COVID-19

gwb-trading · Mar 8, 2021

Some more history...

300 Years ago a virus was raging through England causing death and misery and forcing the whole country into lockdown. A woman who'd spent time in the Ottoman Empire knew how to stop it. This is the story...

A 300-Year-Old Tale Of One Woman's Quest To Stop A Deadly Virus
https://www.npr.org/sections/health...le-of-one-womans-quest-to-stop-a-deadly-virus

Three hundred years ago, in 1721, England was in the grips of a smallpox epidemic.

"There were people dying all over the place," says Isobel Grundy, a professor emeritus of English at the University of Alberta in Canada. "Social life came to a standstill — and all the things we've suddenly become familiar with again."

But as Londoners cowered inside their homes, there was a woman who knew how to end the outbreak. Her name was Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and she had learned a technique from women in the distant Ottoman Empire that could stop the pox in its tracks.

What happened next is a tale of politics and public health that bears some "depressingly similar" parallels to the current pandemic, Grundy says. But it also shows how science and determination turned the tide against one of the worst diseases humanity has ever endured.

Smallpox was far deadlier than the coronavirus the world is currently battling. Fatality rates were as high as 30%, and many of the dead were children. Those who survived were often left scarred by the disease, which covered the body in blisters.

But in the 1700s in the Ottoman Empire, centered around modern day Turkey, some women knew how to stop it.

These women were part of a vast informal network of female medical professionals. "There were a lot of women practitioners in the Ottoman Empire," says Akif Yerlioglu, a historian of Ottoman medicine at the University of Oslo in Norway. They were not allowed into the madrassas, Ottoman universities, but they shared knowledge among themselves, working as faith healers, midwives, surgeons and, even in one case Yerlioglu says, an eye doctor.

What these women knew was this: Take a bit of pus from a smallpox patient and use a needle to scratch a tiny amount just beneath the skin so it gets into the blood of a healthy person. That person would get a mild form of smallpox and become immune to the more serious version.

Yerlioglu says the practice is strikingly absent from Ottoman medical texts written by men, but accounts that do survive make clear that it was a well-known practice. "Women were sharing this knowledge, this know-how, among themselves," he says.

The technique was known as engrafting, variolation or, simply, inoculation. It is thought to have originated in China centuries earlier, and it was also practiced in India and Africa.

"We don't know exactly why or how it works, we just know that it does work," says Michael Kinch, an associate vice chancellor at Washington University in St. Louis who has written a book on vaccination. Kinch and others suspect this form of inoculation may have worked because it introduced the smallpox virus through the skin, rather than the lungs.

"By putting it in the place that is less deadly, i.e., the skin, then you would have a greater likelihood of surviving," he says. Another theory is that the inoculators were using a less dangerous strain of the virus.

This kind of inoculation did have risks. A relatively small number of people could become very sick and even die, and patients could give others smallpox. But it was far less dangerous than catching it through normal routes.

European doctors were aware of what the Ottomans and others were doing but they refused to believe it worked. At the time, "Europe was pretty isolated and it was fairly xenophobic," Kinch says.

Grundy says reluctance to adopt the practice was about prejudice, not science. "It comes from an Islamic country that we regard as backwards — 'How could they have the answer to smallpox?' — and also it was something done by women, which is bad."

This was where things stood when Lady Mary arrived in the Ottoman Empire's capital of Constantinople in 1717. Lady Mary was a wealthy noblewoman, married to the English ambassador to the empire. She was enthralled by the thriving metropolis.

"The art was completely different, the customs of life were completely different, the music, everything really," says Grundy, who has devoted much of her career to studying Lady Mary's writings. "So it was all very exciting to her, and among the new discoveries she took in was this practice of inoculating against smallpox."

Lady Mary described what she saw in a letter home to a friend. She told how old women kept pus from a smallpox victim in a nutshell and used a needle to create a tiny scratch in their patient's vein. She was instantly convinced of its potential.

"I am well satisfied of the safety of this experiment, since I intend to try it on my dear little son," she wrote. Lady Mary was ready to inoculate her son because smallpox had killed her brother a few years earlier, and shortly before traveling East, she had contracted it herself.

"She did survive but she was very, very badly marked. Her eyelashes never grew back after the smallpox and her skin was very much scarred," Grundy says.

She had her son inoculated in Constantinople. The family traveled back to England. And then, in 1721, came the major smallpox outbreak in London.

Lady Mary quickly arranged to have her daughter (also named Mary) inoculated. And as a member of the aristocracy, Lady Mary's decision got noticed. It was written about in the papers.

"By the time spots came up on little Mary, there was kind of a queue at the door to come and see her," Grundy says. "Both social acquaintances of Lady Mary and of high-placed doctors."

Lady Mary embraced the attention. In her letter of 1717, she had written of her desire to spread the practice of inoculation: "I am patriot enough to take the pains to bring this useful invention into fashion in England." But in the next breath, she expressed contempt for British doctors, who she believed were too preoccupied with making money: "I should not fail to write to some of our doctors very particularly about it, if I knew any one of them that I thought had virtue enough to destroy such a considerable branch of their revenue, for the good of mankind."

Rather than turn to the male medical establishment, Lady Mary sought to persuade the future queen of England, Caroline, the Princess of Wales, to inoculate her children. The princess, an ally of Lady Mary's, was willing to give it a try. After consulting with physicians and the king, the decision was made to conduct a series of tests "taking criminals condemned to death and asking them to volunteer to be inoculated experimentally," Grundy says.

Six condemned criminals were offered pardons in exchange for participating in the experiment. It was "by today's standards, wildly unethical," says Kinch. There were additional tests on orphans. These kinds of experiments were commonplace for medical professionals of the time — it was medicine as practiced in a society with a rigid class structure, where slavery was still legal.

"I think there was a different view of people's lives, and of the value of life and all lives being equal," he says.

In the end, the Princess of Wales did inoculate her daughters (her sons, possible heirs to the throne, were considered too important to risk), and Lady Mary became a public figure, which came with consequences.

The princess's decision made inoculation "a political matter," says Grundy. "Those who opposed the royal family would say, 'Oh, well this is something the Princess of Wales is doing, I wouldn't trust that.' "

There were others who mistrusted its Islamic origins and some who just resisted the idea of putting a foreign contaminant in their body. For Grundy, the cultural divisions Lady Mary encountered feel very familiar. She sees parallels in today's political fights over whether to wear masks, or the racially charged conspiracy theories claiming the coronavirus came from a Chinese lab.

"The repetition of the way in which battle lines get drawn, that's really extraordinary," Grundy says.

Kinch says Lady Mary's actions also offer lessons.

"One takeaway for everyone, whether it be scientists or nonscientists, is that we're not nearly as smart as we think we are," he says. "We have much we can learn from others."

Lady Mary wanted to stop smallpox, and to do it she was open to all ideas, he says. "Her brilliance and her open-mindedness helped her to embrace something that helped her to save hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives."

That's because the technique she'd borrowed from Ottoman women did take hold in England. Many thousands were inoculated, including a young boy named Edward Jenner. He went on to develop the first vaccine, also against smallpox. Vaccines proved to be safer and more effective than the old ways of inoculation. Smallpox was declared completely eradicated in 1980.

And vaccination is still being used today to fight new deadly viruses, including the coronavirus.

Tsing Tao · Mar 8, 2021

gwb-trading said:
Some more history...

300 Years ago a virus was raging through England causing death and misery and forcing the whole country into lockdown. A woman who'd spent time in the Ottoman Empire knew how to stop it. This is the story...

A 300-Year-Old Tale Of One Woman's Quest To Stop A Deadly Virus
https://www.npr.org/sections/health...le-of-one-womans-quest-to-stop-a-deadly-virus

Three hundred years ago, in 1721, England was in the grips of a smallpox epidemic.

"There were people dying all over the place," says Isobel Grundy, a professor emeritus of English at the University of Alberta in Canada. "Social life came to a standstill — and all the things we've suddenly become familiar with again."

But as Londoners cowered inside their homes, there was a woman who knew how to end the outbreak. Her name was Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and she had learned a technique from women in the distant Ottoman Empire that could stop the pox in its tracks.

What happened next is a tale of politics and public health that bears some "depressingly similar" parallels to the current pandemic, Grundy says. But it also shows how science and determination turned the tide against one of the worst diseases humanity has ever endured.

Smallpox was far deadlier than the coronavirus the world is currently battling. Fatality rates were as high as 30%, and many of the dead were children. Those who survived were often left scarred by the disease, which covered the body in blisters.

But in the 1700s in the Ottoman Empire, centered around modern day Turkey, some women knew how to stop it.

These women were part of a vast informal network of female medical professionals. "There were a lot of women practitioners in the Ottoman Empire," says Akif Yerlioglu, a historian of Ottoman medicine at the University of Oslo in Norway. They were not allowed into the madrassas, Ottoman universities, but they shared knowledge among themselves, working as faith healers, midwives, surgeons and, even in one case Yerlioglu says, an eye doctor.

What these women knew was this: Take a bit of pus from a smallpox patient and use a needle to scratch a tiny amount just beneath the skin so it gets into the blood of a healthy person. That person would get a mild form of smallpox and become immune to the more serious version.

Yerlioglu says the practice is strikingly absent from Ottoman medical texts written by men, but accounts that do survive make clear that it was a well-known practice. "Women were sharing this knowledge, this know-how, among themselves," he says.

The technique was known as engrafting, variolation or, simply, inoculation. It is thought to have originated in China centuries earlier, and it was also practiced in India and Africa.

"We don't know exactly why or how it works, we just know that it does work," says Michael Kinch, an associate vice chancellor at Washington University in St. Louis who has written a book on vaccination. Kinch and others suspect this form of inoculation may have worked because it introduced the smallpox virus through the skin, rather than the lungs.

"By putting it in the place that is less deadly, i.e., the skin, then you would have a greater likelihood of surviving," he says. Another theory is that the inoculators were using a less dangerous strain of the virus.

This kind of inoculation did have risks. A relatively small number of people could become very sick and even die, and patients could give others smallpox. But it was far less dangerous than catching it through normal routes.

European doctors were aware of what the Ottomans and others were doing but they refused to believe it worked. At the time, "Europe was pretty isolated and it was fairly xenophobic," Kinch says.

Grundy says reluctance to adopt the practice was about prejudice, not science. "It comes from an Islamic country that we regard as backwards — 'How could they have the answer to smallpox?' — and also it was something done by women, which is bad."

This was where things stood when Lady Mary arrived in the Ottoman Empire's capital of Constantinople in 1717. Lady Mary was a wealthy noblewoman, married to the English ambassador to the empire. She was enthralled by the thriving metropolis.

"The art was completely different, the customs of life were completely different, the music, everything really," says Grundy, who has devoted much of her career to studying Lady Mary's writings. "So it was all very exciting to her, and among the new discoveries she took in was this practice of inoculating against smallpox."

Lady Mary described what she saw in a letter home to a friend. She told how old women kept pus from a smallpox victim in a nutshell and used a needle to create a tiny scratch in their patient's vein. She was instantly convinced of its potential.

"I am well satisfied of the safety of this experiment, since I intend to try it on my dear little son," she wrote. Lady Mary was ready to inoculate her son because smallpox had killed her brother a few years earlier, and shortly before traveling East, she had contracted it herself.

"She did survive but she was very, very badly marked. Her eyelashes never grew back after the smallpox and her skin was very much scarred," Grundy says.

She had her son inoculated in Constantinople. The family traveled back to England. And then, in 1721, came the major smallpox outbreak in London.

Lady Mary quickly arranged to have her daughter (also named Mary) inoculated. And as a member of the aristocracy, Lady Mary's decision got noticed. It was written about in the papers.

"By the time spots came up on little Mary, there was kind of a queue at the door to come and see her," Grundy says. "Both social acquaintances of Lady Mary and of high-placed doctors."

Lady Mary embraced the attention. In her letter of 1717, she had written of her desire to spread the practice of inoculation: "I am patriot enough to take the pains to bring this useful invention into fashion in England." But in the next breath, she expressed contempt for British doctors, who she believed were too preoccupied with making money: "I should not fail to write to some of our doctors very particularly about it, if I knew any one of them that I thought had virtue enough to destroy such a considerable branch of their revenue, for the good of mankind."

Rather than turn to the male medical establishment, Lady Mary sought to persuade the future queen of England, Caroline, the Princess of Wales, to inoculate her children. The princess, an ally of Lady Mary's, was willing to give it a try. After consulting with physicians and the king, the decision was made to conduct a series of tests "taking criminals condemned to death and asking them to volunteer to be inoculated experimentally," Grundy says.

Six condemned criminals were offered pardons in exchange for participating in the experiment. It was "by today's standards, wildly unethical," says Kinch. There were additional tests on orphans. These kinds of experiments were commonplace for medical professionals of the time — it was medicine as practiced in a society with a rigid class structure, where slavery was still legal.

"I think there was a different view of people's lives, and of the value of life and all lives being equal," he says.

In the end, the Princess of Wales did inoculate her daughters (her sons, possible heirs to the throne, were considered too important to risk), and Lady Mary became a public figure, which came with consequences.

The princess's decision made inoculation "a political matter," says Grundy. "Those who opposed the royal family would say, 'Oh, well this is something the Princess of Wales is doing, I wouldn't trust that.' "

There were others who mistrusted its Islamic origins and some who just resisted the idea of putting a foreign contaminant in their body. For Grundy, the cultural divisions Lady Mary encountered feel very familiar. She sees parallels in today's political fights over whether to wear masks, or the racially charged conspiracy theories claiming the coronavirus came from a Chinese lab.

"The repetition of the way in which battle lines get drawn, that's really extraordinary," Grundy says.

Kinch says Lady Mary's actions also offer lessons.

"One takeaway for everyone, whether it be scientists or nonscientists, is that we're not nearly as smart as we think we are," he says. "We have much we can learn from others."

Lady Mary wanted to stop smallpox, and to do it she was open to all ideas, he says. "Her brilliance and her open-mindedness helped her to embrace something that helped her to save hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives."

That's because the technique she'd borrowed from Ottoman women did take hold in England. Many thousands were inoculated, including a young boy named Edward Jenner. He went on to develop the first vaccine, also against smallpox. Vaccines proved to be safer and more effective than the old ways of inoculation. Smallpox was declared completely eradicated in 1980.

And vaccination is still being used today to fight new deadly viruses, including the coronavirus.
More...

Awesome article!

Tsing Tao · Mar 8, 2021

GWB, now that the CDC came out today and said that people who were fully vaccinated do not need to wear masks, do you believe this will help or hurt the COVID cases in the future?

Additionally, how will people be able to know who is not wearing a mask because they were vaccinated?

Genuine questions, no gotcha in here.

TreeFrogTrader · Mar 8, 2021

gwb-trading said:
Some more history...

300 Years ago a virus was raging through England causing death and misery and forcing the whole country into lockdown. A woman who'd spent time in the Ottoman Empire knew how to stop it. This is the story...

A 300-Year-Old Tale Of One Woman's Quest To Stop A Deadly Virus
https://www.npr.org/sections/health...le-of-one-womans-quest-to-stop-a-deadly-virus

Three hundred years ago, in 1721, England was in the grips of a smallpox epidemic.

"There were people dying all over the place," says Isobel Grundy, a professor emeritus of English at the University of Alberta in Canada. "Social life came to a standstill — and all the things we've suddenly become familiar with again."

But as Londoners cowered inside their homes, there was a woman who knew how to end the outbreak. Her name was Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and she had learned a technique from women in the distant Ottoman Empire that could stop the pox in its tracks.

What happened next is a tale of politics and public health that bears some "depressingly similar" parallels to the current pandemic, Grundy says. But it also shows how science and determination turned the tide against one of the worst diseases humanity has ever endured.

Smallpox was far deadlier than the coronavirus the world is currently battling. Fatality rates were as high as 30%, and many of the dead were children. Those who survived were often left scarred by the disease, which covered the body in blisters.

But in the 1700s in the Ottoman Empire, centered around modern day Turkey, some women knew how to stop it.

These women were part of a vast informal network of female medical professionals. "There were a lot of women practitioners in the Ottoman Empire," says Akif Yerlioglu, a historian of Ottoman medicine at the University of Oslo in Norway. They were not allowed into the madrassas, Ottoman universities, but they shared knowledge among themselves, working as faith healers, midwives, surgeons and, even in one case Yerlioglu says, an eye doctor.

What these women knew was this: Take a bit of pus from a smallpox patient and use a needle to scratch a tiny amount just beneath the skin so it gets into the blood of a healthy person. That person would get a mild form of smallpox and become immune to the more serious version.

Yerlioglu says the practice is strikingly absent from Ottoman medical texts written by men, but accounts that do survive make clear that it was a well-known practice. "Women were sharing this knowledge, this know-how, among themselves," he says.

The technique was known as engrafting, variolation or, simply, inoculation. It is thought to have originated in China centuries earlier, and it was also practiced in India and Africa.

"We don't know exactly why or how it works, we just know that it does work," says Michael Kinch, an associate vice chancellor at Washington University in St. Louis who has written a book on vaccination. Kinch and others suspect this form of inoculation may have worked because it introduced the smallpox virus through the skin, rather than the lungs.

"By putting it in the place that is less deadly, i.e., the skin, then you would have a greater likelihood of surviving," he says. Another theory is that the inoculators were using a less dangerous strain of the virus.

This kind of inoculation did have risks. A relatively small number of people could become very sick and even die, and patients could give others smallpox. But it was far less dangerous than catching it through normal routes.

European doctors were aware of what the Ottomans and others were doing but they refused to believe it worked. At the time, "Europe was pretty isolated and it was fairly xenophobic," Kinch says.

Grundy says reluctance to adopt the practice was about prejudice, not science. "It comes from an Islamic country that we regard as backwards — 'How could they have the answer to smallpox?' — and also it was something done by women, which is bad."

This was where things stood when Lady Mary arrived in the Ottoman Empire's capital of Constantinople in 1717. Lady Mary was a wealthy noblewoman, married to the English ambassador to the empire. She was enthralled by the thriving metropolis.

"The art was completely different, the customs of life were completely different, the music, everything really," says Grundy, who has devoted much of her career to studying Lady Mary's writings. "So it was all very exciting to her, and among the new discoveries she took in was this practice of inoculating against smallpox."

Lady Mary described what she saw in a letter home to a friend. She told how old women kept pus from a smallpox victim in a nutshell and used a needle to create a tiny scratch in their patient's vein. She was instantly convinced of its potential.

"I am well satisfied of the safety of this experiment, since I intend to try it on my dear little son," she wrote. Lady Mary was ready to inoculate her son because smallpox had killed her brother a few years earlier, and shortly before traveling East, she had contracted it herself.

"She did survive but she was very, very badly marked. Her eyelashes never grew back after the smallpox and her skin was very much scarred," Grundy says.

She had her son inoculated in Constantinople. The family traveled back to England. And then, in 1721, came the major smallpox outbreak in London.

Lady Mary quickly arranged to have her daughter (also named Mary) inoculated. And as a member of the aristocracy, Lady Mary's decision got noticed. It was written about in the papers.

"By the time spots came up on little Mary, there was kind of a queue at the door to come and see her," Grundy says. "Both social acquaintances of Lady Mary and of high-placed doctors."

Lady Mary embraced the attention. In her letter of 1717, she had written of her desire to spread the practice of inoculation: "I am patriot enough to take the pains to bring this useful invention into fashion in England." But in the next breath, she expressed contempt for British doctors, who she believed were too preoccupied with making money: "I should not fail to write to some of our doctors very particularly about it, if I knew any one of them that I thought had virtue enough to destroy such a considerable branch of their revenue, for the good of mankind."

Rather than turn to the male medical establishment, Lady Mary sought to persuade the future queen of England, Caroline, the Princess of Wales, to inoculate her children. The princess, an ally of Lady Mary's, was willing to give it a try. After consulting with physicians and the king, the decision was made to conduct a series of tests "taking criminals condemned to death and asking them to volunteer to be inoculated experimentally," Grundy says.

Six condemned criminals were offered pardons in exchange for participating in the experiment. It was "by today's standards, wildly unethical," says Kinch. There were additional tests on orphans. These kinds of experiments were commonplace for medical professionals of the time — it was medicine as practiced in a society with a rigid class structure, where slavery was still legal.

"I think there was a different view of people's lives, and of the value of life and all lives being equal," he says.

In the end, the Princess of Wales did inoculate her daughters (her sons, possible heirs to the throne, were considered too important to risk), and Lady Mary became a public figure, which came with consequences.

The princess's decision made inoculation "a political matter," says Grundy. "Those who opposed the royal family would say, 'Oh, well this is something the Princess of Wales is doing, I wouldn't trust that.' "

There were others who mistrusted its Islamic origins and some who just resisted the idea of putting a foreign contaminant in their body. For Grundy, the cultural divisions Lady Mary encountered feel very familiar. She sees parallels in today's political fights over whether to wear masks, or the racially charged conspiracy theories claiming the coronavirus came from a Chinese lab.

"The repetition of the way in which battle lines get drawn, that's really extraordinary," Grundy says.

Kinch says Lady Mary's actions also offer lessons.

"One takeaway for everyone, whether it be scientists or nonscientists, is that we're not nearly as smart as we think we are," he says. "We have much we can learn from others."

Lady Mary wanted to stop smallpox, and to do it she was open to all ideas, he says. "Her brilliance and her open-mindedness helped her to embrace something that helped her to save hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives."

That's because the technique she'd borrowed from Ottoman women did take hold in England. Many thousands were inoculated, including a young boy named Edward Jenner. He went on to develop the first vaccine, also against smallpox. Vaccines proved to be safer and more effective than the old ways of inoculation. Smallpox was declared completely eradicated in 1980.

And vaccination is still being used today to fight new deadly viruses, including the coronavirus.
More...

Similarly, the Americans had points where they were losing more soldiers to smallpox than to combat.

Many of the soldiers adopted the european practice of infecting themselves with cowpox, which is a similar type of virus and does in fact transmit to humans. The Brits had discovered there and on the continent that dairy farmers- milkmaids- had very little incidence of full blown smallpox or death from it. General Washington forbade it but looked the other way because he needed to have his men survive. It was a very widespread practice and the British army in the revolution was doing it as well. And yes it worked or was of benefit.

Your post says "more vaccine history" so maybe this was discussed elsewhere.

Jenner developed the first vaccine or one of the first. Can't remember. And he worked on the smallpox vaccine. Just glanced at wiki and it says he coined the word "vaccination" which means "from or of the cow" in Latin. Funny dat, for the reasons discussed.

I first learned about this cowpox connection when I was a teenager and was reading the journal of one the American revolution war soldiers who was encamped in Quebec City getting ready for the siege. He said some of the men were trying to infect themselves with cowpox because the small pox was flaring up.

Apologies to AOC for referencing anything before 1990- especially involving Americans, British, men, whites, colonialism, etc.

gwb-trading · Mar 9, 2021

A couple recent articles on CDC studies about weight and COVID risk...

CDC study finds about 78% of people hospitalized for Covid were overweight or obese
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/08/cov...le-hospitalized-were-overweight-or-obese.html

About 78% of people who have been hospitalized, needed a ventilator or died from Covid-19 have been overweight or obese, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a new study Monday.

Just over 42% of the U.S. population was considered obese in 2018, according to the agency’s most recent statistics. Overweight is defined as having a body mass index of 25 or more, while obesity is defined as having a BMI of 30 or more.

“As clinicians develop care plans for COVID-19 patients, they should consider the risk for severe outcomes in patients with higher BMIs, especially for those with severe obesity,” the CDC wrote.

(More at above url)

CDC: People on the cusp of being overweight have the lowest COVID-19 risk
https://www.businessinsider.com/peo...erweight-have-lowest-covid-19-risk-cdc-2021-3

The CDC found people with obesity or severely underweight have the highest COVID-19 risk.

A BMI on the cusp of overweight was linked to the lowest risk of death, hospitalization, or intensive care.

BMI is an imperfect measure of health, but it's one tool for protecting at-risk people with obesity or underweight.

(More at above url)

gwb-trading · Mar 10, 2021

With the large number of people over 65 in the U.S. who have been vaccinated in every state -- the hospitalizations for this group are dropping rapidly.

Cuddles · Mar 10, 2021

gwb-trading said:
With the large number of people over 65 in the U.S. who have been vaccinated in every state -- the hospitalizations for this group are dropping rapidly.

More...

God bless Joe Biden, the elder saviour

Cuddles · Mar 16, 2021

https://news.yahoo.com/trump-reportedly-redirected-navy-hospital-181555518.html
Trump reportedly redirected a Navy hospital ship from Seattle to L.A. because Newsom was more complimentary than Inslee

Former President Donald Trump's personal policy toward governors during the COVID-19 pandemic was no secret. He wanted to work with them, he said, as long as they showed him some appreciation. "It's a two-way street, they have to treat us well also," he said during a Fox News interview in March 2020. Now, an anecdote from ABC News' Jonathan Karl's upcoming book Front Row at The Trump Show, sheds even more light on how Trump made crucial, potentially life-or-death decisions based on whether he felt he was getting enough compliments.

Karl reports that upon learning a Navy hospital ship was heading to Seattle last March, Trump decided to redirect it to Los Angeles, solely because he liked the things California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) had been saying about him. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D), on the other hand, did not have a big fan in Trump.

"Don't you think we should send it to California?" Trump reportedly asked. "Gavin has been saying the nicest things about me."

Trump reportedly said he considered Inslee a "showboater" and a "real jerk," which apparently meant, in the former president's mind, that Washingtonians were less deserving of extra hospital beds.

gwb-trading · Mar 17, 2021

CDC warns if this is open near you, expect new coronavirus outbreaks
https://bgr.com/2021/03/16/coronavirus-update-covid-19-news-eating-at-restaurants-indoors/

According to the latest coronavirus update from The New York Times, a little more than 57,000 new coronavirus cases were reported in the US on Monday, along with at least 751 new coronavirus-related deaths. Over the past week, though, the average of new daily cases was down 18%, to 55,153 per day.

That’s the good news. The more worrisome part is that you don’t have to look too hard to find examples of people going to too much of an extreme in celebrating the decline. Spring breakers flocking to Miami Beach, for example, have led to hundreds of arrests, according to the mayor there who says that too many people are ignoring coronavirus protocols. And on a related note, the CDC released the results of a new study earlier this month that found if one particular thing is opening back up in a big way in your community, there’s a direct link to a rise in new coronavirus cases. Can you guess what it is? We’ll give you a hint — it involves restaurants.

The CDC’s study found what appears to be a direct relationship between the prevalence of renewed, reopened indoor dining at restaurants in a community, and new COVID-19 rates. “Allowing on-premises restaurant dining was associated with an increase in daily COVID-19 case growth rates 41–100 days after implementation and an increase in daily death growth rates 61–100 days after implementation,” the health authority reported.

Some 97% of US counties saw restaurants begin reopening indoor or what’s known as “on-premise” dining over the course of the CDC’s study period. The study went on to find that eating both indoors as well as outdoors at restaurants led to a 2.2 percentage point increase in deaths 61-80 days after the restaurants reopened, and that amount increased to 3 percentage points 81-100 days post-reopening.

The danger herein, of reopening too fast, too soon, is what CDC director Rochelle Walensky apparently had in mind during a March 3 interview with NPR host Ari Shapiro. “I think the next two or three months could go in one of two directions,” she said. “If things open up, if we’re not really cautious, we could end up with a post-spring break surge the way we saw a post-Christmas surge. We could see much more disease. We could see much more death.”

Alternatively: If we “really hunker down for a couple of more months, we get so many people vaccinated and we get to a really great place by summer.” It’s up to us, in other words, which of those two visions becomes reality.

According to researchers at Johns Hopkins University who’ve been tracking the COVID pandemic since its inception, there have now been more than 29.4 million coronavirus cases identified in the US. Additionally, more than 535,000 coronavirus-related deaths in the US have been reported.

gwb-trading · Mar 17, 2021

The race between variants and vaccines in US will be a close call, expert warns, and eased restrictions aren't helping
https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/17/health/us-coronavirus-wednesday/index.html