walk a block without stopping. But their choice [to not get vaccinated] just negated my urgent need.”

Echoed a nurse at a regional hospital: “They’re dying of stupidity by choice, but at the same time taking up space in the hospital and displacing stroke, cancer and cardiac patients.”

“Do I care what happens to those who won’t take a simple step to end this nightmare?” asked reader Jon Kraus, who said his brother-in-law had a surgery to fix a painful back condition put on hold due to COVID-19 levels. “I’m tired of catering to people who don’t care about anyone but themselves.”

This is why Gov. Jay Inslee and President Joe Biden suddenly feel more comfortable mandating the vaccine for groups of workers and businesses. Yes, the right-wing flank of the GOP will sue, march around in tri-corner hats and scream at their local school boards. But people are done. The vaccinated — the majority in most states — have had enough.

Now, as the workplace vax wars rev up, the best point to keep in mind is offered up by reader Michael Andreoni:

“Who I DO feel sorry for are the medical personnel who have to deal with this mess,” he wrote.

It’s the story of our time, how a pandemic that was visited upon us, through no fault of our own, ended up morphing into such a self-inflicted wound for America.

It didn’t take a tyrant or a deep state or a committee of banal bureaucrats to bring death panels to life, as Sarah Palin imagined in her fever dream. We willingly did it to ourselves.

Danny Westneat: dwestneat@seattletimes.com; Danny Westneat takes an opinionated look at the Puget Sound region's news, people and politics.


https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/sophies-choice-over-and-over-death-panels-are-the-new-phase-of-the-pandemic/

[Adam White]

Not through any fault of their own, but to use a quick analogy, it's similar to The Emporer with No Clothes.

You did what you believed to be the right thing, but wothout regular antibody testing, you have ZERO knowledge on how the vaccine truly affected you and how strong your immunity is or isn't,  yet you continue on with an invisible armor with the assumption that not only are you protected, but that you're protecting others when it might not be true

That's not a very good analogy - in The Emperor's New Clothes, it's a scam. Anyway, your analogy would hold more water if people getting the vaccine were relying on faith and buying snake oil. But they're not. Any single vaccine recipient may not have any particular knowledge of their immune status, but they are lucky enough to be able to rely on documentary evidence. This isn't blind faith, it's a decision based on a significant body of scientific knowledge.

The vaccines are known to be effective, even if the efficacy is diminished in respect of the Delta (and Alpha and possibly other) variants. And antibody testing only shows the presence of antibodies and has no way of determining how much immunity you possess. As I type this, I am working on the basis that you have not yet got your antibody test results. So you actually don't know if you have ever had the virus. If your results come back positive for COVID antibodies, that just means you have had the virus and have antibodies in your bloodstream. It says nothing about how much immunity you have (or which strain infected you, etc).

And who's to say that any person choosing to get the vaccine isn't ALSO in possession of COVID antibodies from a prior asymptomatic infection? I think one odd thing about your analogy is you seem to be the one who is putting faith in something you have no proof of (both the robustness of your immune system and how it would respond to a SARS-CoV-2 infection as well as the fact that you *might* have had a prior infection). The people choosing to get the vaccines at least have clinical evidence in support of their position (even if the evidence is less than complete, it's astronomically more extensive than what you're going on).

Maybe you were using 'you' to mean 'one' - but in my particular case, I got the vaccine and have not changed my behaviour since the beginning of lockdown. I barely leave the house, I avoid public transport and I wear a mask if I have to be indoors around people (grocery store, train on the way to work once a week now that I am being required to do that). So, no acting like I have an 'invisible armour'.

Anyway, getting the vaccine and having natural antibodies INCREASES your immunity. By choosing to forego the vaccine, a person is deliberately choosing to reduce his immunity.

If you have concerns about the vaccine, then maybe just say it? You've not articulated any particular concerns about the vaccine (at least not that I recall seeing in this thread). So as it stands, your argument seems to be, "I think I've had the virus, so I don't think I need to get the vaccine".

[Snaketoz]

Saying you have natural immunity reminds me of a friend who years ago said, "I always drive when I'm drunk, and I've never had a problem."

[tufsu1]

Bl8rjax, stop posting this anti-vax shit. I’ve warned you repeatedly. I’m not doing it again.

I'm curious what he has to say about Israel and their infections now. The serious cases are once again leaning heavily to the unvaccinated.

It may be a week or so before he answers you...

well here's the latest - 90% of most serious patients are unvaccinated

https://www.jpost.com/health-and-wellness/coronavirus/90-percent-of-covid-ecmo-patients-are-unvaccinated-health-ministry-679207?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Israeli+child+who+survived+Italy+cable+car+crash+abducted+to+Israel&utm_campaign=September+12%2C+2021+Day

[jaxlongtimer]

DeSantis is betting his farm on fighting mask and vaccine mandates. 

How is it good for his economy when half the population is scared to go out due to his efforts (eating at home, seeking online entertainment instead of local live and making online out-of-state purchases instead of shopping local) and the other half is filling up hospitals, wearing out health workers and first responders, missing work, costing taxpayers billions in medical care via subsidies or higher insurance premiums and preventing people with other health problems from getting proper medical care?  Add, this is causing supply chain interruptions and labor shortages due to all the people on the outs.  And, discouraging tourists and events from coming to our state.

After fining local school boards, he now plans to fine local governments.  So much for fighting top-down government.  And, the taxpayers are going to get stuck paying for all the sick employees of these entities.

Pro-vaccine?  He stood idly by while someone falsely claimed vaccines change your RNA.  Another example of him wanting his cake and eat it too.

His lack of leadership and the lengths he is going to for political manipulation are truly astounding.

WASHINGTON — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is threatening to impose hefty fines on city and county governments that require their employees be vaccinated against Covid.

DeSantis said Monday that his state would fine the local governments $5,000 for each employee that is forced to get a vaccine in order to continue working.

The threat stems from a law DeSantis signed in May that bans “governmental entities in Florida from requiring proof of vaccination or post-infection recovery to gain access to, entry upon, or service from their operations," his office said. "Additionally, the law imposes a $5,000 fine per violation for any entity, including government entities, that asks to see proof of vaccination in Florida.”

The state is preparing to begin enforcing the law on Thursday.

DeSantis said Monday that requirements in the city of Gainesville and Orange and Leon counties that workers must be vaccinated or risk getting fired “should alarm Floridians, and raises important questions.”

“This is political, it’s about using government power to control,” he said. “We’re going to protect these jobs, we’re going to protect livelihoods and we’re going to protect families.”

The governor warned that these mandates will result in “millions and millions of dollars potentially in fines.”

DeSantis’ administration has already been battling school mask mandates. A Florida appeals court late last week allowed the state to continue implementing an order banning mask requirements in schools while the issue is under review.

Last Thursday, President Joe Biden announced that the federal government would mandate Covid vaccines for federal workers and contractors. He also announced an emergency rule requiring all employers with 100 or more employees to require that their workforce is fully vaccinated or that unvaccinated workers produce a negative Covid test at least once a week.

https://news.yahoo.com/florida-gov-desantis-threatens-heavy-115600749.html

Gov. Ron DeSantis stood by during a Monday press conference as a city employee in Florida falsely claimed the COVID-19 vaccine "changes your RNA."

To promote his campaign against vaccine mandates and passports, DeSantis had invited several employees of the city of Gainesville, which is requiring its public employees to get vaccinated against the coronavirus or face termination, to speak out against the mandates.

The governor highlighted unvaccinated first responders facing the prospect of termination over the mandates, which he argued were unconstitutional. But he made no mention of the pervasive misinformation fueling much of the opposition to the life-saving shots.

"The vaccine changes your RNA, so, for me, that's a problem," the Gainesville man, Darris Friend, said from the podium. "They're taking away our freedom and liberty, little by little. They're using the vaccine for cover. Last year, they took away our religious rights, they're not defending our freedom of speech, and this is just one way to take us to the next step."

The crowd cheered as Friend left the podium, and the governor said nothing to contradict his false claim, a spin-off of a conspiracy theory popular online that the vaccines alter a person's DNA. They do not - a point made repeatedly by scientists and public-health officials including at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

An mRNA-developed vaccine, like those from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech, uses messenger ribonucleic acid to attach a dummy protein to a cell's outer surface in the muscle to teach the body's immune system how to defeat it; at no time does this enter the cell's nucleus and affect the DNA.

DeSantis' communications director, Taryn Fenske, told Insider the governor "has never said the vaccine changes your RNA, nor is that his opinion."

DeSantis held the press conference, featuring a slew of local elected officials and government employees, to announce his administration would level $5,000-per-infraction fines against any Florida cities and counties requiring government employees to be vaccinated as a term of employment. Florida's GOP-controlled state legislature recently passed a law barring local governments and private businesses from requiring that their employees be vaccinated or that customers be vaccinated to receive services.

The governor threatened "millions and millions of dollars potentially in fines" against local governments. The state is also supporting a lawsuit filed by more than 200 Gainesville public employees against the city's mandate. Friend, the Gainesville employee, is a plaintiff in that suit.

President Joe Biden announced last week that his administration would require employers with more than 100 employees to mandate either vaccination or weekly COVID-19 testing for all employees. He also announced that all federal government employees and contractors would be required to be vaccinated against COVID-19.

DeSantis called the national and local rules "ridiculous, unforeseen expansions of power" and argued that "thousands of thousands" of Floridians would be "coerced out of a job through government power."

"You just throw 'em out like they're chopped liver - that is just fundamentally wrong," DeSantis said. "We're not going to let that happen. We're going to protect these jobs, we're going to protect these peoples' families, we're going to protect their livelihoods."

The governor, who received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, repeatedly said Monday that people were turning down the vaccines because they'd already contracted the coronavirus and had natural immunity or because their doctors advised them against taking it. He repeated his belief that the vaccines should be widely available but that taking them should be a personal choice, and he didn't attest to the safety or efficacy of the vaccines.

https://news.yahoo.com/florida-gov-ron-desantis-let-214652661.html

[jcjohnpaint]

Our accreditation in our department at UNF might be cancelled due to NASAD agents not willing to travel to Florida due to safety concerns. They refuse to travel here.

[jaxlongtimer]

It is official:  Idaho now rationing healthcare due to hospitals overwhelmed by unvaccinated COVID patients.

Idaho hospitals are so overwhelmed with the surge in coronavirus cases that doctors and nurses have to contact dozens of regional hospitals across the West in hopes of finding places to transfer individual critical patients.

The situation has grown so bad that the Idaho Department of Health and Wellness announced Thursday that the entire state is in a hospital resource crisis, permitting medical facilities to ration health care and triage patients.

Kootenai Health, a hospital in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, has already converted a conference room into an overflow Covid unit, started paying traveling nurses $250 an hour and brought in a military medical unit. The hospital received permission from the state to begin rationing care last week. That's all in response to the Covid surge that in recent weeks has taken over much of Idaho — a state with one of the nation's lowest vaccination rates.

"It's just nonstop trying to find placement for these patients and the care that they need," said Brian Whitlock, the president and CEO of the Idaho Hospital Association, who noted that hospitals across the state are struggling with the same issue. "It really is a minute-by-minute assessment of where beds are open, and hospitals saying we don't know where we're going to put the next one."

The need for ICU bed space is affecting a range of patients: those suffering from Covid, as well as people who have had heart attacks or strokes or were involved in accidents, for instance.

Prior to the pandemic, experts said borders between states in the region were blurry when it came to patient care. While many of the states are known for their beautiful scenery and wide open terrains, the access to critical medical care can be difficult for the small rural towns that pepper its landscape. The easiest access to medical treatment might be across a border, rather than within a state's boundaries.

Those state boundaries, however, have become a bit starker as hospitals struggle to keep beds open for patients within their own state.

Health leaders in Washington state said that they are attempting to help their neighbors states, but they are keeping a close eye on their own bed space.

“We’ve had to initiate patient placement committees with physicians at our various hospitals to really assess and prioritize — in conversation with these facilities that are wanting to transfer — to really identify who’s at the most risk for higher level of care and what can be managed where they’re at and what cannot be managed where they’re at,” said Peg Currie, the chief operating officer at Providence Health Care in Spokane, Washington, which is a 40-minute drive from Coeur d’Alene and Kootenai Health.

It’s become an ethical challenge, as Washington has been aggressive in its Covid safety measures while Idaho’s state leaders have done little to address the latest surge.

Dr. Doug White, the director of the University of Pittsburgh's Program on Ethics and Decision Making in Critical Illness, said that while Washington's health care services may feel a moral obligation to help, the need for action falls to Idaho's state government.

"Medical practice is regulated at the state level, public health interventions come at the state level, and so in an emergency like this, I do think that the state lines become very important because what we're seeing is these very stark differences between how Washington state has responded to the pandemic and how Idaho has responded to the pandemic," he said, noting that Washington's aggressive safety measures came at some cost to the state.

But the relationships between these hospitals runs deep.

Dr. David Pate, a member of Idaho's coronavirus task force and the former president and CEO of St. Luke's Health System in Boise, said that because of how far Idaho's towns are from metropolitan areas, it was common prior to the pandemic for doctors to send their patients to cities like Spokane, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Portland, Oregon, and other far-flung cities in the region. It often required patients to be taken by plane or helicopter and close coordination between medical facilities.

Now, he said, doctors are being forced to call 30 or more hospitals across multiple states to find a bed for a single patient in hospitals with which they have little to no relationship. Some doctors in Idaho have called as far south as Texas and as far east as Georgia.

"You're taking seven to eight hours to call a bunch of hospitals to see if one will take your patient who might face a time-sensitive emergency," Pate said. "Seven to eight hours might mean that patient won't survive."

The challenge of transfers added to the pressure for Idaho to establish crisis standards of care, which means doctors can triage patients dependent on bed space availability and health care workers without specific training can be brought in to work in the ICU.

For Idaho's health leaders, the number of hospital transfers that Kootenai Health had to decline because of the Covid surge crystalized the need to change care standards last week.

A regional transfer hub for patients in urgent need of critical care — typically things like car accidents, heart attacks and strokes — Kootenai Health has had to turn down 392 patient transfer requests in the month of August because of their number of Covid patients. From July to the end of September last year, they turned down 18 patient transfers.

Kootenai Health is not the only hospital that is establishing these new care standards and northern Idaho is not the only part of the state that may be implementing them.

When Idaho declared it would ration care in its northern region last week, the state's health and welfare director, Dave Jeppesen, called it a “last resort.”

Earlier this week, he said crisis standards of care were “imminent” for hospitals in the rest of the state given that Idaho continues to set new records for hospitalizations and patients in the intensive care unit and on ventilators due to Covid.

“The numbers are increasing at an alarming rate and we do not see a peak in sight,” he said at a briefing on Tuesday.

In his announcement on Thursday, Jeppesen pleaded with Idaho residents, stating that "best way to end crisis standards of care is for more people to get vaccinated."

"The situation is dire," he said. We don’t have enough resources to adequately treat the patients in our hospitals, whether you are there for COVID-19 or a heart attack or because of a car accident.”

Under critical standards of care, the state allows health care providers to make difficult decisions about how to allocate and use scarce medical resources. That means some patients could go without treatment, as treatment is saved for those most likely to survive.

Idaho is not alone in pursuing this type of care.

Billings Clinic, a 300-bed hospital in Montana, is considering adopting crisis standards of care as its ICU hits 150 percent capacity. Alaska’s largest hospital, Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage, said Tuesday that based on its number of patients they had been “forced within our hospital to implement crisis standards of care.”

Meanwhile, hospitals in Wyoming that are not normally equipped with pediatric beds are struggling to address a wave of pediatric illnesses.

Eric Boley, the president of the state's hospital association, said they typically depend on neighboring states to take critically ill kids.

"We really don't have pediatric beds in our state, so we rely on surrounding states to help us with those," he said. "And we're seeing a big uptick in pediatric cases right now."

It's a frustration for health care leaders across the West, as they struggle to get this latest surge under control.

With few signs that it will let up any time soon, the region's health care systems could be stretched to their breaking point in a region of the country that remains highly skeptical of Covid vaccines and mask mandates.

"It doesn't matter what you believe about Covid right now. What matters is that our health care system's at capacity," said Pate, of Idaho's coronavirus task force. "I'm just asking people, work with us for a month, six weeks — humor us. Be careful, don't get in a large crowd, wear a mask and please do consider getting vaccinated."

https://news.yahoo.com/hospitals-west-struggle-beds-critically-083011541.html

[Charles Hunter]

Every unvaccinated person who shows up at one of those hospitals with COVID-19 should be sent home with a tube (or bottle, whatever) of sheep dewormer, along with "thoughts and prayers" of course.

[Non-RedNeck Westsider]

So the update that everyone was eagerly anticipating!

If it's not broken; don't fix it, right?

Well...  not enough anti-bodies present to register, so the test came back negative.  So basically just really fortunate to not have had anything else happen in the interim I guess.

Have appt. with CVS tomorrow.

[jaxlongtimer]

^ Welcome to the club.  Thank you for getting vaccinated.

Just imagine how many others are thinking like you but haven't tested to come to the conclusion you just did?  As stated before, no matter what, natural antibodies do not approach the level of vaccines so even if someone tests positive for them they aren't going to have maximum protection.

You were fortunate.  Others are finding out the hard way.

[Adam White]

So the update that everyone was eagerly anticipating!

If it's not broken; don't fix it, right?

Well...  not enough anti-bodies present to register, so the test came back negative.  So basically just really fortunate to not have had anything else happen in the interim I guess.

Have appt. with CVS tomorrow.

Glad you've been okay! Also, I guess that means that whatever you HAVE been doing has been successful at keeping you safe/healthy/COVID-free.

[BridgeTroll]

So the update that everyone was eagerly anticipating!

If it's not broken; don't fix it, right?

Well...  not enough anti-bodies present to register, so the test came back negative.  So basically just really fortunate to not have had anything else happen in the interim I guess.

Have appt. with CVS tomorrow.

I'm  happy for you... in many ways...

[Snaketoz]

So the update that everyone was eagerly anticipating!

If it's not broken; don't fix it, right?

Well...  not enough anti-bodies present to register, so the test came back negative.  So basically just really fortunate to not have had anything else happen in the interim I guess.

Have appt. with CVS tomorrow.

So relieved. Thanks for doing the right thing.

[jaxlongtimer]

Wow, Florida had 1 of every 25 COVID deaths reported globally... And, NE Florida counties leads the state.  While some statistics appear to show improvement, we have a long way to go.  Meanwhile, our governor continues to think Florida is a shining light for handling COVID  .

Florida accounted for an estimated 1 out of 25 global COVID-19 deaths recorded during the past week, a USA Today Network analysis showed, even as much of the  Jacksonville area continued to show progress in slowing the spread of the coronavirus.

In Duval County, new-case positivity for the week fell to its lowest level since late June.

However, the region's progress in stemming the tide of cases has not prevented COVID-19 deaths — now several weeks removed from the new-case peak in summer — from rising to their highest levels thus far in the coronavirus pandemic for portions of Northeast Florida.

The analysis found that of all the COVID-19 deaths reported worldwide during the one-week period ending Friday, 1 of every 25 was reported by the Florida Department of Health.

The worldwide data compiled by Johns Hopkins University showed that Florida accounted for 18.1 percent of the 13,643 deaths reported this week in the United States, and about 4 percent of the 62,291 recorded around the world.

Data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control showed that Clay County recorded the most deaths per 100,000 residents in Florida during the one-week period from Sept. 6-12: 116 deaths, or 53 per 100,000 residents. Columbia County ranked fourth-most, with Putnam County seventh.

Those statistics were not complete for some counties, including Alachua County.

It's not yet clear why those statistics reported a higher weekly toll for Clay County than for other nearby counties, including Duval County (110), St. Johns County (26) and Nassau County (nine). At some points during the pandemic, deaths have risen in an erratic pattern because of backlogs of reporting deaths, which often have sometimes taken weeks or even months to tabulate in full.

The pattern of rising deaths, however, is apparent across Northeast Florida.

Federal statistics show Duval County with death tolls of 137, 167 and 110 in the last three weeks. During prior stages of the pandemic, Duval County never added more than 76 fatalities from the disease.

St. Johns County had never recorded more than 17 COVID-19 deaths in a week, but has added 34, 20 and 26 in the past three weeks.

Florida also surpassed a grim milestone earlier this week: The state's cumulative death toll now exceeds 50,000 in statistics from the Florida Department of Health, dating back to March 2020.

Hospitalization and case counts, however, continued to decrease across Northeast Florida, in a more favorable sign for the region's summer surge that accompanied the spread of the more-contagious delta variant.

The Florida Hospital Association reported Thursday that total hospitalizations from COVID-19 across the state had decreased below 10,000 for the first time since the early weeks of summer, decreasing 31.5 percent over the past 14 days.

On Friday, Baptist Health Jacksonville announced that hospitalization numbers had diminished to the point where daily public updates would no longer be required.

As of Friday morning, the hospital reported 183 total COVID-19 patients — a decrease of more than 340 in four weeks.

Still, those hospitalization numbers remain well above their patterns from the spring, when Duval County regularly reported new-case positivity rates at or below 5 percent.

During the seven-day span from Sept. 10 to Thursday, the Florida Department of Health recorded 2,529 new cases in Duval County, compared to 3,063 between Sept. 3-9.

Also dropping were Baker County (170 to 91), Clay County (942 to 799), Nassau County (393 to 240) and St. Johns County (1,400 to 1,206).

However, Putnam County recorded a jump in new positive cases, from 486 to 533, while new-case positivity — although decreasing from 23.5 to 22.4 percent — remained among the highest in Florida.

In Duval County, new-case positivity slid to 10.6 percent, the lowest since the 6.9 percent listed for June 18-24.

https://www.jacksonville.com/story/news/coronavirus/2021/09/18/northeast-florida-covid-19-death-toll-continues-record-rise/8315225002/

[jaxlongtimer]

Do ya' think the vaccines have been tested enough?

The biggest vaccination campaign in history is underway. More than 5.92 billion doses have been administered across 184 countries, according to data collected by Bloomberg. The latest rate was roughly 33.6 million doses a day.

In the U.S., 385 million doses have been given so far. In the last week, an average of 777,010 doses per day were administered.

Enough doses have now been administered to fully vaccinate 38.6% of the global population—but the distribution has been lopsided. Countries and regions with the highest incomes are getting vaccinated more than 20 times faster than those with the lowest.

While the best vaccines are highly effective at preventing hospitalization and death, it takes a coordinated campaign to stop a pandemic. Infectious-disease experts say that vaccinating 70% to 85% of the U.S. population would enable a return to normalcy.

On a global scale, that’s a daunting level of vaccination. At the current pace of 33.6 million a day, the goal of high levels of global immunity remains a long way off. Manufacturing capacity, however, is steadily increasing, and new vaccines by additional manufacturers are coming to market.

Globally, the latest vaccination rate is 33,566,922 doses per day, on average. At this pace, it will take another 6 months to cover 75% of the population.

Israel was first to show that vaccines were bending the curve of Covid infections. The country led the world in early vaccinations, and by February more than 84% of people ages 70 and older had received two doses. Covid cases declined rapidly, and a similar pattern of vaccination and recovery repeated across dozens of other countries.

This progress is under threat. New strains, led by the highly transmissible delta variant, have caused renewed outbreaks. It’s now a life-and-death contest between vaccine and virus. Unvaccinated people are more at risk than ever, leading U.S. health officials to dub it a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.”

Even among those who are vaccinated, the delta variant may lead to mild cases, and those who get sick are able to spread the disease to others, according to the latest data. The vaccines remain effective at preventing hospitalization and death.

Since the start of the global vaccination campaign, countries have experienced unequal access to vaccines and varying degrees of efficiency in getting shots into people’s arms. Before March, few African nations had received a single shipment of shots. In the U.S., 115.9 doses have been administered for every 100 people.

Delivering billions of vaccines to stop the spread of Covid-19 worldwide is one of the greatest logistical challenges ever undertaken.

Roughly half of the U.S. population has been fully vaccinated, and states are flush with supply. The vaccination campaign, however, has slowed. Once the envy of the world for its swift rollout, the U.S. has since been overtaken by dozens of countries. There are still wide gaps between the most and least vaccinated counties in the U.S., leaving many communities vulnerable to continued outbreaks.

Distribution in the U.S. is directed by the federal government. Pfizer and BioNTech’s vaccine, as well as Moderna’s shot both require two doses taken several weeks apart. J&J’s inoculation requires just a single dose. Additional booster shots may be used to enhance protections over time.

So far, 211 million Americans have received at least one dose of a vaccine—82.0% of the adult population. At least 181 million people have completed a vaccination regimen. The U.S. is sending some of its excess supply to other hard-hit regions of the world....

....In the U.S., the latest vaccination rate is 777,010 doses per day, on average. At this pace, it will take another 4 months to cover 75% of the population.

Above story and country by country and state by state tables of how many doses and what percentage of their population is vaccinated is at:  https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/covid-vaccine-tracker-global-distribution/