Saturday, February 20th, 2021
Today was a happy day.
I was awake super early; probably because I ended last nights miserable thoughts by just going to bed at 21:00. I had from 6:00 -9:30 to snooze, read, have a coffee and figure out what day of the week it might be. Most days are just like the one before. Not today.
Today is Saturday, so first up practice in the park which is followed by pool time. As has become my habit when I go to the back-up pool, I arrived early with a lane freeing up shortly after my arrival making for blissful 40 minutes of lap time. After the icy wind and the freezing temperatures in the park the pool felt nice and warm.
Given we are meeting our bubble family for another Supra tonight and neither of us would have lasted from breakfast to dinner without food, we skipped breakfast and had a baked sweet potato with sour cream each for lunch.
I learned they take forever if baked in tin foil, better to roast them directly on the grid. While waiting for them to be done, I called my high school sweetheart in Cape Town for a chat, trying to avoid talking about the virus as we agree to disagree on that subject. The remedies undertaken by the South African government might be a case of "the cure is worse than the disease". My favorite restaurant shut their doors forever during the first lock down. His favorite place is barely surviving, and many shops have gone under. It was rather depressing news.
Lunch was a TV lunch watching Lucifer, an entertaining Netflix series, after which EM headed back to speak to her father and do some school work, while I hopped onto a call with the outdoor graduation sub-committee.
The call went much better than I had anticipated. The location everyone had dismissed turns out to be the only viable option – the west parking lot at Wolf Trap National Park for Performing Arts! The graduation celebration would be a fall back in the event that MCPS cancels all outdoor graduations on school fields, a decision to be made at some point in April.
Wolf Trap is not only the least cost option, it is the only option that would allow us to have all graduates on one lot at the same time. Everywhere else we would be limited to fifty cars at a time, which is logistically not doable. There are concerns about transport, the location being in a different State and equity of all students being able to attend.
The discussion today showed that all of these can be solved; my saying all along. Plus, it does not require a deposit. If we do not use the permit, we would lose US$120 – end of story. We also concluded there would be no need for a stage. Let’s see what the PTSA has to say to the suggestion, not to hopeful as they have nixed it before.
The next sub-committee which now needs to decide on a location is the Post Prom Committee. I still favor the idea of a parking lot for a big street fest type of event, but the majority seems to prefer the national mall, which does have the advantage of coming with a permit for gatherings exceeding the limits. So, a good day on many fronts, ending with a Georgian feast, which is afore mentioned Supra.
We have done two of these in our garden over the summer and it is really quite fun. There is a Georgian restaurant in Downtown DC which sells Georgian food to be cooked at home. A six-course meal when all is said and done. It is an all girls night, which sort of fits with the episode of Lucifer we watched earlier in the day, where Lucifer arranges for a girls night out for his "partner". I trust ours will not end in deaths.
Infection numbers continue to trend downward, with 62k new infections reported nationwide over the past twenty-four hours to bring the national total to 28.6 million. It is very hard to believe this ongoing positive trend. The slight uptick compared to seven days ago can be attributed to the States in the Great Plains, where the fall surge began, which are reporting significant increases in infections. My guess: this is the result of gatherings on Super Bowl Sunday and likely this is just the beginning as only 16 days have passed since the event.
Over 100 scientists agree the virus is here to stay and will become endemic. What this means for society is not as bad as it sounds, seeing we have been through it with the flu just over a hundred years ago. Between vaccines and recovered people herd immunity globally is likely to be reached within the next 12-24 months . Infections will become less severe and getting a Corona shot will become much like getting a flu shot.
The USA is set to vaccinate 3.3 million people by the end of March, based on doses secured. The key challenge will be logistics. It seems that healthy, young people can expect to get in line for a shot by June, with every US resident who would like a shot getting one by July.
Recently EM came back from dinner with her BF as well as his brother and sister in law. The latter two work in health care. They have made two claims, which I would prefer EM (and the BF) question rather than repeat as facts. The first claim related to reporting of patients with COVID. Supposedly hospitals receive higher compensation for people diagnosed with COVID. This supposedly results in inflated numbers. USA Today fact checked this claim.
Sen. Scott Jensen, R-Minn Said the following on Fox News in April: “if it's a straightforward, garden-variety pneumonia that a person is admitted to the hospital for – if they're Medicare – typically, the diagnosis-related group lump sum payment would be $5,000. But if it's COVID-19 pneumonia, then it's $13,000, and if that COVID-19 pneumonia patient ends up on a ventilator, it goes up to $39,000." What has not been discussed at all are the presumably higher costs, for instance for PPE oxygen, medication and equipment, associated with treating COVID patients, which presumably justify higher rates. USA-today has fact checked the claim that higher reimbursements lead to over reporting of COVID hospitalizations. “Under MediCare each hospital has a base payment rate assigned, which takes into account nationwide and regional trends, including labor costs and varying health care resources in each market. Then, each diagnosis-related group, which classifies various diagnoses into groups and subgroups, is assigned a weight based on the average amount of resources it takes to care for a patient. Those figures are multiplied to determine the payment from Medicare. A hospital in one city and state may be paid more or less for treating a patient than a hospital in another. PolitiFact reporter Tom Kertscher wrote, "The dollar amounts Jensen cited are roughly what we found in an analysis published April 7 by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a leading source of health information. The conclusion: Recent legislation pays hospitals higher Medicare rates for COVID-19 patients and treatment, but there is no evidence of fraudulent reporting.”
The second point was related to reported deaths. EM was outraged that anyone who tested positive for the virus upon death was reported as a COVID death, even stage four cancer patients. Again, the outrage suggests reported death numbers are inflated as patients would have died anyway, COVID or no COVID, are counted as COVID deaths. This is a claim frequently made, so I feel it should be addressed. I looked up how many people in the USA have died in 2019 versus in 2020.
For 2020 final numbers are not yet available and probably will not be for a while to come. However, numbers for January through October are fully reported. So far, more than 350,000 Americans have died of COVID-19. According to preliminary weekly data from the CDC (as of January 6, 2021), 3,187,086 people died from all causes between January 1 and December 26, 2020. While this data is preliminary and is incomplete for at least the last eight weeks of reported data, it provides for useful context. According to the same estimates, 2,852,609 people died in 2019, meaning at least 334,000 more people have died so far in 2020 than 2019, despite missing or incomplete data for October through December. It is a simple with/ without virus comparison, indicating how deadly the virus has been – an access of 1% of the US population have died in 2020 compared to 2019.
Finally, like my high school sweetheart many people decide not to get vaccinated. I think that is okay, everyone is at liberty to choose how they want to end their lives, but if you decide COVID-19 is the best option, please do not congest the health care systems with your decision.