If the young are the nation’s future, they are getting a sorry eyeful now of how not to deal with widespread death and disease, uncertainty, and inequity. What will kids say years from now about how parents and politicians handled young folks’ schooling during the Covid-19 pandemic? The student journalists at the University of North….
Continue ReadingTesting
Loneliness and fear taking big toll on locked down elderly, sick, and injured
For the old, sick, and injured who are institutionalized, the Covid-19 pandemic and the efforts to halt the spread of the disease into care facilities has created debilitating side-effects: isolation, loneliness, silence, fear, and worries of abandonment. Facility lockdowns, combined with the relentless governmental bungling of the coronavirus response, are taking a terrible toll that….
Continue ReadingWith as many as 200,000 U.S. dead already, grimmer days may still be ahead
The Covid-19 pandemic, with grim outcomes already, may get even worse in the days ahead. That troubling forecast — from one of the nation’s less-than-outspoken medical leaders (Dr. Robert Redfield, right, head of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) and as laid out in a seasoned journalist’s detailed reporting — may seem hard….
Continue ReadingU.S. showered sketchy nursing homes with millions in Covid emergency aid
In response to the shattering harms of the Covid-19 pandemic, Congress sought to shore up the U.S. health care system with billions of dollars in emergency aid. But the federal agency that helps to oversee the institutional care for the elderly, sick, and injured performed poorly as a steward of taxpayers’ hard-earned money. The Health….
Continue ReadingAs world takes note of historic nuclear horrors, U.S. Covid carnage surges on
Last week the world took note with appropriate solemnity a terrible historic moment: The first military use of nuclear weapons, with explosions 75 years ago of bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The resulting carnage — which the United States said was needed to end the horrors of World War II, especially….
Continue ReadingThe big Alzheimer’s puzzle: Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV. Blood, too?
It isn’t just the testing for the novel coronavirus that has already anxious Americans upset these days. Controversies also are swirling around existing and developing ways for experts to screen older patients for cognitive decline, namely dementia and its most familiar form, Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s disease, which accounts for 60%-80% of dementia cases, is the….
Continue ReadingTime for nursing homes to pay for staff tests, Maryland and other states say
Imagine in an alternate world in which it is not the poor and ravenous Oliver Twist who implores the world for more porridge, please. Instead, think of the “poor me” cries coming from Bumble the Beadle or Mr. Limbkins, two nefarious guys who exploit kids at the venal workhouse to which Oliver is consigned. Welcome….
Continue ReadingWith Covid-19 surge unchecked, testing, tracing, and key data teetering, too
How big and bad is the now-unchecked Covid-19 pandemic and the damage it is inflicting on this country? The United States persists as the novel coronavirus epicenter, blowing past previous record numbers of infections to more than 4.5 million. The disease has edged toward claiming the lives of roughly 155,000 Americans. Imagine if the equivalent,….
Continue ReadingAs stakes soar for Covid-19 vaccine, concerns rise about this one big bet
As the novel coronavirus infections and deaths keep skyrocketing, Americans more and more have been forced into tough risk analyses, and frankly, too often thinking like gamblers. They are, for example, looking a lot at the much-promoted possibility of a Covid-19 vaccine in desperate poker ways — “betting on the come” and playing “river, river….
Continue Reading600 of 15,000 nursing homes get gear as U.S. demands virus tests for staff
Five months after national media sounded alarms about a novel coronavirus savaging a Washington state long-term care center, federal regulators have begun to roust themselves with more vigor to safeguard hundreds of thousands of elderly, sick, and injured residents of nursing homes and other similar facilities. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services — which….
Continue Reading