Coronavirus Update 10

The New York Times asks, where are the photos of people dying of Covid?
Pictures speak far louder than words

Some news may be good, but it is too limited. Maybe state governors ignoring the president's lies, bullshit and his desperate bid for re-election regardless of how many innocent lives are needlessly lost constitutes some good news.

The Washington Post reports today:

A study of 96,000 hospitalized coronavirus patients on six continents found that those who received an antimalarial drug promoted by President Trump as a “game changer” in the fight against the virus had a significantly higher risk of death compared with those who did not. 

People treated with hydroxychloroquine, or the closely related drug chloroquine, were also more likely to develop a type of irregular heart rhythm, or arrhythmia, that can lead to sudden cardiac death, it concluded.

FactCheck writes about the president's claim that he is taking hydroxychloroquine:

In announcing that he has been taking hydroxychloroquine to prevent COVID-19, President Donald Trump made a series of inaccurate, unsubstantiated or misleading statements related to the drug, which remains an unproven treatment against the coronavirus:

• Trump said he started taking hydroxychloroquine because he thinks “it’s good” and has “heard a lot of good stories.” But there is no published data showing that the medication protects against infection with the coronavirus, and experts recommend such use only within clinical trials.

• As part of his justification for taking hydroxychloroquine, the president repeatedly said that “many” frontline workers take the drug for COVID-19 prevention. It’s unclear how many people do take the drug for prevention, or prophylaxis, but several physicians told us they were not aware of the practice at their institutions.

• Trump insisted that there only has been one “bad survey” of hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19. That’s false. Numerous studies, including the best evidence to date, do not suggest that hydroxychloroquine is beneficial for COVID-19 patients.

• The president called an unpublished study that used Veterans Affairs data and found no benefit to using hydroxychloroquine “phony” and “false,” and accused the authors of being politically motivated. There is no evidence of political bias, and while the study has not been peer-reviewed, its results are consistent with other published papers.  

Fact Check elaborates: 

In announcing that he has been taking hydroxychloroquine to prevent COVID-19, President Donald Trump made a series of inaccurate, unsubstantiated or misleading statements related to the drug, which remains an unproven treatment against the coronavirus:

Trump said he started taking hydroxychloroquine because he thinks “it’s good” and has “heard a lot of good stories.” But there is no published data showing that the medication protects against infection with the coronavirus, and experts recommend such use only within clinical trials. 

As part of his justification for taking hydroxychloroquine, the president repeatedly said that “many” frontline workers take the drug for COVID-19 prevention. It’s unclear how many people do take the drug for prevention, or prophylaxis, but several physicians told us they were not aware of the practice at their institutions. 

Trump insisted that there only has been one “bad survey” of hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19. That’s false. Numerous studies, including the best evidence to date, do not suggest that hydroxychloroquine is beneficial for COVID-19 patients. 

The president called an unpublished study that used Veterans Affairs data and found no benefit to using hydroxychloroquine “phony” and “false,” and accused the authors of being politically motivated. There is no evidence of political bias, and while the study has not been peer-reviewed, its results are consistent with other published papers.

Thus our failed US president continues to make stuff up and lie as he goes along. Unless he is an insane germophobe, he is probably not taking hydroxychloroquine now. Inconvenient true facts, true truths and truly sound reasoning are the enemy of our failed president's message and his irrational, ruthless run for his ego-satisfying re-election.

In his fear of republicans being swept out of office by reasonably reality-tethered voters, the president is raging against voting by mail despite providing no evidence of corruption in vote-by-mail. His inability to convince even some republican states is becoming apparent:

But not only is Trump’s claim that fraud is rampant in absentee voting bogus (absentee ballot fraud is exceedingly rare); his real motive — that he thinks mail voting advantages Democrats — is simply wrong. 

That may partly explain why even many Republican states are turning their backs on Trump and moving to expand mail voting.   

The New York Times explains:

"In the face of a pandemic, what was already limited opposition to letting voters mail in their ballots has withered. Eleven of the 16 states that limit who can vote absentee have eased their election rules this spring to let anyone cast an absentee ballot in upcoming primary elections — and in some cases, in November as well. Another state, Texas, is fighting a court order to do so.  

Four of those 11 states are mailing ballot applications to registered voters, just as Michigan and Nevada are doing. And that does not count 34 other states and the District of Columbia that already allow anyone to cast an absentee ballot, including five states in which voting by mail is the preferred method by law. 

There’s some resistance from Republican officeholders in some places, but the overwhelming trend is to ignore Trump and move ahead to make mail voting easier. Just as Trump has failed to convince all Republicans that we should stop wearing masks and immediately resume all social and economic activity, he hasn’t convinced his party that mail voting must be rejected, or limited only to important people such as him."

Limited only to important people such as him? His compassion for others is touching. Sort of like a very hard kick in the groin is touching.

Anyway, therein resides some apparently good news. Even some republican states are rejecting some of the constant torrent of lies and BS that our self-serving president constantly spews for his personal benefit as he sees it.

Treating a Covid patient in Italy, not the US



A drone photo of a mass burial, Hart Island, the  
New York City public cemetery, April 9, 2020

AMERICA: LAND OF WASTE

The average American tosses 4.4 pounds of trash every single day. It may not seem all that astonishing on the surface, but with 323.7 million people living in the United States, that is roughly 728,000 tons of daily garbage – enough to fill 63,000 garbage trucks.

That is 22 billion plastic bottles every year. Enough office paper to construct a 12-foot-high wall from Los Angeles to Manhattan. It is 300 laps around the equator in paper and plastic cups, forks, and spoons. It is 500 disposable cups per average American worker – cups that will still be sitting in the landfill five centuries from now.

Approximately half of the 254 million tons of yearly waste will meet its fate in one of the more than 2,000 active landfills across the country – and you probably live, work or socialize closer to one than you may think.

The easiest way to know you’re living near a landfill is by smelling it, right? Wrong.

The United States is home to thousands of inactive landfills – and some have found new life and purpose as public parks.

But most are out of sight, out of mind. The West Coast is practically overflowing with landfills: There are a dozen in the Los Angeles area alone, though most are now closed. New Yorkers hailing from Manhattan, Brooklyn, Bronx, and Queens have no problem beating up on Staten Island, a borough practically built on top of what used to be the world’s largest garbage dump.

Even the Sunshine State isn’t immune to taking some of the load. Landfills linger in the heart of Miami and West Palm Beach, though they pale in comparison to the dump deluge in Tennessee and the Carolinas.

Landfills have a long and relatively unsorted history. Before the first municipal dumps appeared on the map in the 20th century, humans either burned their garbage or buried it on the outskirts of town to avoid disease. The circa 1937 Fresno Municipal Sanitary Landfill is considered the first modern, sanitary landfill of its kind, and future landfills followed suit.

At first, they weren’t much more than man-made craters in the earth – a dramatic step up from the first municipal dump established in ancient Athens but still pretty crude. They were environmental disasters, leaching contaminated liquid into the soil and groundwater, and releasing overwhelming amounts of methane into the air.

The 1976 Resource Conservation and Recovery Act changed all of that. The law requires landfills to be lined with plastic, clay or both, effectively killing the old idea of a “dump,” or those old-school craters.

Over the last hundred years, the number of dumps and landfills has dramatically increased across the country – as seen in the time lapse above – to accommodate the growing population’s garbage disposal needs.

Las Vegas may be the city of sin, but its home state Nevada is the land of garbage, with a whopping 38.4 tons of waste per person in its landfills.

Idaho, North Dakota, and Connecticut are the only three states in the country with less than 10 tons of landfill waste per person – putting Pennsylvania, Colorado, and California to shame, with their average of 35 tons of landfill garbage per person.

That’s not to say that these state residents are necessarily producing all of this landfill waste themselves. The trash trade is a $4 billion industry, and many state landfills are only too happy to take garbage from other states.

Transport fees are cheapest in the South and Midwest – as low as $19 per ton in states like Alabama. Ohio, for example, is famous for accepting as much as 3.4 million tons of out-of-state waste per year, to the tune of $35 per ton. The most offensive giver of trash was New York, accounting for nearly 32 percent of Ohio’s out-of-state total, with New Jersey not far behind.

Landfill gas is a dangerous, virtually invisible concoction generated in the most natural way possible: the bacterial decomposition of organic material. The result is half methane and half carbon dioxide and water vapor, with trace amounts of oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen and nonmethane organic compounds, or NMOCs, which can cause smog if uncontrolled.

In the past, environmentalists have been more concerned by carbon dioxide emissions, but now, they are worrying about methane. Even though methane doesn’t linger as long as carbon dioxide, it is far more effective at absorbing the sun’s heat and contributing to global warming. For the first 20 years after it meets the atmosphere, methane is 84 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

The population-heavy states of California and Texas are currently facing the greatest problem with landfill-produced methane, but the repercussions of this problem could eventually affect the entire world.

It can be hard to wrap our minds around the impact of our waste in terms of landfill gas and metrics that stretch into the billions. So let’s scale it down.

Your 4.4 pounds of daily trash is approximately the weight of a modest-sized pumpkin that you would carve on Halloween. Add up all those “pumpkins” over the seasons and they come in at 1,606 pounds – or the size of your average cow. But if you pack that trash into cubed feet, you’re looking at the height of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

The waste tally for a family of four is even grimmer. That yearly haul weighs as much as an Asian elephant and stacks up to the height of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Think that’s bad? The annual weight of trash for the entire country equals 254 million tons, or 1.2 million blue whales, and would reach the moon and back 25 times, a journey of 11,534,090 miles.

Not all hope is lost, though. Keep reading to learn about how you can cut back on your waste. 

Now, more than ever, Americans are hopping on the recycling bandwagon. Last year marked the all-time high for recycling: 34.3 percent of our garbage, or 87.2 million tons, could have ended up in a landfill but didn’t. Bravo, America!

But though recycling has increased in recent years, so has trash generation. More than 60 million plastic bottles still find their way to landfills and incinerators on a daily basis. Six times as many water bottles were thrown away in 2004 than in 1997.

Clearly, there is still work to be done. And you can make a difference.

Conclusion

Whether we are a running out of landfill space in America is a hotly debated topic, but that doesn’t mean we should produce garbage like there is no tomorrow. Here are some tips to help reduce your personal waste:

• Bring reusable bags when you go shopping, and choose reusable containers for packing meals.
• Buy in bulk whenever possible. Beware of double packing – or individually wrapped items that are repackaged and sold as bulk.
• Compost your food scraps and yard waste whenever possible.
• Cut back on junk mail – you receive more than 30 pounds of it per year.
• Be like a SNOWFLAKE and try and leave as little of an environmental footprint as you can.

https://www.saveonenergy.com/land-of-waste/

SUPPORT FOR TRUMP

LETTER: Trump-bashing doesn’t heal wounds that divide us
https://www.capecodtimes.com/opinion/20200520/letter-trump-bashing-doesnt-heal-wounds-that-divide-us

Gary Liddell of Holt writes: “The president is bringing in and testing new vaccines for this virus at unbelievable speed but yet, the Dems continue to complain and criticize that he is not taking the blame. Of course he shouldn’t; it’s all on the Chinese.”
https://www.nwfdailynews.com/opinion/20200327/letter-too-much-trump-bashing

The continual President Trump-bashing is getting out of hand.
Could we not give Trump some “credit” for this instead of trying to find ways to tear him down?
https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/letters-to-the-editor/article188262129.html

Let’s stop the Donald Trump bashing. Here is an individual running for president who speaks his mind.
https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/letters-to-the-editor/article48936355.html

Readers React: Stop bashing Trump during this crisis
I just finished reading the Letters to the Editor in the March 29 edition. Here is a summary of the letters. I hate Trump, I hate Trump, I hate Trump, I hate Trump, I hate Trump, I hate Trump, I hate Trump and finally I hate Trump.
Really people! At a time when our country is going through tough times and we should be pulling together as Americans, this is the drivel that keeps showing up in The Morning Call Letters to the Editor? Aren’t we better than that?
https://www.mcall.com/opinion/readers-react/mc-opi-let-knerr-i-hate-trump-letters-20200402-h2cyqzuugvabjk3qq6ik2afhy4-story.html

Stop bashing President Trump, he's getting this done
https://www.galvnews.com/opinion/letters_to_editor/article_f10706c1-bf15-5de8-a7c4-6b5da197ce28.html

In a time of crisis, U.S. should rally around Trump, not bash him | READER COMMENTARY
I didn’t vote for Donald Trump nor am I a fan. But Trump-bashing has gone too far!
https://www.baltimoresun.com/opinion/readers-respond/bs-ed-rr-trump-bashing-letter-20200409-hjmnur5lxjgqthrdpz4gjupagu-story.html

Coronavirus Disinformation is Winning Hearts and Minds

Reuters is reporting that a new poll indicates that about a quarter of Americans have no interest in taking a Covid-19 vaccine if one is developed. Some people are concerned that safety could be compromised in view of the speed of development. Reuters writes:

"(Reuters) - A quarter of Americans have little or no interest in taking a coronavirus vaccine, a Reuters/Ipsos poll published on Thursday found, with some voicing concern that the record pace at which vaccine candidates are being developed could compromise safety. 

Some 36% of respondents said they would be less willing to take a vaccine if U.S. President Donald Trump said it was safe, compared with only 14% who would be more interested. 

Less than two-thirds of respondents said they were “very” or “somewhat” interested in a vaccine, a figure some health experts expected would be higher given the heightened awareness of COVID-19 and the more than 92,000 coronavirus-related deaths in the United States alone. 

Fourteen percent of respondents said they were not at all interested in taking a vaccine, and 10% said they were not very interested. Another 11% were unsure. 

Studies are underway, but experts estimate that at least 70% of Americans would need to be immune through a vaccine or prior infection to achieve what is known as “herd immunity,” when enough people are resistant to an infectious disease to prevent its spread."

It is shocking that about 36% of people in the survey would be less inclined to do what the president says, while 14% would be inclined to believe him. That reflects the president's obvious track record of lies, deceit and gross incompetence in dealing with the pandemic. One can see the damage that lies and disinformation from all sources is inflicting on Americans and American society.

On the encouraging side, about 84% of respondents in the survey still believe that vaccines are safe for adults and children. That suggests safety assurances that people get might reconsider their unwillingness to take a vaccine. About 29% of those who said they were “not very” interested in taking the vaccine indicated that they would be more open to taking a vaccine if the FDA approved it. Presumably, the FDA will approve the vaccine before it is made available to the public.