Happy Easter everyone! Love, Happiness and most of all good health to everyone and your families. May God show us mercy in these difficult times.
Or is it an orthodox thing? I don’t know anything about religion other than that I dated a Russian chick and their leader was another old guy with a different silly hat.
Chief Physician in MA on his desperate pursuit of PPE. This is like a made for TV episode. Crazy. If the fed isn't going to help, get out of the way. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2010025 In Pursuit of PPE As a chief physician executive, I rarely get involved in my health system’s supply-chain activities. The Covid-19 pandemic has changed that. Protecting our caregivers is essential so that these talented professionals can safely provide compassionate care to our patients. Yet we continue to be stymied by a lack of personal protective equipment (PPE), and the cavalry does not appear to be coming. Our supply-chain group has worked around the clock to secure gowns, gloves, face masks, goggles, face shields, and N95 respirators. These employees have adapted to a new normal, exploring every lead, no matter how unusual. Deals, some bizarre and convoluted, and many involving large sums of money, have dissolved at the last minute when we were outbid or outmuscled, sometimes by the federal government. Then we got lucky, but getting the supplies was not easy. A lead came from an acquaintance of a friend of a team member. After several hours of vetting, we grew confident of the broker’s professional pedigree and the potential to secure a large shipment of three-ply face masks and N95 respirators. The latter were KN95 respirators, N95s that were made in China. We received samples to confirm that they could be successfully fit-tested. Despite having cleared this hurdle, we remained concerned that the samples might not be representative of the bulk of the products that we would be buying. Having acquired the requisite funds — more than five times the amount we would normally pay for a similar shipment, but still less than what was being requested by other brokers — we set the plan in motion. Three members of the supply-chain team and a fit tester were flown to a small airport near an industrial warehouse in the mid-Atlantic region. I arrived by car to make the final call on whether to execute the deal. Two semi-trailer trucks, cleverly marked as food-service vehicles, met us at the warehouse. When fully loaded, the trucks would take two distinct routes back to Massachusetts to minimize the chances that their contents would be detained or redirected. Hours before our planned departure, we were told to expect only a quarter of our original order. We went anyway, since we desperately needed any supplies we could get. Upon arrival, we were jubilant to see pallets of KN95 respirators and face masks being unloaded. We opened several boxes, examined their contents, and hoped that this random sample would be representative of the entire shipment. Before we could send the funds by wire transfer, two Federal Bureau of Investigation agents arrived, showed their badges, and started questioning me. No, this shipment was not headed for resale or the black market. The agents checked my credentials, and I tried to convince them that the shipment of PPE was bound for hospitals. After receiving my assurances and hearing about our health system’s urgent needs, the agents let the boxes of equipment be released and loaded into the trucks. But I was soon shocked to learn that the Department of Homeland Security was still considering redirecting our PPE. Only some quick calls leading to intervention by our congressional representative prevented its seizure. I remained nervous and worried on the long drive back, feelings that did not abate until midnight, when I received the call that the PPE shipment was secured at our warehouse. This experience might have made for an entertaining tale at a cocktail party, had the success of our mission not been so critical. Did I foresee, as a health-system leader working in a rich, highly developed country with state-of-the-art science and technology and incredible talent, that my organization would ever be faced with such a set of circumstances? Of course not. Yet when encountering the severe constraints that attend this pandemic, we must leave no stone unturned to give our health care teams and our patients a fighting chance. This is the unfortunate reality we face in the time of Covid-19. Andrew W. Artenstein, M.D. Baystate Health, Springfield, MA
That's right today , orthodox is usually one week after catholic easter. But what easter when I can't even roast a lamb or a goat over a spitfire. Anyway happy easter!
Not religious and dont really celebrate Easter but that sounds so much better than a traditional ham thats usually eaten here.
We are also doing some of the best per capita testing in the world in these large hot spot states as well. I know it's easy to complain, but we have to look at what we are doing compared to other places in the world. If New York was a country by itself it would have done the most per capita testing for any country over 10 million people. We are at a MAJOR bottleneck overall and it would be really nice if Texas and Cali doubled testing, but the focus is clearly on the northeast as it should be. Also, based on the negative test results we are certainly testing more than hospital candidates. I'm not sure why you would say that is only who we are testing.
Greek rabbits don't make eggs. No, we only break eggs. Egg hunting is more of a central european tradition. Here we only gather 30 people+ and roast goats and baby lambs in big souvlas and eat until we fall down.
We still have a long way to go in terms of per capita testing across the entire country to avoid missing blind spots, but things have improved overall in the past 6 weeks. That being said, our positive test rate is still relatively high and it is a huge mistake that certain areas are in the process of ending their quarantines (Florida I'm looking at you). America’s 20 percent positivity rate is disquieting. The U.S. did almost 25 times as many tests on April 15 as on March 15, yet both the daily positive rate and the overall positive rate went up in that month. If the U.S. were a jar of 330 million jelly beans, then over the course of the outbreak, the health-care system has reached in with a bigger and bigger scoop. But every day, 20 percent of the beans it pulls out are positive for COVID-19. If the outbreak were indeed under control, then we would expect more testing—that is, a larger scoop—to yield a smaller and smaller proportion of positives. So far, that hasn’t happened. The test-positivity rate, then, is a decent (if unusual) proxy for the severity of an outbreak in an area. And it shows clearly that the U.S. still lags far behind other countries in the course of fighting its outbreak. South Korea—which discovered its first coronavirus case on the same day as the U.S.—has tested more than half a million people, or about 1 percent of its population, and discovered about 10,500 cases. The U.S. has now tested 3.2 million people, which is also about 1 percent of its population, but it has found more than 630,000 cases. So while the U.S. has a 20 percent positivity rate, South Korea’s is only about 2 percent—a full order of magnitude smaller. https://www.theatlantic.com/technol...reak-out-control-test-positivity-rate/610132/
Some good info on Germany forward looking plan related to antibody testing. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/18/...odies-germany-seeks-path-out-of-lockdown.html
