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Posts by stl1
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2022-02-06 at 6:09 PM UTC in i burglarized a residence this evening...
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2022-02-06 at 5:33 PM UTC in STICK IT, Damn It!The Washington Post
The 1918 flu didn’t end in 1918. Here’s what its third year can teach us.
Jess McHugh
In New York City in 1920 — nearly two years into a deadly influenza epidemic that would claim at least 50 million lives worldwide — the new year began on a bright note.
The 1918 flu didn’t end in 1918. Here’s what its third year can teach us.
“Best Health Report for City in 53 Years,” boasted a headline in the New York Times on Jan. 4, 1920, after New York had survived three devastating waves of the flu virus. The nation as a whole, which would ultimately lose 675,000 people to the disease, believed that the end might finally be in sight.
Within a few weeks, however, those optimistic headlines began to change. Before the end of the month, New York City would experience a surge in influenza cases. Chicago and other urban centers reported the same.
Residents should prepare themselves for an “influenza return,” New York City health commissioner Royal S. Copeland warned. He predicted that the virus variant responsible for the surge would be milder and that those who had fallen ill the previous year would be immune. He was wrong, at least in part: While many places worldwide did not see a fourth wave of the great influenza pandemic, several metropolises — including New York City, Chicago and Detroit — had another deadly season in store.
As the coronavirus pandemic creeps into its third year, the 1918 influenza pandemic can offer some insight into how this chapter of history might draw to a close. But an “ending,” when it comes to viruses such as these, is a misleading word. Eventually, experts say, the novel coronavirus is likely to transition from a deadly and disruptive pathogen to a milder, more seasonal nuisance.
In the meantime, though, the country’s experience a century ago suggests that we could be in for a lot more pain — especially if we let our guard down.
The 1918 flu lasted far beyond 1918. Two years after it began, just as officials such as Copeland were declaring victory and cities were easing restrictions, a fourth wave hit parts of the country, bringing punishing caseloads that pushed some hospitals to the brink of collapse and left many more Americans dead.
The virus did not seem so menacing when it began: The first wave in the spring of 1918 was relatively mild. But it returned with a vengeance in the fall, probably having mutated. That second wave burned through patients around the world. Street cars were converted into hearses, and priests collected bodies with horse-drawn carriages.
First U.S. vaccine mandate in 1809 launched 200 years of court battles
During the second wave alone, more Americans were killed by the flu than died in the First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War and the Vietnam War combined.
The flu pandemic seemed to affect young people in particular, for reasons that historians and scientists are still debating. When the first recorded cases arrived, World War I was raging, and the cramped conditions of the trenches meant that the virus could pass rapidly from soldier to soldier, and the conditions in field hospitals often hastened the spread. Other experts have suggested that people in their 20s and 30s were less likely to have prior immunity to similar flu viruses.
Regardless, the virus alone lowered life expectancy in the United States by more than 12 years. As many as 10 percent of all young adults living through the time of the flu pandemic may have died of it, according to historian John M. Barry in his book “The Great Influenza.”
By the winter of 1919-1920, Americans were weary of the limitations on daily life. Nearly all of the public health restrictions — such as mask-wearing, social distancing and the closure of schools and churches — had been lifted. A hasty return to public gatherings led to an increase in case numbers. Politicians either blamed people’s carelessness for the reemergence of the virus or downplayed the seriousness of it.
The fourth wave was not front-page news in the way that prior spikes had been. The coverage was often relegated to small paragraphs deep inside newspapers, reporting thousands of new cases on a weekly or even daily basis. By February 1920, there was an epidemic in a state prison in New Jersey, and some courts were forced to halt proceedings because of illness.
One physician wrote a letter to the editor in the New York Times in the winter of 1920, begging people to avoid “needless exposure to influenza” through unnecessary social contact. The doctor warned that anyone who visited someone who was ill was then “capable of spreading the disease to any number of others who might have escaped, thereby putting an extra drain upon the already overburdened hospitals, nurses, and doctors.”
But if the fourth wave failed to generate the kinds of headlines and fear of its predecessors, it wasn’t for a lack of lethality. In New York City, more people died in the period from December 1919 to April 1920 than in the first and third waves, according to a research paper on influenza mortality in the city. Detroit, St. Louis and Minneapolis also experienced significant fourth waves, and severe “excess mortality” was reported in many counties in Michigan because of the flu.
Ben Franklin’s bitter regret that he didn’t immunize his 4-year-old son against smallpox
Local governments’ public health interventions actually may have contributed to the fourth wave by limiting the virus’s spread in prior waves. Letting the virus run rampant, however, would not have been advisable either, said Wan Yang, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Columbia University and an author of the paper on New York City influenza mortality. “More infection could also lead to more mutation, so that could generate a new virus variant that can then erode your prior immunity, so it’s an interplay depending on how the virus is going to evolve, which is really unpredictable,” Yang said.
Influenza viruses and coronaviruses are genetically different, so it’s not possible to make a one-to-one comparison with the 1918 pandemic. Yang noted that the novel coronavirus appears to mutate far faster than the 1918 influenza virus. Management of the current pandemic also has benefited from many scientific developments that were not available a century ago, including more-sanitary hospital conditions, better access to clean water, and — perhaps what is most notable — a vaccine.
Still, we can get a glimpse into our future by looking at the past. The 1918 flu virus, after lingering in a deadly form for more than two years, eventually grew milder. Now it is “part of every seasonal flu we have,” said Ann Reid, the executive director of the National Center for Science Education, who helped sequence the genome of the 1918 influenza virus in the 1990s. Her research found that some genetic aspects of the 1918 virus continued to be present in new outbreaks, including pandemics in 1957 and 1968. People with immunity to the 1918 virus were therefore likely to have some protection from its genetic cousins.
“Eventually, everyone in the world will have some base level of immunity to this coronavirus, so even when it mutates into a new strain, people won’t be entirely vulnerable to it,” Reid said.
The best we can hope for with the current pandemic is an evolution that is to the flu virus’s. “I think it’s going to stay,” Yang said of the novel coronavirus. “I don’t think elimination is feasible or even realistic at this point. Hopefully we can live more peacefully with this virus.” -
2022-02-05 at 3:18 PM UTC in THE MAGA PARTY!,,, the GOP is dead, republicans are going down with the dems,, get ready for THE MAGA PARTY lefty's
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2022-02-05 at 2:45 PM UTC in STICK IT, Damn It!Newsweek
Unvaccinated Man Almost Killed by COVID Regrets Not Getting Shots: 'I Was Terribly Wrong'
Aristos Georgiou
An unvaccinated Georgia man has said he regrets not getting his COVID-19 shots after almost dying as a result of the disease.
Fifty-six-year-old Jeff Adams, from the city of Covington, told FOX 5 Atlanta that he contracted COVID-19 at the concert of a friend's band at the American Legion in Conyers in August, 2021.
At this point Adams was not vaccinated. He said he had decided against getting the shots because a blood test in July that year revealed that he had COVID-19 antibodies, indicating a prior infection.
As such, he believed that he did not need to get vaccinated.
But he has now spoken about his experience with the disease and said that he regrets his decision.
"I can tell you conclusively that is the worst decision of my life," he told FOX 5. "I'm a person who has never been sick much at all in my life, and I thought I didn't have to worry about it. But, boy, was I wrong. I was terribly wrong."
Adams said that within days of the concert he became extremely sick and delirious. Eventually, his mother and daughter convinced him to visit to the emergency department at Piedmont Rockdale Hospital in Conyers.
"I was very near death, shortly after I got to the hospital," Adams said. "I had waited too long, but I don't even remember that. There is about a six-week period of my life, beginning on August 8, that I have no memory of at all."
Dr. Shimool Rabbani, a physician at the hospital who treated Adams, said he was one of the sickest COVID-19 patients he had seen over the past two years.
The 56-year-old was in acute respiratory failure and needed to be placed on a mechanical ventilator in the ICU.
Adams also has two health issues that put him at high risk of becoming severely ill from COVID-19. "I was 305 pounds and diabetic. And, that didn't help at all," he said.
Adams ended up spending 88 days in hospital and had to be resuscitated on five separate occasions. During his hospital stay, he was on a ventilator for five weeks and was also in a coma for five weeks.
"I came as near death as anybody," he said. "There was probably a six- to eight-week period of terrible pain, I mean excruciating pain. I couldn't get out of bed. I couldn't walk. I could barely speak."
Adams is now back at home but he faces a long recovery, and still requires a tracheostomy tube.
"I can walk a limited amount. I can get in and out of my hospital bed, I have a medical bed at home. I'm receiving home healthcare and coming to the hospital once every two weeks to have a surgery wound addressed," he said.
Adams is now urging people who have not been vaccinated to get their shots.
"Ever since I've regained consciousness and could speak, I've told everybody I can to go get the vaccine, because it's that important," he said.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), people who have recovered from COVID-19 will have some protection from repeat infections. But reinfections can still occur in these individuals, and in some cases they can be serious. New virus variants may also increase the risk of reinfection.
All COVID-19 vaccines continue to be highly effective in protecting against severe illness. As such, the CDC recommends vaccination for all people aged five years or older, including individuals who have been infected before. -
2022-02-04 at 10:18 PM UTC in Winter Weather TerrorismI shovel my own snow.
Jiggles shovels his own shit. -
2022-02-04 at 10:03 PM UTC in Happy Black Pride MonthMister Albert King:
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2022-02-04 at 9:53 PM UTC in Winter Weather TerrorismI got my snow shoveled...and it was even real!
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2022-02-04 at 9:15 PM UTC in STICK IT, Damn It!STEP ON UP, FOLKS...AND STICK IT!
Bloomberg
Moderna’s Covid-19 Vaccine Gets Backing From CDC Advisory Panel
Fiona Rutherford
(Bloomberg) -- Moderna Inc.’s Covid-19 shot received unanimous backing from a group of key U.S. health advisers after its approval, a move that could help encourage the hesitant to get vaccinated as the omicron variant continues to spread across the country.
All 13 members of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices voted to recommend the two-dose regimen for adults on Friday.
Moderna’s shot, to be sold under the brand name Spikevax, won full approval this week from the Food and Drug Administration, becoming the second Covid vaccine to gain such a clearance. The similar messenger RNA shot from partners Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE was fully approved by regulators last year. Previously, the shots were available under emergency-use authorizations.
Another full clearance for a shot that has had a major role in the U.S. immunization campaign could persuade more holdouts who were wary of the initial review process to get shots. About a quarter of Americans who are eligible still haven’t received a vaccine, according to the CDC.
While messenger RNA shots have been associated with an elevated rate of heart inflammation in people 12 to 39 years old, the benefits of the vaccine clearly outweigh the risks, according to a government report published last July.
The CDC presented evidence during Friday’s meeting from safety monitoring systems in multiple countries showing that there is an increased, but rare, risk of myocarditis following vaccination with a messenger RNA shot. The highest risk was most commonly seen in young males after receiving a second dose.
As of Feb. 4, more than 204 million doses of Moderna’s vaccine have been administered in the U.S., accounting for about 37% of the 540 million shots administered overall.
Variant Shots
Both Moderna and Pfizer are studying omicron-specific vaccines as the variant continues to spread. Last week, Moderna enrolled the first participant in a trial of its omicron-specific vaccine booster.
At the same time, a subvariant of the omicron strain called BA.2 has been detected in at least 57 countries. While it appears to spread more easily than the original, initial findings show it doesn’t seem to cause more severe disease and booster shots remain an effective shield.
The subvariant is estimated to account for less than 1% of all sequenced cases, but the proportion of BA.2 has been steadily increasing, a CDC spokesperson said in an email Thursday. -
2022-02-04 at 6:31 PM UTC in Winter Weather TerrorismQ. How many feet of snow did Jiggles play in in the summer in England as a boy?
A. The same number as the times Speculum claims Rump was impeached. -
2022-02-04 at 6:28 PM UTC in Winter Weather TerrorismHow many times was Rump impeached, Speculum?
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2022-02-04 at 5:50 PM UTC in Winter Weather Terrorism
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2022-02-04 at 5:49 PM UTC in Do you get aggravated easily?I'll give you a dollar.
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2022-02-04 at 5:18 PM UTC in Winter Weather TerrorismI got that you're full of malarkey and got caught and proven wrong...again.
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2022-02-04 at 5:15 PM UTC in Do you get aggravated easily?
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2022-02-04 at 4:04 PM UTC in Food Prices Approach Record Highs, Threatening the World’s PoorestWhy?
You trying to start the next famine? -
2022-02-04 at 3:55 PM UTC in Winter Weather TerrorismSo, my post left Jiggles speechless!
Long live the power provided by copying and pasting the truth! -
2022-02-03 at 9:57 PM UTC in Winter Weather Terrorism
Originally posted by Jiggaboo_Johnson Psssh a foot of snow, Back home in England a foot of snow was called "A summer heatwave"…pussy North Americans.
While I would hate to claim JIGGLY BOOTY IS FULL OF SHIT, there is his line of crap and then...there is the truth.
Does It Snow In England?
England is one of the countries that make up the United Kingdom alongside Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. The country is between latitudes 49° and 61° N. This location dictates varying weather conditions due to the polar front jet stream. This means that, in one day, the country can experience a myriad of climates. Generally, though, the weather is mostly cool with high temperatures occurring briefly. According to the Köppen climate classification system, the climate of the UK is a temperate oceanic climate.
By virtue of being close to the Atlantic Ocean, England’s climate is mostly mild, windy, and wet with rare temperature variations. However, compared to the other countries in the UK, England has higher temperatures on both the minimum and maximum sides. Snow events have become rarer over the years in England. In the few days that the country receives snow, it barely settles on the ground except for a few occasions.
Snow In England
In a year, the UK gets slightly less than 30 days of snow, mostly received in places with high altitudes, which have colder temperatures. Most of this snow is received in Scotland while England rarely receives snow except in certain parts such as London. Even in London, it may, or it may not snow. Mostly, it does not snow.
MOSTLY, IT DOES NOT SNOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Now, let's hear you attempt to bullshit your way out of this one, Jiggles. This should be classic! -
2022-02-03 at 9:39 PM UTC in Random image threadPut a ring on him, Candy!
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2022-02-03 at 9:34 PM UTC in THE MAGA PARTY!,,, the GOP is dead, republicans are going down with the dems,, get ready for THE MAGA PARTY lefty's
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2022-02-03 at 6:07 PM UTC in Are there any hot Canadian women?Nell is hot but you'll probably have to fight Dudley to get her.
