Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

Quelle surprise, her employer says otherwise.

(many paragraphs after "refuses") ... Sutter Health, the hospital system that oversees California Pacific Medical Center, said in a statement to The Washington Post that it offers tests to employees whose exposure is deemed high-risk and to any employee experiencing symptoms. Symptomatic employees are placed on paid leave while awaiting test results, according to the statement.

I'm kinda with @Alma here in thinking there was a bit of "selling the sizzle" for those folks who're always hungry for a particular tsk-tsk-tsk morality play.

 

Two things:

One.
I'm going to be deliberately vague about this. A close friend of mine works for a state-funded arts outreach program. One of his colleagues is also on faculty at a university where he teaches in that particular creative discipline and as a part of their Asian-American studies program. He is third generation Sino-American. His academic duties include spending time in China as part of a cultural/academic exchange with schools over there.

He went over there a week before Thanksgiving 2019. Two weeks in, someone told him about a killer flu in Wuhan (province? I don't know nearly as much about China as I should.) He stayed for another week and a half. Then a faculty member over there got sick. One day he was there, the next day, he wasn't. Before he could even ask, he was told to go home while he could.

When he got back to the U.S., he had that achey, feel-like-you're-coming-down-with-something malaise a lot of people get when they're in a plane for a long time. The thing was, it didn't go away after a few days. Was it age? Was it something else? He contacted the CDC and told him what he'd heard and how he was feeling. They told him it was a combination of being forty and sitting in a plane full of people sharing air for too long. They suggested he sleep it off and, yes, wash his hands. He took a leave of absence from the university, stayed home and skipped visits with family over the holidays, and did not go on the outreach trips to schools and small communities with my friend's organization. He was warned to "not scare people."

Lucky for him, he had the means to stay in, get everything delivered and see a doctor who believed him. He did get better around St. Patrick's day. He's teaching from home and still sheltering in place.

I heard about him from K. when I told him what my friend the DWB doc told me.



And this...
@Jerry-atric, I have no idea if we run in the same circles in Kentucky or not, but the Commonwealth Office of Heritage and Antiquities has asked for programs to limit if not outright suspend archeological projects. So how are sports safer than sitting in a feature and micro leveling where the closest person is often eight to ten feet away in a three- to six-foot deep trench doing the same thing?

 

This is my Grinch face

 

It wouldn't surprise me at all if that were the case. Given the protocols, procedures and equipment in place, there might need to be a serious breach of these before even "moderate risk" is reached. The CDC's current guidance, for example, points to the necessity of testing, isolation, etc., only in specific combinations of missing PPE (for the provider and the patient) and the treatment being administered (i.e., taking the patient's temperature isn't the same as jabbing a swab up his/her nose).

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)

I'll admit I could be completely off-base here. It just seems to me that there's more than enough ambiguity in that story for the nurse's perceptions to be out of whack with respect to the facts.

 

It's certainly somewhere in the middle. An ER nurse could probably get tested every day if she asked or pressed enough. Is it necessary? Probably not, but you would think they'd be tested somewhat regularly just standard practice. A football team getting tested that much, at likely a significant cost, even if it does come from some other source, is a little out of whack compared to frontline workers, though, no?

 

This is a strange question.

That is a very good point.

 

That guy might — I say, he might — be wrong.

Scientists at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found evidence of infection in 106 of 7,389 blood donations collected by the American Red Cross from residents in nine states across the U.S., according to the study published online in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.

The scientists based their study on blood samples that the American Red Cross collected between Dec. 13 and Jan. 17 and later sent to the CDC for testing to see if any had antibodies to the new coronavirus, which is named SARS-CoV-2.
…
In analyzing the blood samples, the CDC scientists found antibodies in 39 samples from California, Oregon and Washington state collected between December 13 and December 16.

The findings suggest there were isolated cases of coronavirus infection on the U.S. West Coast in mid-December, the scientists wrote.

They also found 67 samples with antibodies in Massachusetts, Michigan, Wisconsin or Iowa, and Connecticut or Rhode Island collected between Dec. 30 and Jan. 17.
…
The scientists said they ruled out the possibility that the antibodies they found had developed to fight off other coronaviruses, which cause the common cold. They did that by looking for antibodies specific to the new coronavirus in 90 of the samples.

They said they found antibodies specific to SARS-CoV-2 in 84 of the samples, or nearly all of them.​

He may be right, but I feel the researchers went to pretty solid lengths to make sure they were testing for the specific antibodies.

 

Can you develop antibodies from an asymptomatic case?

 

Recalling that South Dakota nurse's grossly embellished story about patients "denying the disease's existence, even in their dying words" . . . I'd say you're on the right track.

The one mitigating factor, I suppose, is that football players likely are in close proximity to larger groups of people at one time.

 

I call a little bit of bullshit on all of these Twitter nurse testimonies. How does an ER nurse in Houston or El Paso or wherever have like 50K Twitter followers? I don't deny that bad things are happening at hospitals right now, but those little Twitter blasts are a little too convenient.