Protect yourself, your government doesn't gaf

The top U.S. public health agency issued a full-throated call to reopen schools in a package of new “resources and tools” posted on its website Thursday night that opened with a statement that sounded more like a political speech than a scientific document, listing numerous benefits for children of being in school and downplaying the potential health risks.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published the new guidance two weeks after President Trump criticized its earlier recommendations on school reopenings as “very tough and expensive,” ramping up what had already been an anguished national debate over the question of how soon children should return to classrooms. As the president was criticizing the initial C.D.C. recommendations, a document from the agency surfaced that detailed the risks of reopening and the steps that districts were taking to minimize those risks.

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The package of materials began with the opening statement, titled “The Importance of Reopening America’s Schools This Fall,” and repeatedly described children as being at low risk for being infected by or transmitting the coronavirus, even though the science on both aspects is far from settled.

“The best available evidence indicates if children become infected, they are far less likely to suffer severe symptoms,” the statement said. “At the same time, the harms attributed to closed schools on the social, emotional, and behavioral health, economic well-being, and academic achievement of children, in both the short- and long-term, are well-known and significant.”

  NYT

And a report was just published out of Florida that a nine-year-old girl died from the infection.

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, reacted to the release on Friday during an event with The Washington Post.

“I think the C.D.C. has put some good guidance down,” Dr. Fauci said. “I just took a quick look at them before I started in the program, which was sent to me by my colleagues at the C.D.C. So I think it’s a sound set of guidelines.”

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The new materials are meant to supplement guidance the C.D.C. previously issued on when and how to reopen schools, with recommendations such as keeping desks six feet apart and keeping children in one classroom all day instead of allowing them to move around.

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The new statement released on Thursday is a stark departure from the 69-page document obtained by The New York Times earlier this month, marked “For Internal Use Only,” which was intended for federal public health response teams to have as they are deployed to hot spots around the country.

That document classified as “highest risk” the full reopening of schools, and its suggestions for mitigating the risk of school reopenings would be expensive and difficult for many districts, like broad testing of students and faculty and contact tracing to find people exposed to an infected student or teacher.

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While the C.D.C.’s new guidance for opening schools downplayed the risks the virus poses to school-aged children, a number of recent clusters of virus cases around the United States have been linked to school-related events and gatherings of teenagers.

In O’Fallon, Mo., just outside of St. Louis, 19 students from St. Dominic High School and two of their guests tested positive after attending an outdoor graduation ceremony on July 8 that was followed by an off-site prom July 10, the school said in a statement this week.

In Middletown, N.J., officials are investigating a cluster of roughly 20 cases in teenagers between the ages of 15 and 19 who contracted the virus after attending a party.

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And in Chappaqua, N.Y., a spike in cases was traced to a drive-in graduation that was held in late June for Horace Greeley High School, which was then followed by other gatherings. “We have identified at this point that there are 27 positive cases that tie back to that set of activities,” George Latimer, the Westchester County executive, said at a news conference on July 6.

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A large new study from South Korea found that children younger than 10 transmit the virus to others much less often than adults do, but that those between the ages of 10 and 19 can spread the virus at least as well as adults do.

Unprincipled, disgusting, outrageous, dangerous, pathetic.  Redfield should resign in disgrace.

And if that's not enough...

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has been shipping masks, gowns and gloves to 15,000 nonprofit nursing care facilities since June. But many of the shipments have been filled with unusable or low-quality gear.

Nursing home employees said they have opened boxes filled with loose gloves of unknown provenance stuffed into unmarked Ziploc bags, surgical masks crafted from underwear fabric and plastic isolation gowns without openings for hands. Some reported receiving masks with brittle elastic bands that snap when stretched.

None of the shipments have included functional N95 respirators, the virus-filtering face masks that are the single most important bulwark against infection.

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“It’s mystifying that the government would think this is acceptable.”

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FEMA pointed its finger at a private contractor it employs and issued a statement saying it has received complaints “on less than 1 percent of the total PPE shipments to nursing homes.”

This is the pass the buck administration.

And this is where we are in "the greatest country on earth":

A rural, impoverished county in the South Texas border region with more coronavirus cases than its one hospital can handle has gone into a grim crisis mode, forming ethics committees to help determine which patients should be treated and which should be sent home to die instead.

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[Starr County]’s infection rate of 2,350 per 100,000 people far exceeds the rate in more populous parts of Texas, including Houston.

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“Our backs are to the wall,” Starr County’s top elected official, County Judge Eloy Vera, told reporters in a video news conference. “We are literally in a life-and-death situation.”

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Given the county’s scarce medical resources, hospital officials said they had formed ethics and triage committees to determine which patients would be treated based on their chances of survival. Those discussions will involve health care providers, the patients and their relatives, officials said.

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Pentagon officials have dispatched Army and Navy personnel to the Starr County hospital and other medical centers in border cities to provide support, and state and federal officials have sent in morgue trailers, ventilators, testing teams and surgical masks to the Rio Grande Valley.

I wonder what kind of support the Pentagon is providing.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.