Honestly why did Trump lose his shit when MD governor got kits from S. Korea? It's clear the guy doesn't want his numbers going up. Which is effin' dumb because you can lower the death rate w/more positive cases. damn, you'd think he'd be high priority...though we've got billionaires dropping, so i guess not "just the flu" after all.
Trump lost his shit because the only numbers he cares about are on Tuesday 3rd November 2020. This isn’t about Covid-19 to him, it’s about vanity.
Just shocking that a guest or host on MSNBC would come up with some argument that Orange Man Bad. So very hard to believe!
So you thought COVID-19 was an urban problem.... not so much. Where the coronavirus is hitting rural America hard Covid-19 is running rampant through some workplaces, including factories and farms https://www.vox.com/2020/4/28/21239...-south-dakota-missouri-nebraska-rural-america New York City is still battling America’s worst Covid-19 outbreak to date. And now, even as some states begin to consider reopening, many sparsely populated areas of rural America are seeing a worrying uptick in cases. “The epicenter of this outbreak really has shifted into the smaller rural areas,” said Angela Hewlett, associate professor in infectious disease at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, in a recent Infectious Diseases Society of America briefing. And that’s a major problem, given that the health systems of many of these places are the least equipped to deal with a sudden surge in cases. Testing in many less-populous areas has lagged even further behind the already-low national average, obscuring the extent of transmission in more sparsely populated areas. As protests in largely rural states show, some people assume rural areas might be spared the worst of Covid-19 outbreaks. Yet many people in rural regions work in large-scale industries, such as food processing, where social distancing is challenging and they’re at higher risk. “Part of the reason that we’re seeing such dramatic increases in rural communities” is because the virus is running rampant through workplaces like factories and farms, says Hewlett. “These are not places where typically people can work from home,” she notes. Instead, “there are often lots of people working in very close contact in these essential jobs — which really is a setup for perpetuating a disease like this.” This deadly combination will lead to longer, more sustained outbreaks in rural regions, “making reopening much more challenging,” Andrew Pavia, chief of pediatric infectious diseases at the University of Utah School of Medicine, said at the IDSA briefing. “I think we’ve oversimplified this idea of peaks. We’re not seeing one epidemic nationwide, or even statewide — we’re seeing different outbreaks, thousands of them playing out in different parts of the country.” What counts as “rural America”— and how much is the virus spreading there? Rural can mean many things. The US census definition, for example, is any spot with a population of fewer than 50,000 people. But depending on what federal definition you use, some 17 percent to 49 percent of people in the US live in “rural” areas. Additionally, otherwise-rural regions can have small and even fairly large metropolitan areas. According to a new Covid-19 map from the Dartmouth Atlas Project, the top 10 regions with the fastest growth rates in cases are primarily metropolitan areas with blue-collar industry, located in largely rural states. Because they are small, many rural counties have few cases, giving the impression that broad regions of the country are still unaffected. A more accurate picture of what is happening with Covid-19 across the US emerges when the data are aggregated to larger geographic areas defined on where people get health care. “Both counties and states fail to reflect how and where people get care,” explains Elliott Fisher, a professor of health policy and medicine at the Dartmouth Institute. Fisher and his colleagues’ maps show the current status of the Covid-19 epidemic through 306 US “hospital referral regions.” (They used data collected by the New York Times and the US census, and they will be updated every weekday.) In addition, unlike many of the maps which just show total case numbers, the Dartmouth Atlas Project shows population-based rates of the virus’s prevalence and the average growth rate. Since hospital referral regions draw from multiple counties or even different states, Fisher hopes that the atlas may be able to provide “early signals about new outbreaks,” which may otherwise be missed. For example, Houma, Louisiana, a town of around 32,000 people in the Atchafalaya Basin — live oak and Cajun country — has almost as many cases per capita within its hospital region as Chicago. Greeley, Colorado, where there is a large JBS meatpacking plant, has more cases per capita within its hospital region than Washington, DC. That kind of case reporting is particularly critical given the ongoing shortage of testing. In areas of Utah, very few people are getting tested. “Does that mean there’s no disease? Absolutely not,” Pavia says. “It means we don’t have a good spotlight on what’s going on. And so we’re missing things.” Testing scarcity is a reflection of the general unequal distribution of medical resources, which extends far beyond Covid-19. According to the Chartis Group, 63 percent of rural hospitals don’t have ICU beds. Many rural hospitals have only a month’s worth of cash on hand and have lost a substantial part of their income due to the reduction of outpatient services during the pandemic. This leaves them even less equipped to handle the crisis. Most epidemiology models predict that initial peaks in less-densely populated states may still be weeks away, making understanding these kinds of nuances — and not relaxing social distancing prematurely — critical. According to new federal guidelines, states should wait for a sustained decrease in cases over 14 days before easing restrictions. But these recommendations aren’t mandatory, and some states are behaving more cautiously than others — creating what Fisher terms a “natural experiment.” Here’s a closer look at how communities in Central California, Alaska, South Dakota, Missouri, Nebraska, and Georgia are handling the uncertainty, and threat, of Covid-19. (More at above url)