TAMPA (WFLA) – The Florida Department of Health plans to no longer release a daily COVID-19 report of state cases, deaths, and hospitalizations and will now issue a weekly report.
Most recently on Thursday, the Florida Department of Health reported 1,872 new cases, bringing the state’s overall total to 2,329,867 cases since the virus was first detected on March 1, 2020.
More than 10.3 million Floridians have been vaccinated – accounting for more than half of Florida’s eligible population with 85 percent of Florida’s seniors being vaccinated.
COVID-19 case and vaccine reporting will be available on a weekly basis at the state’s Florida Heath website every Friday.
Op Ed: This is good because now even more Filthy Floridians will die.
The delta variant is 'ripping through the unvaccinated' and crowding hospitals in Florida, Texas
For the week ending July 29, 110,477 people tested positive for COVID-19 in Florida, according to state health officials.
With more than 1,000 COVID patients at hospitals across its six-county region, Orlando’s AdventHealth has suspended non-emergency operations.
A warning from one Texas health expert: "By not getting vaccinated and doing your part, we risk crashing one of the most advanced health care systems in the world.”
A fourth wave of COVID-19 is threatening to overwhelm U.S. hospitals in regions where large swaths of unvaccinated people provide little resistance to the highly contagious delta variant.
Nowhere is the strain more apparent than Florida, which reached a new peak Tuesday of 11,515 people hospitalized with COVID-19, according to data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Hospitals in Jacksonville and Orlando last week crashed through their pandemic peaks, and hospitals in Miami-Dade County are at or approaching record coronavirus hospitalizations this week, said Mary Mayhew, CEO of Florida Hospital Association.
And cases continue to surge, with 110,477 residents testing positive for the COVID-19 virus for the week that ended July 29, foreshadowing more people needing hospital care in the weeks ahead.
"The delta variant is ripping through the unvaccinated," Mayhew said.
Across Florida, COVID surge is 'straining our system'
Further stressing hospitals are larger-than-normal volumes of sick people crowding emergency rooms with non-COVID-19 illnesses, Mayhew said. The combination has challenged hospitals' capacity to staff enough nurses, doctors, respiratory therapists and other clinicians to care for the surge of critically ill patients.
With more than 1,000 coronavirus patients at hospitals across its six-county region, Orlando's AdventHealth suspended non-emergency operations last week to free up staff and space. More than 90% of COVID-19 patients at AdventHealth's hospitals are unvaccinated, and the small number of vaccinated patients with COVID-19 typically have underlying conditions such as cancer or autoimmune disease, the hospital said.
"We have peaked above any previous wave and it is straining our system, our physicians and all of our clinicians," said Neil Finkler, chief clinical officer of AdventHealth's Central Florida division.
"None of these patients thought they would get the virus. But the delta variant has proven to be so highly contagious that even the young and the healthy, including pregnant patients, are starting to fill up our hospitals."
While hospitals from the Northeast to the Southwest set up temporary field hospitals during past surges, Mayhew said Florida hospitals are converting existing hospital space to set up beds. Hospitals are making space in conference rooms, cafeterias and auditoriums.
Mayhew said converting existing hospital space allows more efficient use of limited staff rather than scrambling to staff a remote field hospital in a parking lot or a convention center.
'Every staffed bed' is full at some Texas hospitals
In Texas, hospitals are preparing for the steady rise of COVID-19 hospitalizations that are following rising cases counts. Like in Florida, Texas hospital beds are being filled with unvaccinated COVID-19 patients, said Angela G. Clendenin, a professor at Texas A&M School of Public Health.
While previous COVID-19 waves mainly involved older and middle-aged adults with existing health conditions, the new wave is claiming young adults in their 20s and 30s who need breathing machines in hospital intensive care units, Clendenin said.
Jesus Christ just did another facepalm. We the people expect that corporations will do unscrupulous things to the peasants. This is a given but some corporations are good corporate citizens. This is because of the threat of Qui Tam. Non profits on the other hand fly under the RADAR. They are of little interest to national news and they are often mobbed up with local affiliate in a quid pro quo arrangement.
Like everything else medical related, disabled people are exploited for maximum profit and while some non profits are sincere in helping the disabled others are not. Transparency is often lacking and employee exploitation tends to be the rule rather than the exception. One glaring example of that is RCIL Resource Center For Independent Living in Utica NY.
Dozens of red flags when up when one of our investigative reporters started asking questions and digging deeper into the goings on at RCIL. How deep the corruption goes is not known at this time but when there is complete lack of transparency it usually indicates an abyss of wrong doing. The unwillingness of staff to even give a member of the public the names of the members of the board of directors triggered an impromptu transparency audit from our citizen/journalist investigator. RCIL failed and failed miserably.
At this point, there is no call to action by our readers or network partners as Fat Bastardo ofBigger Fatter Politicshas suggested but there are PINAC auditors in the area that will audit RCIL unannounced. The following few paragraphs explains the sinister nature of parasite entities such are RCIL.
THE NON-PROFIT sector in the U.S. is a complete scam. Hospitals and other agencies get special breaks on property and income taxes. They plough their earnings into expansion and massive salaries for top executives, just like for-profit companies do.
The competitive dynamic that forces each corporation to accumulate as much capital as possible applies to non-profits just as much as for-profits. Employees for non-profits do the work that produces the funds that pay the CEOs--and are often paid even less than employees at for-profit corporations. So exploitation of workers is often even greater at "non-profit" companies than at for profit companies.
KUOW, a public radio station, did a story on non-profit hospitals in Seattle on July 9: Nurses at "non-profit" Swedish hospital start at around $25 per hour ($50,000 per year) and housekeepers get only $12 an hour, while Swedish CEO Rod Hochman made $ 1.5 million in the first nine months of 2007 alone! Hochman also got $120,000 for relocation expenses, as well as $13,000 for other expenses.
But it's not just Hochman--seven officials at Swedish made at least $1 million per year . Altogether, at least 15 Seattle-area non-profit hospital executives earned $1 million or more a year. These salaries come out of what is, in essence, profit made by the "non-profit" corporation. These high salaries continue as Swedish laid off 200 workers this year. Just like at for-profit companies, the people who do the real work get laid off and the ones who are left get overworked, while the CEOs accumulate more and more.
Workers at "non-profits" and public agencies deserve as much support and solidarity as any other workers. Workers as a whole produce the wealth--whether they work in for-profits, non-profits or government agencies. The wealth they produce keeps the whole economy going--to the benefit of the super-rich, whether they be CEOs or shareholders.
Management at non-profits try to sell workers on the idea that they are producing for the public good--so they should be willing to accept less money. Workers should reject this lying rationale that only serves the interests of management. They are actually working to line the pockets of the managers.
When workers rise up and take ownership and control of the economy they will have to transform the "non-profits" just as much as the "for-profits." They will have to squeeze the profit out of both and create an economy based on human need--instead of one based on profit or "non-profit" accumulation.
RCIL located in the economically depressed Mohawk Valley in Central New York State does it even dirtier than Swedish Hospital in Seattle WA. Along with paying its workers poverty wages, 90% of its workers are part time which means that most of these workers do not have health insurance. For an organization that claims to be a social service organization RCIL only seems to serve itself and it's vendors.
Fat Bastard's investigation on Parkridge Health in Hendersonville NC and Adventist Health resulted in huge fines but sadly none of the dozen or so criminals were even but this is New York State that has an aggressive state AG and even more aggressive federal attorneys. Stay tuned to see if another corrupt exploiter of human suffering gets brought to justice.
Critical race theory is an intellectual movement and a framework of legal analysis according to which (1) race is a culturally invented category used to oppress people of color and (2) the law and legal institutions in the United States are inherently racist insofar as they function to create and maintain social, political, and economic inequalities between white and nonwhite people.
Critical race theory developed in the 1970s as an effort by activists and legal scholars to understand why the U.S. civil rights movement had lost momentum and was in danger of being reversed. Their approach emphasized general and systemic features of the legal system that served to perpetuate race-based oppression and white privilege.
Critical race theory is important because it potentially provides a more realistic understanding of white racism in the U.S. as not merely a set of negative attitudes toward other racial groups but also a body of law and legal practices whose real-world effect is the oppression of people of color, especially African Americans.
critical race theory (CRT), intellectual movement and loosely organized framework of legal analysis based on the premise that race is not a natural, biologically grounded feature of physically distinct subgroups of human beings but a socially constructed (culturally invented) category that is used to oppress and exploit people of colour. Critical race theorists hold that the law and legal institutions in the United States are inherently racist insofar as they function to create and maintain social, economic, and political inequalities between whites and nonwhites, especially African Americans.
Critical race theory (CRT) was officially organized in 1989, at the first annual Workshop on Critical Race Theory, though its intellectual origins go back much farther, to the 1960s and ’70s. Its immediate precursor was the critical legal studies (CLS) movement, which dedicated itself to examining how the law and legal institutions serve the interests of the wealthy and powerful at the expense of the poor and marginalized. (CLS, an offshoot of Marxist-oriented critical theory, may also be viewed as a radicalization of early 20th-century legal realism, a school of legal philosophy according to which judicial decision making, especially at the appellate level, is influenced as much by nonlegal—political or ideological—factors as by precedent and principles of legal reasoning.) Like CLS scholars, critical race theorists believed that political liberalism was incapable of adequately addressing fundamental problems of injustice in American society (notwithstanding legislation and court rulings advancing civil rights in the 1950s and ’60s), because its emphasis on the equitable treatment under the law of all races (“colour blindness”) rendered it capable of recognizing only the most overt and obvious racist practices, not those that were relatively indirect, subtle, or systemic. Liberalism was also faulted for mistakenly presupposing the apolitical nature of judicial decision making and for taking a self-consciously incremental or reformist approach that prolonged unjust social arrangements and afforded opportunities for retrenchment and backsliding through administrative delays and conservative legal challenges. Unlike most CLS scholars, however, critical race theorists did not wish to abandon the notions of law or legal rights altogether, because, in their experience, some laws and legal reforms had done much to help oppressed or exploited people.
In their workCritical Race Theory: An Introduction, first published in 2001, the legal scholarsRichard Delgado (one of the founders of CRT) andJean Stefancic discuss several general propositions that they claim would be accepted by many critical race theorists, despite the considerable variation of belief among members of the movement. These “basic tenets” of CRT, according to the authors, include the following claims: (1) Race is socially constructed, not biologically natural. (2) Racism in the United States is normal, not aberrational: it is the common, ordinary experience of most people of colour. (3) Owing to what critical race theorists call “interest convergence” or “material determinism,” legal advances (or setbacks) for people of colour tend to serve the interests of dominant white groups. Thus, the racialhierarchythat characterizes American society may be unaffected or even reinforced byostensibleimprovements in the legal status of oppressed or exploited people. (4) Members of minority groups periodically undergo “differential racialization,” or theattributionto them of varying sets of negativestereotypes, again depending on the needs or interests of whites. (5) According to the thesis of “intersectionality” or “antiessentialism,” no individual can be adequately identified by membership in a single group. AnAfrican Americanperson, for example, may also identify as a woman, alesbian, afeminist, aChristian, and so on. Finally, (6) the “voice of colour” thesis holds that people of colour are uniquely qualified to speak on behalf of other members of their group (or groups) regarding the forms and effects ofracism. Thisconsensushas led to the growth of the “legal story telling” movement, which argues that the self-expressed views of victims of racism and other forms of oppression provide essential insight into the nature of the legal system.
As hundreds of thousands of bikers ride into Sturgis, South Dakota, for it's annual motorcycle rally, vendors selling merchandise featuring Nazi imagery and confederate flags were once again in the spotlight.
According to local ABC News affiliate KOTA, vendors at this year's rally, which is held during the first ten days of August, are selling merchandise bearing Nazi imagery under the guise of supporting freedom of expression for riders and attendees.
One hat bears the initials "SS" of the Schutzstaffel, a Nazi military unit. Under the hat's lid, the text reads, "support your local white boy."
Another was branded with a swastika. According to the report, many vendors also sold Confederate flag memorabilia, to cater to customers who view it as a "heritage" symbol.
"A lot of bikers, you know, it's a freedom thing. A lot of bikers want to be free and voice their opinion and I like to cater to what they want. It doesn't mean that I necessarily believe in everything but, you know, I like to please everybody," said Jenny Alonso, a vendor at the rally, in an interview with KOTA. My OpEd: Jenny Alonso is a depraved whore.
Alonso claimed vendors would sell the merchandise as a way to honor US soldiers who brought Nazi memorabilia back as trophies after World War II.
"So, we're kind of honoring that not necessarily that, you know, we believe in Nazis and Hitler, but it's just kind of a special thing that the US military was able to go and win the war and bring things back as souvenirs and they would put them on their bike," Alonso said.
On its website, the rally organizers say it is a place for people of, "all walks of life who share a common love for motorcycles." Insider reached out to the organizers for comment on the merchandise sold at the rally.
Last week, as it was reported that the rally drew some of its largest crowds in years, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said he was concerned the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally would become a COVID-19 superspreader event amid a surge of the Delta variant that ravaged communities in parts of the US.
A lot of the fat assed, swag-bellied, small peckered bikers will get the Delta variant which the will spread to their own and a lot of them will get sick and die. How can that be a bad thing?
If you think the average MAGAt has enough redeeming value to justify their existence you need to think again.
If you think MAGAts are capable of normal thinking, think again.
If you think MAGAts do more good than harm, think again.
They made the COVID pandemic much worse. the didn't listen then and they will not listen now. They remain in denial on their death beds.
Let's say that it is possible to get a MAGAt to listen to reason and wear a mask or get vaccinated, why do it? We humans are not responsible for the well being of creatures lower than cockroaches. Because of the millions of MAGAt alive to vote, there will be another Trump or someone worse. MAGAts are committing suicide why stop them? They are unreachable and that makes them dangerous. They have no regard for us humans and that makes them dangerous. The have no social of moral responsibility and that makes them dangerous. They are putting their kids and your kid in danger for their adoration of Trump and that makes them dangerous.
When it comes to masks and vaccines, agree with them and reinforce their selfish depravity as they waddle into church and infect members of their own vile species.
United States
Coronavirus Cases:
36,875,293
Deaths:
634,608
By January these numbers will soar and 99% of them will be unvaccinated MAGAts
Some of the most powerful conservatives in the United States have, since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, chosen to sow disinformation along with mockery and distrust of proven methods of combating the disease, from masks to vaccines to social distancing. Their actions have afflicted the nation as a whole with more disease and death and economic crisis than good leadership aligned with science might have, and, in spite of hundreds of thousands of well-documented deaths and a new surge, they continue. Their malice has become so normal that its real nature is rarely addressed. Call it biological warfare by propaganda.
Call Jared Kushner the spiritual heir of the army besieging the city of Caffa on the Black Sea in 1346, which, according to a contemporaneous account, catapulted plague-infected corpses over the city walls. This is sometimes said to be how the Black Death came to Europe, where it would kill tens of millions of people – a third of the European population – over the next 15 years. A Business Insider article from a year ago noted: “Kushner’s coronavirus team shied away from a national strategy, believing that the virus was hitting Democratic states hardest and that they could blame governors.” An administration more committed to saving lives than scoring points could have contained the pandemic rather than made the US the worst-hit nation in the world. Illnesses and casualties could have been far lower, and we could have been better protected against the Delta variant.
At the outset of the pandemic, as Seattle and New York City became hard hit, Republicans apparently imagined that the pandemic would strike Democratic states and cities first, and certainly in 2020 Black, Latinx and indigenous people were disproportionately affected. To put it clearly, Republicans enabled a campaign of mass death and disablement, thinking it would be primarily mean death and illness for those they regarded as opponents.
Nevertheless, Democratic governors, Native nations and people with moderate-to-leftwing views have done a better job of protecting against this scourge. The worst-hit areas in the country are now Republican-led states and regions. At one point recently, Florida under raging science denier Governor Ron DeSantis, with about 7.5% of the US population, accounted for 20% of all new Covid cases. The governors of Florida and Texas have banned mask mandates, making attempts to protect public health, including that of children, acts of defiance by cities and school districts. DeSantis’s supporters are peddling “Don’t Fauci My Florida” T-shirts and drink coolers with the text “How the hell am I going to drink a beer with a mask on?” On 27 July, as Delta infections proliferated, House minority leader Kevin McCarthy tweeted, “Make no mistake – The threat of bringing masks back is not a decision based on science, but a decision conjured up by liberal government officials who want to continue to live in a perpetual pandemic state.”
Call Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham the spiritual heirs of Lord Jeffery Amherst, the British military commander who in 1763 wrote to an underling, “Could it not be contrived to send the Small Pox among those disaffected tribes of Indians?” As the New York Times put it with characteristic mildness, “Mr Carlson, Ms Ingraham and guests on their programs have said on the air that the vaccines could be dangerous; that people are justified in refusing them; and that public authorities have overstepped in their attempts to deliver them.” Newsweek was more blunt, quoting Ingraham herself saying that the vaccine was an attempt to push an “experimental drug on Americans against their will – threatening them, threatening to deprive them of basic liberties, if they don’t comply.” The goal was to rile up the audience – and prevent them from getting vaccinated, while the evidence was clear that the vaccines prevent both disease in the vaccinated and the spread of disease. Vaccines are, incidentally, how smallpox was eliminated worldwide.
There is of course another angle to the conservative response to the pandemic. In far-right ideology, freedom – for white men especially – is an absolute goal. Even recognizing the systems in which we are all enmeshed might burden the free person with obligations to others and to the whole. Science itself is a series of descriptions of our enmeshedness: of how pesticides travel beyond the crops they’re sprayed on, of the way that fossil fuel emissions contribute to health problems and climate change, of how the spread of disease can be prevented by collective action. Rightwing ideology, after all, has emphasised the right to own and carry a gun over the right to be free of being menaced or murdered by guns, as thousands are in the US every year.
But just as the right to brandish guns is defended in the face of those gun deaths, so the right to contract and spread a sometimes lethal and often debilitating disease is defended as the antithesis of the responsibility not to do so. It’s safe to assume that the Republican leadership knows better, and that some of their followers do and some don’t. Some have chosen to engage in biological warfare; some are merely tools being used in that warfare. That is, some of them are unwitting corpses being catapulted over the walls, unconscious smallpox blankets; some of them are Amherst in spirit. A friend of a friend of mine, a masseuse, had a client who laughed at the end of their session and revealed that her vaccination card was fake: definitely an Amherst.
Covid-19 is far from the first time people have decided to profit from promoting the death of others: the fossil fuel industry plunging ahead while fully aware that climate catastrophe was the consequence of its product is the most extreme example. Manufacturers of guns and prescription opiates have done so as well. But it might be the first time that a new threat has been so dramatically increased not by direct profiteers but by those selling ideology and sowing division.
Measuring the impact of the pandemic by its death toll leaves out other impacts that matter: millions of schoolchildren isolated and undereducated, millions of parents exhausted by double duty, millions of small businesses shuttered, millions unemployed and impoverished, their dreams crushed, millions isolated and anxious, millions grieving the dead. Medical workers who were selflessly heroic the first time around are demoralized now that the hospitalised are so often people who could have been vaccinated, could have been careful, but chose not to. The poison runs through everything. Some of it was spread on purpose.
Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Men Explain Things to Me and The Mother of All Questions. Her most recent book is Recollections of My Nonexistence
Delta Variant Just Getting Out Of The Starting Blocks
Trumpistan aka Klanistan aka the Bible Belt already has the highest numbers of COVID deaths and cases and the surge is just beginning. MAGAts are already dropping like flies. When the colder months begin we will see even more super spreader event. Churches, bars and public schools will be the epicenters of COVID spread and if we have a tough flu season we will have an even higher body count. MAGAts who catch COVID are very likely to get the flu. This double whammy will will prove very effective in culling the troops of Trumpanzees in the red states.
How you can lead MAGAts into the COVID 19 meat grinder
If you argue with these idiots and give them the facts and the science it will only strengthen their resolve to remain ignorant so if you argue with them, make sure that you leave them enraged and even more hard headed. Another way to strnthen their resolve to renain ignorant and defiant is to pretend that they have convinced you that COVID is a giant conspiracy by the liberals and the whole world to control everyone and if anyone from the sane side presents facts with a wink and a nod simply shout, FAKE NEWS.
In a few days I will be around a pack of MAGAts and if the subject comes up I'll say to them with a straight face, "This whole thing is a hoax and the entire fucking world is in on it".
Even when a MAGAt is on his or her death bed they will still remain a slave to their hate and Trumpism.
Projections are showing a significant surge by December and if you treat the blue states as outliers those numbers become even more significant. The Delta variant is kicking ass and taking names in all the red states. The spread of the Delta variant is progressing rather nicely and as predicted through out Trumpistan and it gets better. Dr Fauci and the CDC say there is a distinct possibility that there will be a strain even more contagious and more deadly than the Delta variant and the Delta variant mutates. More infections among MAGAts mean more spread, more deaths and more mutations which will equal less MAGAts. Why would anyone want nto stop that?
