Stephan: I am going to just let this report speak for itself. If you are part of the unvaccinated death cult at this point, I hope you have at least drawn up a will.
A nurse gives a Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine shot to Gizelle Carrillo, 14, at Eagle Rock High School in Los Angeles, California, on August 30, 2021. Credit: Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times/Getty
As the Biden administration steps up its efforts to get shots in arms, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a new study Friday that underscores the effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccines against serious illness or death.
The study, which examined hospitalizations and deaths from Covid-19 over a period of more than three months, found that unvaccinated people are more than 10 times more likely to be hospitalized with Covid-19 than those who have been vaccinated, and 11 times more likely to die of the virus, according to CDC director Rochelle Walensky.
The study — as well as twoothers also released Friday by the CDC — is still an early release, meaning that there could be changes in the final version. But the findings nonetheless provide some clarity about the state of the pandemic as the delta variant makes its mark on communities throughout the country.
Stephan: It is now irrefutably clear that the Covid pandemic has become principally a Republican disease, because it is also irrefutably clear that those who fail to get vaccinated, overwhelmingly Republicans, are both at much greater risk than those who have been vaccinated, and also are much more dangerous to those around them.
Maybe what we should do is stop interstate travel and leave the populace of the Red states and their incompetent governors and legislatures to let Darwinian survival sort out who survives Covid in those states. And it won’t just be the Covid infectees who die. This morning I saw a story of a heart patient in a Red state who tried unsuccessfully to get emergency treatment in 43 hospitals but was unable to receive it because the hospitals were all filled with unvaccinated Covid patients. The man died because he could not get treatment, and his story is not a singleton. The boneheaded stupidity of the unvaccinated is both pathetic and tragic. But America is a free country and you ought to be able to kill yourself if you want to. You should not, however, be allowed to put others at risk because of your choices.
There are three reasons that Florida has consistently been a focal point of debate over the course of the pandemic. One is that its governor, Ron DeSantis, is a prominent Republican official, a role that he embraces and elevates. Another is that DeSantis has been explicit in expressing his opposition to measures aimed at containing the coronavirus or limiting its spread. A third is that, particularly of late, his state has been hit particularly hard by the virus.
Since the fourth surge in new cases began in late June, about 54,000 more people have died of covid-19. Nearly 1 in 5 of those deaths have occurred in Florida — 18 percent of the deaths come from a state that makes up about 6 percent of the country’s population. What’s more, over the course of the surge, the percentage of deaths occurring in Florida has been increasing.
It’s only natural to wonder whether DeSantis’s approach to the pandemic overlaps […]
Lauren Leatherby and Amy Schoenfeld Walker, - The New York Times
Stephan: Anyone who bothers to look at actual social outcome data knows that Republicans care nothing for American children, except their own. I have written about this on many occasions (see SR archive, search on "children"). It is one of the main reasons I loath the Republican cult. It has nothing to do with partisanship. If Democrats behaved in the same way, I would have the same feelings about them. Happily, although I have a number of issues with the Democratic Party, a majority of them do care about children beyond their own. This is about compassion and wellbeing and acts not words.
What Covid is showing the world is that those who are Republicans are knowingly and deliberately killing children. You want facts to support that assertion. Here are some.
Just as millions of families around the United States navigate sending their children back to school at an uncertain moment in the pandemic, the number of children admitted to the hospital with Covid-19 has risen to the highest levels reported to date. Nearly 30,000 of them entered hospitals in August.
Pediatric hospitalizations, driven by a record rise in coronavirus infections among children, have swelled across the country, overwhelming children’s hospitals and intensive care units in states like Louisiana and Texas.
Children remain markedly less likely than adults, especially older adults, to be hospitalized or die from Covid-19. But the growing number of children entering the hospital, however small compared with adults, should not be an afterthought, experts say, and should instead encourage communities to take on more efforts to protect their youngest residents.
“It should concern us all that hospitalizations — indicators of severe illness — are rising in the pediatric population, when there are a lot of steps we could take to prevent many of these hospitalizations,” said Jason L. Salemi, an epidemiologist at the University of South Florida, who tracks Covid-19 hospitalization data.
Public health officials and experts also caution that even small increases […]
Stephan: The central problem that is tearing America apart is that about a third of us cannot tell the difference between facts and rightwing fantasies; you can see it play out in a spectrum of ways every day. Disinformation is tearing us apart, and nothing seems to be being done about it. In my opinion, to be certified as a news organization you should be required at the loss of your license to only present objectively verifiable facts.
Americans have a huge problem. It manifests itself in our politics and we see it in our daily lives. It is exacerbated by the commercials on television, the internet and our cell phones.
Many of us can no longer tell the difference between appearance and reality — if in fact we ever could.
This inability explains the appeal of Donald Trump, why some people believe professional wrestling is “real,” why some of us won’t take a COVID vaccine and why some of us will take a deworming drug meant for horses versus a vaccine designed by scientists for humans. It enables people to scream out “I don’t trust the scientists,” while at the same time checking themselves into the hospital if they get sick.
Flooded by a glut of misinformation that overwhelms actual facts, the American public seems to have reached a new level of mistrust and arrogant stupidity, further eroding our ability to take on problems and thus increasing our chances of a calamity heretofore unseen except in gothic horror stories or “Mad Max” movies.
Stephan: I have been following this trend and sharing it with my readers since it began: using the highways to charge electric vehicles. This, I think, is the future.
It’s the stuff of science fiction. Imagine driving down the road, and your electric car automatically charges. You don’t have to stop. You don’t have to get out of the car. Nothing.
Well, this dream could soon be a reality. At least, it may soon be a reality in Indiana.
The Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT), Purdue University, and German startup Magment GmbH have all joined forces to create a system that wireless charges electric vehicles as they drive. Ultimately, the idea is to develop the world’s first wireless charging concrete pavement.
In the press release, the teams note that the project will progress in three primary stages.
The two first phases will involve various forms of pavement testing and analysis and optimization research. This work will ultimately be conducted by the Joint Transportation Research Program (JTRP) at Purdue’s West Lafayette campus. Once these stages are complete, a third phase will see INDOT construct a test site that is at least a quarter-mile-long. Here, the team will test the concrete’s capacity to […]
