An Unbelievable Lack of COVID Awareness

Here's a post by Dr Chuck Wurster on Twitter about the lack of COVID knowledge, in the 3rd year of the pandemic.

"Often when I talk to patients in the emergency department, I feel like no one has ever actually talked to them about Covid, masks, vaccinations or how to protect themselves and their families from viral illnesses.

Some patients are surprised to learn that Covid is still spreading through our communities. They’ve never heard of long Covid, and they believe that the virus is “just a cold.” No one has ever told them that repeat Covid infections could have profound health implications.

Many people don't know that masks work to decrease the spread of respiratory viruses and are not just something worn by sick people. They don't know that respirator-style masks can protect the wearer from getting infections. They don't know that you can get these masks for kids.

Many of my patients are surprised to learn that their young children have been eligible for the Covid vaccines for months. They don't know they themselves could have had two boosters this year or that the new bivalent boosters are available. Many adults have had only two doses.

My patients have very little knowledge of how to keep an Covid infection from spreading within a household. Talk of ventilation and filtration, opening windows, masking, and isolation within the home are foreign concepts. No one has ever told them.

Why don't my patients know these seemingly evident and basic concepts of the world we now live in? It's likely a combination of many things. Regardless of why, I do my best every shift, with the short time we have in an overcrowded emergency department, to fill in the blanks.

Public health messaging has been abysmal in informing the public about our current state of persistent Covid transmission and death, the emergence of influenza and RSV, and the immense strain this viral soup has put on our healthcare system.

No one from public health says the word Covid anymore. They say “respiratory viruses”. No one from public health says “mask” anymore, they just mention washing your hands. No one ever mentions Long Covid or talks about the vascular and immune complications of repeat infections.

The scarcity of knowledge and lack of insight within our society does not solely rest with public health. We, as front-line healthcare workers, have done poorly in filling in the gaps left by non-existent public messaging. We can’t just let this slide anymore.

The healthcare team must take the extra few minutes to give patients the tools to protect themselves and their families. Encourage all vaccinations, most especially Covid and flu. Encourage masking in public and at school. Talk about respirators. Talk about cleaning the air.

We need our public figures, including politicians, celebrities and high profile physicians to model strategies to curb the spread of respiratory viruses. Most importantly this must include wearing respirator-style masks in indoor public spaces. Our society needs to see this.

The public won't be able to adapt to these extraordinary times unless they know how to avoid prolonged and potentially life-shortening illnesses. We have to provide this information both in our words and in our behaviours."

Midterm Postmortem

Stephen Kruiser summed it up well in his 11/9/22 column titled "We're Done -- American
Voters Are Idiots":

"So much for the Red Wave, freedom, and hopes that the United States of America would continue to exist past next Arbor Day.

We’re done here, kids. You know actual human beings who voted for Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, and Kathy Hochul in New York.

These are not people who are conducive to the continued existence of this once-glorious Republic.

What happened last night should have been an emphatic correction to the hell this country has been subjected to since Joe Biden was artificially installed in the White House.

Instead, we got a bunch of bleating socialist sheep."

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It's hard to understand how, after 73% of Americans polled said their biggest concerns are the economy and crime, people would still vote for the Democrats anyway!  And I never could have imagined that New Yorkers would still vote for Kathy Hochul rather than crime-fighting Lee Zeldin. The criminals themselves must be happy, though: "The hunt is on for a knife-wielding robber who sliced a 27-year-old man in the face inside the Union Square subway station in Manhattan, cops said."

Phil Mushnick on Kyrie Irving & Other Antisemites

Sportswriter Phil Mushnick has written a great column titled "Nets’ Kyrie Irving can go to hell with his anti-Semitic stupidity" and he has brought up some important facts that others seem to overlook:

"While Irving’s sense of applied and shared history seems to be in accord with the 12th-century Inquisition and genocidal Nazis of the 20th century, I wonder if he knows of three more recent historical figures:  James Chaney, a black man from Mississippi, and Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, two young Jews from New York City. 

"I highly doubt that Irving, despite his Duke University pedigree, has heard of them and I highly doubt that what now passes for black leadership — the selectively silent from Jesse Jackson to Al Sharpton to Louis Farrakhan to LeBron James to Kanye West — would encourage young African Americans to learn of them. 

"Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman were civil rights workers on a mission in Mississippi in 1964. They were murdered by Ku Klux Klan members. Chaney was 21, Schwerner was 24 and Goodman was 20.
Starting with the formation of the NAACP in 1909 in NYC, there have been a preponderance of Jews in black civil rights movements. They shared the commonality and brutality of illogical, ignorant, Kyrie Irving-like bigotry. 

"But now we see, hear and read of  'enlightened' black men and women turning Jews such as Goodman and Schwerner from martyrs to suckers. It’s a colossal betrayal generated and spread by practiced hate and race hustlers who now win attention and even support on demand."

It's not only enlightened black men, it's also terrorists like these who attacked a kosher market and killed three people. They also hated Jews, and they had an interest in the  the so-called Black Hebrew Israelites movement. How long does it take today's antisemites to go from openly expressing antisemitic sentiments to actually killing Jews?

Dear Deniers: COVID Is Still Not Over

Read Dr. David Berger's column about COVID, from the Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald. He could very well be describing what's been happening here in the United States: "The notion that COVID-19 has been vanquished is not supported by the facts."

Before giving us the facts, he writes that "Right now, we are telling ourselves a soothing story about COVID-19, one that follows the pattern of many of the fairytales we have liked to tell since our days around the campfire. It has a typical beginning (a dark threat stalks us), middle (a valiant and desperate fight against overwhelming odds) and end (the foe vanquished, a return to normal)."

"With no consent, no mandate, no public discussion, the 'dry tinder' (the elderly, those with chronic disease, those most at risk of  'reaping', as Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly has termed them) is being burnt off. Deaths and infirmity in these individuals can easily be explained away and so easily discounted."

"The only way to identify that this is happening is through statistical analysis of death and illness rates. These analyses accumulate daily and are remarkably consistent around the globe, but statistical reports are not eye-catching and are easily ignored when it is expedient to do so."

Sound familiar?  

Why people would rather hide the truth and continue to minimize the devastation than fight it, I'll never understand. But when you read the reader comments that often accompany important columns like this and read things like "Who cares?", "Stop the fearmongering", and "I refuse to wear a mask and get vaccinated", you can plainly see why we're still in such trouble.

Mazel Tov, Benjamin Netanyahu!

From Israel Hayom: "Former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared to hold a narrow lead early Wednesday in Israeli elections, according to exit polls, potentially paving the way for a return to power after it appeared that at least one left-wing party failed to meet the necessary threshold to enter parliament.

The exit polls were preliminary, and the final results could change as votes are tallied. However, they pointed to a continued rightward shift in the Israeli electorate, further dimming hopes for peace with the Palestinians and setting the stage for possible conflict with the Biden administration and Israel's supporters in the US."

It's tough what the Biden Administration thinks. Netanyahu has always protected Israel first, and it's impossible to make peace with Palestinians, assorted antisemites, and terrorists who want you wiped off the map.

Shameful!

"Vulgar, offensive’: GOP candidate’s novel on Anne Frank a ‘wake-up call,’ says anti-missionary activist"

Dr. Johnny Teague, a pastor and Republican nominee for Congress, published a work of historical fiction that continues the autobiographical The Diary of Anne Frank, but his ending is shocking.

In what appears to be a missionizing message , the teenage victim accepts Christianity before dying in a Nazi concentration camp, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported in a review of Teague’s oeuvre.

'It is very disturbing that this Texas Rep candidate would misappropriate not just a Jewish symbol, icon and liturgy – and that’s routine for the messianic movement – but to misappropriate a young woman who was murdered specifically because she was a Jew and not a Christian,' leading anti-missionary activist Rabbi Tovia Singer told World Israel News Tuesday in an interview."

With the wave of casual antisemitism that's going on today, this is just par for the course.  And with tastes being what they are, this book will probably become a big hit with these people. 

Gentiles should just stop co-opting the Holocaust for their own purposes.

And "celebrities" like Kyrie Irving and Kanye West should just shut up.