Rather than fixing the problems, Noem has spent her time on a nonfactual PR campaign to claim what a good job she did with COVID -- while residents of her state die. South Dakota's Noem scrambles to defend pandemic failures South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) wants to put a positive spin on her state's experiences with the pandemic. It's not going especially well. https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow...m-scrambles-defend-pandemic-failures-n1250905 South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) is acting like someone who's eager to run for a different job. Shortly before Election Day, the Republican governor was in New Hampshire. Shortly after Election Day, Noem was in Texas, and this past weekend, she was in Georgia, hoping to help her party's U.S. Senate candidates. The Argus Leader in Sioux Falls noted this week that the first-term governor -- and former congresswoman -- has made "dozens of out-of-state outings" in recent months. There is, however, a rather dramatic problem likely to interfere with Noem's national ambitions: South Dakota has suffered brutally with the coronavirus pandemic. In fact, it's been one of the worst places on the planet for COVID-19, and the Republican governor's response has provided a model of what not to do. Given that it's difficult to parlay failure into a bid for national office, Noem has begun trying to put a positive spin on South Dakota's tragedy. Just this week, the governor wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed, effectively boasting about her state's rejection of "harsh rules," "lockdowns, and "mask mandates." She added: Many in the media have criticized this approach, labeling me ill-informed, reckless and even a "denier." Some have asserted that South Dakota is "as bad as it gets anywhere in the world" when it comes to Covid-19 -- a demonstrably false statement. The trouble is, it's really not a demonstrably false statement. A Washington Post analysis explained this week: Data from the Federation of American Scientists in mid-November showed South Dakota's per capita death rate was the third-highest of any hot spot worldwide in its data set. And Washington Post data show South Dakota has by far the highest per capita death rate in the country — 18.7 deaths per 100,000 people over the past seven days. The New York Times' tally found the same result: per capita, South Dakota's COVID-19 fatality totals are the worst in the United States. Noem's op-ed proceeded to try to draw favorable comparisons between her state and others, prompting the Post's analysis to add, "You can cherry-pick data to tell pretty much any story you want. But focusing on momentary increases (which are happening pretty much everywhere, to some degree or another) and ignoring South Dakota's even worse increases and the overall picture of the past two-plus months is really to miss the forest for the trees." Something to keep in mind as the governor engages in out-of-state travel and prepares to ask for a promotion. Postscript: The New York Times also reported yesterday on South Dakota state Sen. Helene Duhamel, who tested positive this week, just two days after attending a dinner with the governor. The artcile added, "Governor Noem has fiercely resisted imposing a mask mandate or any other restrictions throughout the pandemic, even as the coronavirus raged through the state in the fall, overwhelming its hospitals. The governor’s office insisted that she had not had close contact with Ms. Duhamel, even though they were photographed standing only a few feet apart.
Infected after 5 minutes, from 20 feet away: South Korea study shows coronavirus’ spread indoors https://www.latimes.com/world-natio...dy-shows-perils-of-indoor-dining-for-covid-19 Dr. Lee Ju-hyung has largely avoided restaurants in recent months, but on the few occasions he’s dined out, he’s developed a strange, if sensible, habit: whipping out a small anemometer to check the airflow. It’s a precaution he has been taking since a June experiment in which he and colleagues re-created the conditions at a restaurant in Jeonju, a city in southwestern South Korea, where diners contracted the coronavirus from an out-of-town visitor. Among them was a high school student who became infected after five minutes of exposure from more than 20 feet away. The results of the study, for which Lee and other epidemiologists enlisted the help of an engineer who specializes in aerodynamics, werepublished last week in the Journal of Korean Medical Science. The conclusions raised concerns that the widely accepted standard of six feet of social distance may not be far enough to keep people safe. The study — adding to a growing body of evidence onairborne transmission of the virus— highlighted how South Korea’s meticulous and often invasivecontact tracing regimehas enabled researchers to closely track how the virus moves through populations. “In this outbreak, the distances between infector and infected persons were ... farther than the generally accepted 2 meter [6.6-foot] droplet transmission range,” the study’s authors wrote. “The guidelines on quarantine and epidemiological investigation must be updated to reflect these factors for control and prevention of COVID-19.” KJ Seung, an infectious disease expert and chief of strategy and policy for the nonprofit Partners in Health’s Massachusetts COVID response, said the study was a reminder of the risk of indoor transmission as many nations hunker down for the winter. The official definition of a “close contact” — 15 minutes, within six feet — isn’t foolproof. In his work on Massachusetts’ contact tracing program, he said, business owners and school administrators have fixated on the “close contact” standard, thinking just 14 minutes of exposure, or spending hours in the same room at a distance farther than six feet, is safe. “There’s a real misconception about this in the public,” said Seung, who was not involved in the South Korea study. “They’re thinking, if I’m not a close contact, I will magically be protected.” Seung said the study pointed to the need for contact tracers around the world to widen the net in looking for people who had potentially been infected and to alert people at lower risk that they may have been exposed. Linsey Marr, a civil and environmental engineering professor at Virginia Tech who studies the transmission of viruses in the air, said the five-minute window in which the student, identified in the study as “A,” was infected was notable because the droplet was large enough to carry a viral load, but small enough to travel 20 feet through the air. “‘A’ had to get a large dose in just five minutes, provided by larger aerosols probably about 50 microns,” she said. “Large aerosols or small droplets overlapping in that gray area can transmit disease further than one or two meters [3.3 to 6.6 feet] if you have strong airflow.” The South Korean study began with a mystery. When a high school senior in Jeonju tested positive for the virus on June 17, epidemiologists were stumped because the city hadn’t had a coronavirus case in two months. North Jeolla province, where Jeonju is located, hadn’t had one for a month. The girl hadn’t traveled out of the region in recent weeks and had largely gone from home to school and back. Contact tracers turned to the country’s Epidemic Investigation Support System, a digital platform introduced in South Korea amid the pandemic that allows investigators to access cellphone location information and credit card data of infected individuals in as little as 10 minutes. Cellphone GPS data revealed that the student had briefly overlapped with another known coronavirus patient from a different city and province altogether, a door-to-door saleswoman who had visited Jeonju. Their connection was a first-floor restaurant on the afternoon of June 12 — for just five minutes. Authorities in the city of Daejeon, where the door-to-door saleswoman was visiting from, said the woman did not tell contact tracers she’d visited Jeonju, about an hour’s drive away, where her company held a meeting with 80 people on the sixth floor of the building with the restaurant. Lee, a professor at the Jeonbuk National University Medical School who has also been helping local authorities carry out epidemiological investigations, went to the restaurant and was surprised by how far the two had been sitting. CCTV recordings showed the two never spoke, or touched any surfaces in common — door handles, cups or cutlery. From the sway of a light fixture, he could tell the air conditioning unit in the ceiling was on at the time. Diagram of the outbreak at a South Korean restaurant equipped with ceiling-type air conditioners: arrows represent the air flow. Curved air streamlines represent where air is reflected off a wall or barrier, and moves downward toward the floor. (Korean Academy of Medical Sciences) Lee and his team re-created the conditions in the restaurant — researchers sat at tables as stand-ins — and measured the airflow. The high school student and a third diner who was infected had been sitting directly along the flow of air from an air conditioner; other diners who had their back to the airflow were not infected. Through genome sequencing, the team confirmed the three patients’ virus genomic types matched. “Incredibly, despite sitting a far distance away, the airflow came down the wall and created a valley of wind. People who were along that line were infected,” Lee said. “We concluded this was a droplet transmission, and beyond” 6.6 feet. The pattern of infection in the restaurant showed it was transmission through small droplets or larger aerosols either landing on the face or being breathed in, said Marr, the Virginia Tech professor who was not involved in the study. The measured air velocity in the restaurant, which did not have windows or a ventilation system, was about 3.3 feet per second, the equivalent of a blowing fan. “Eating indoors at a restaurant is one of the riskiest things you can do in a pandemic,” she said. “Even if there is distancing, as this shows and other studies show, the distancing is not enough.” The study was published at a time when South Korea, like many other countries, is on edge amid a new wave of coronavirus infections, with daily case rates hovering around 600 in recent days. Seoul, the capital, this week began requiring restaurants to close by 9 p.m., limiting coffee shops to takeout only and forcing clubs and karaoke bars to shut down. The research echoed the findings ofa July study out of Guangzhou, China, which looked at infections among three families who dined at a restaurant along the flow of air conditioning at tables that were three feet apart, overlapping for about an hour. Ten of the diners tested positive for the coronavirus. Contact tracers in South Korea similarly mapped out a large outbreak at a Starbucks in Paju in August, when 27 people were infected by a woman sitting under a second-floor ceiling air conditioning unit. Seung, of Partners in Health, said by retracing infection routes epidemiological investigators in South Korea had helped researchers worldwide better understand the coronavirus’ spread. “I showed it to my team doing contact tracing in Massachusetts, and their jaws are dropping,” Seung said. “We know how hard it is to do something like that — it’s impressive.”
Lie of the Year: Coronavirus downplay and denial https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/dec/16/lie-year-coronavirus-downplay-and-denial/ A Florida taxi driver and his wife had seen enough conspiracy theories online to believe the virus was overblown, maybe even a hoax. So no masks for them. Then they got sick. She died. A college lecturer had trouble refilling her lupus drug after the president promoted it as a treatment for the new disease. A hospital nurse broke down when an ICU patient insisted his illness was nothing worse than the flu, oblivious to the silence in beds next door. Lies infected America in 2020. The very worst were not just damaging, but deadly. President Donald J. Trump fueled confusion and conspiracies from the earliest days of the coronavirus pandemic. He embraced theories that COVID-19 accounted for only a small fraction of the thousands upon thousands of deaths. He undermined public health guidance for wearing masks and cast Dr. Anthony Fauci as an unreliable flip-flopper. But the infodemic was not the work of a single person. Anonymous bad actors offered up junk science. Online skeptics made bogus accusations that hospitals padded their coronavirus case numbers to generate bonus payments. Influential TV and radio opinion hosts told millions of viewers that social distancing was a joke and that states had all of the personal protective equipment they needed (when they didn’t). It was a symphony of counter narrative, and Trump was the conductor, if not the composer. The message: The threat to your health was overhyped to hurt the political fortunes of the president. Every year, PolitiFact editors review the year’s most inaccurate statements to elevate one as the Lie of the Year. The "award" goes to a statement, or a collection of claims, that prove to be of substantive consequence in undermining reality. It has become harder and harder to choose when cynical pundits and politicians don’t pay much of a price for saying things that aren’t true. For the past month, unproven claims of massive election fraud have tested democratic institutions and certainly qualify as historic and dangerously bald-faced. Fortunately, the constitutional foundations that undergird American democracy are holding. Meanwhile, the coronavirus has killed more than 300,000 in the United States, a crisis exacerbated by the reckless spread of falsehoods. PolitiFact’s 2020 Lie of the Year: claims that deny, downplay or disinform about COVID-19. 'I always wanted to play it down' On Feb. 7, Trump leveled with book author Bob Woodward about the dangers of the new virus that was spreading across the world, originating in central China. He told the legendary reporter that the virus was airborne, tricky and "more deadly than even your strenuous flus." Trump told the public something else. On Feb. 26, the president appeared with his coronavirus task force in the crowded White House briefing room. A reporter asked if he was telling healthy Americans not to change their behavior. "Wash your hands, stay clean. You don’t have to necessarily grab every handrail unless you have to," he said, the room chuckling. "I mean, view this the same as the flu." Three weeks later, March 19, he acknowledged to Woodward: "To be honest with you, I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down. Because I don’t want to create a panic." His acolytes in politics and the media were on the same page. Rush Limbaugh told his audience of about 15 million on Feb. 24 that coronavirus was being weaponized against Trump when it was just "the common cold, folks." That’s wrong — even in the early weeks, it was clear the virus had a higher fatality rate than the common cold, with worse potential side effects, too. As the virus was spreading, so was the message to downplay it. "There are lots of sources of misinformation, and there are lots of elected officials besides Trump that have not taken the virus seriously or promoted misinformation," said Brendan Nyhan, a government professor at Dartmouth College. "It’s not solely a Trump story — and it’s important to not take everyone else’s role out of the narrative." Hijacking the numbers In August, there was a growing movement on Twitter to question the disproportionately high U.S. COVID-19 death toll. The skeptics cited Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data to claim that only 6% of COVID-19 deaths could actually be attributed to the virus. On Aug. 24, BlazeTV host Steve Deace amplified it on Facebook. "Here's the percentage of people who died OF or FROM Covid with no underlying comorbidity," he said to his 120,000 followers. "According to CDC, that is just 6% of the deaths WITH Covid so far." That misrepresented the reality of coronavirus deaths. The CDC had always said people with underlying health problems — comorbidities — were most vulnerable if they caught COVID-19. The report was noting that 6% died even without being at obvious risk. But for those skeptical of COVID-19, the narrative confirmed their beliefs. Facebook users copied and pasted language from influencers like Amiri King, who had 2.2 million Facebook followers before he was banned. The Gateway Pundit called it a "SHOCK REPORT." "I saw a statistic come out the other day, talking about only 6% of the people actually died from COVID, which is very interesting — that they died from other reasons," Trump told Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Sept. 1. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, addressed the claim on "Good Morning America" the same day. "The point that the CDC was trying to make was that a certain percentage of them had nothing else but just COVID," he said. "That does not mean that someone who has hypertension or diabetes who dies of COVID didn’t die of COVID-19 — they did." Trump retweeted the message from an account that sported the slogans and symbols of QAnon, a conspiracy movement that claims Democrats and Hollywood elites are members of an underground pedophilia ring. False information moved between social media, Trump and TV, creating its own feedback loop. "It’s an echo effect of sorts, where Donald Trump is certainly looking for information that resonates with his audiences and that supports his political objectives. And his audiences are looking to be amplified, so they’re incentivized to get him their information," said Kate Starbird, an associate professor and misinformation expert at the University of Washington. Weakening the armor: misleading on masks At the start of the pandemic, the CDC told healthy people not to wear masks, saying they were needed for health care providers on the frontlines. But on April 3 the agency changed its guidelines, saying every American should wear non-medical cloth masks in public. Trump announced the CDC’s guidance, then gutted it. "So it’s voluntary. You don’t have to do it. They suggested for a period of time, but this is voluntary," Trump said at a press briefing. "I don’t think I’m going to be doing it." Rather than an advance in best practices on coronavirus prevention, face masks turned into a dividing line between Trump’s political calculations and his decision-making as president. Americans didn’t see Trump wearing a mask until a July visit to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Meanwhile, disinformers flooded the internet with wild claims: Masks reduced oxygen. Masks trapped fungus. Masks trapped coronavirus. Masks just didn’t work. In September, the CDC reported a correlation between people who went to bars and restaurants, where masks can’t consistently be worn, and positive COVID-19 test results. Bloggers and skeptical news outlets countered with a misleading report about masks. On Oct. 13, the story landed on Fox News’ flagship show, "Tucker Carlson Tonight." During the show, Carlson claimed "almost everyone — 85% — who got the coronavirus in July was wearing a mask." "So clearly (wearing a mask) doesn’t work the way they tell us it works," Carlson said. That’s wrong, and it misrepresented a small sample of people who tested positive. Public health officials and infectious disease experts have been consistent since April in saying that face masks are among the best ways to prevent the spread of COVID-19. But two days later, Trump repeated the 85% stat during a rally and at a town hall with NBC’s Savannah Guthrie. "I tell people, wear masks," he said at the town hall. "But just the other day, they came out with a statement that 85% of the people that wear masks catch it." The assault on hospitals On March 24, registered nurse Melissa Steiner worked her first shift in the new COVID-19 ICU of her southeast Michigan hospital. After her 13-hour day caring for two critically ill patients on ventilators, she posted a tearful video. "Honestly, guys, it felt like I was working in a war zone," Steiner said. "(I was) completely isolated from my team members, limited resources, limited supplies, limited responses from physicians because they’re just as overwhelmed." "I’m already breaking, so for f---’s sake, people, please take this seriously. This is so bad." Steiner’s post was one of many emotional pleas offered by overwhelmed hospital workers last spring urging people to take the threat seriously. The denialists mounted a counter offensive. On March 28, Todd Starnes, a conservative radio host and commentator, tweeted a video from outside Brooklyn Hospital Center. There were few people or cars in sight. "This is the ‘war zone’ outside the hospital in my Brooklyn neighborhood," Starnes said sarcastically. The video racked up more than 1.5 million views. Starnes’ video was one of the first examples of #FilmYourHospital, a conspiratorial social media trend that pushed back on the idea that hospitals had been strained by a rapid influx of coronavirus patients. Several internet personalities asked people to go out and shoot their own videos. The result: a series of user-generated clips taken outside hospitals, where the response to the pandemic was not easily seen. Over the course of a week, #FilmYourHospital videos were uploaded to YouTube and posted tens of thousands of times on Twitter and Facebook. Nearly two weeks and more than 10,000 deaths later, Fox News featured a guest who opened a new misinformation assault on hospitals. Dr. Scott Jensen, a Minnesota physician and Republican state senator, told Ingraham that, because hospitals were receiving more money for COVID-19 patients on Medicare — a result of a coronavirus stimulus bill — they were overcounting COVID-19 cases. He had no proof of fraud, but the cynical story took off. Trump used the false report on the campaign trail to continue to minimize the death toll. "Our doctors get more money if somebody dies from COVID," Trump told supporters at a rally in Waterford, Mich., Oct. 30. "You know that, right? I mean, our doctors are very smart people. So what they do is they say, ‘I'm sorry, but, you know, everybody dies of COVID.’" The real fake news: The Plandemic The most viral disinformation of the pandemic was styled to look like it had the blessing of people Americans trust: scientists and doctors. In a 26-minute video called "Plandemic: The Hidden Agenda Behind COVID-19," a former scientist at the National Cancer Institute claimed that the virus was manipulated in a lab, hydroxychloroquine is effective against coronaviruses, and face masks make people sick. Judy Mikovits’ conspiracies received more than 8 million views in May thanks in part to the online outrage machine — anti-vaccine activists, anti-lockdown groups and QAnon supporters — that push disinformation into the mainstream. The video was circulated in a coordinated effort to promote Mikovits’ book release. A couple of months later, a similar effort propelled another video of fact-averse doctors to millions of people in only a few hours. On July 27, Breitbart published a clip of a press conference hosted by a group called America’s Frontline Doctors in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. Looking authoritative in white lab coats, these doctors discouraged mask wearing and falsely said there was already a cure in hydroxychloroquine, a drug used to treat rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. RELATED: Yes, at least five randomized controlled studies say hydroxychloroquine doesn’t help Trump, who had been talking up the drug since March and claimed to be taking it himself as a preventive measure in May, retweeted clips of the event before Twitter removed them as misinformation about COVID-19. He defended the "very respected doctors" in a July 28 press conference. When Olga Lucia Torres, a lecturer at Columbia University, heard Trump touting the drug in March, she knew it didn’t bode well for her own prescription. Sure enough, the misinformation led to a run on hydroxychloroquine, creating a shortage for Americans like her who needed the drug for chronic conditions. A lupus patient, she went to her local pharmacy to request a 90-day supply of the medication. But she was told they were only granting partial refills. It took her three weeks to get her medication through the mail. "What about all the people who were silenced and just lost access to their staple medication because people ran to their doctors and begged to take it?" Torres said. No sickbed conversion On Sept. 26, Trump hosted a Rose Garden ceremony to announce his nominee to replace the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the U.S. Supreme Court. More than 150 people attended the event introducing Amy Coney Barrett. Few wore masks, and the chairs weren’t spaced out. In the weeks after, more than two dozen people close to Trump and the White House became infected with COVID-19. Early Oct. 2, Trump announced his positive test. Those hoping the experience and Trump’s successful treatment at Walter Reed might inform his view of the coronavirus were disappointed. Trump snapped back into minimizing the threat during his first moments back at the White House. He yanked off his mask and recorded a video. "Don’t let it dominate you. Don’t be afraid of it," he said, describing experimental and out-of-reach therapies he received. "You’re going to beat it." In Trump’s telling, his hospitalization was not the product of poor judgment about large gatherings like the Rose Garden event, but the consequence of leading with bravery. Plus, now, he claimed, he was immune from the virus. On the morning after he returned from Walter Reed, Trump tweeted a seasonal flu death count of 100,000 lives and added that COVID-19 was "far less lethal" for most populations. More false claims at odds with data — the U.S. average for flu deaths over the past decade is 36,000, and experts said COVID-19 is more deadly for each age group over 30. When Trump left the hospital, the U.S. death toll from COVID-19 was more than 200,000. Today it is more than 300,000. Meanwhile, this month the president has gone ahead with a series of indoor holiday parties. The vaccine war The vaccine disinformation campaign started in the spring but is still underway. In April, blogs and social media users falsely claimed Democrats and powerful figures like Bill Gates wanted to use microchips to track which Americans had been vaccinated for the coronavirus. Now, false claims are taking aim at vaccines developed by Pfizer and BioNTech and other companies. A blogger claimed Pfizer’s head of research said the coronavirus vaccine could cause female infertility. That’s false. An alternative health website wrote that the vaccine could cause an array of life-threatening side effects, and that the FDA knew about it. The list included all possible — not confirmed— side effects. Social media users speculated that the federal government would force Americans to receive the vaccine. Neither Trump nor President-elect Joe Biden has advocated for that, and the federal government doesn’t have the power to mandate vaccines, anyway. As is often the case with disinformation, the strategy is to deliver it with a charade of certainty. "People are anxious and scared right now," said Dr. Seema Yasmin, director of research and education programs at the Stanford Health Communication Initiative. "They’re looking for a whole picture." Most polls have shown far from universal acceptance of vaccines, with only 50% to 70% of respondents willing to take the vaccine. Black and Hispanic Americans are even less likely to take it so far. Meanwhile, the future course of the coronavirus in the U.S. depends on whether Americans take public health guidance to heart. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation projected that, without mask mandates or a rapid vaccine rollout, the death toll could rise to more than 500,000 by April 2021. "How can we come to terms with all that when people are living in separate informational realities?" Starbird said. (List of sources after article at url)
The Draconian fascist democrat policies are racist. Dems clearly want all minorities to not be owners and be workers only. Thanks China Joe! Who needs to eat anyways! https://www.alignable.com/forum/alignable-49-of-minority-business-owners-cant-afford-december-rent Alignable: 49% Of Minority SMBs Can't Afford December Rent Overall, 35% of small business owners reported that they couldn't make rent this month (up 3% from 32% in November). And for minority-owned businesses, the struggle is even more pronounced: nearly half (49%) report being unable to cover their rent in December. That figure jumped 5% from 44% in November.
https://apnews.com/article/coronavi...erica-mexico-e1f1b63fa48a1c0ba6351ec8371843e0 Mexico’s president calls virus lockdowns “dictatorship” MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador suggested Wednesday that politicians who impose lockdowns or curfews to limit COVID-19 are acting like dictators. The comments came as López Obrador once again fended off questions about why he almost never wears a face mask, saying it was a question of liberty. The Mexican leader said pandemic measures that limit people’s movements are “fashionable among authorities ... who want to show they are heavy handed, dictatorship.” “A lot of them are letting their authoritarian instincts show,” he said, adding “the fundamental thing is to guarantee liberty.”