Claims And Issues

WHEN RIGHT TO WORK REALLY MEANS RIGHT TO WORK!

The subhead on this NYT article this morning describes the situation of U.S. workers empowered:  Economic Gains Hobbled as Labor Market Shrinks / Wielding Rare Leverage to Push Demands, Workers Are in no Hurry to Return, by Ben Casselman, NEW YORK TIMES, Wednesday, October 20, 2021, at A1, published online with the headline and subhead, The Economic Rebound Is Still Waiting for Workers / Despite school reopenings and the end of some federal aid, many people are in no rush to land a job. Savings and health concerns are playing a role.

.          The pandemic has made many things clear.  One of them is that the anti-union movement a/k/a "right to work" movement has spawned so much unhappiness on the job that employers cannot deal with it.

          More to the point, their employees no longer feel the need to endure it.

Please read the disclaimer.  ©2021 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.

MAKING YOU PAY FOR SOMEONE ELSE'S CHARTER SCHOOL: FLORIDA COVID REPORT.

 

(Photo by Dr. Scott Kobner in an ER /Los Angeles Times)

You may not choose to send your children to an unvaccinated charter school in a pandemic.  But you will end up paying for it in Florida under a new "emergency" rule reportedly issued by the Florida State Board of Education on Friday, August 6.

The Board of Education's emergency rule in the Covid pandemic would not require any vaccinations or masks so as to protect the children, staff, and teachers in any Florida schools.  To the contrary, it will make Florida State money available to parents who want to move their children to private schools that do not require masks, out of public schools that require masks in the pandemic.

The average cost of private school tuition in Florida is reported to be $9,157 a year.  This may prove to be the most expensive rule ever adopted by Florida's Education Board. 

Some background.  Florida's current governor threatened to withhold Florida State money from school districts that require masks.  It seems a long time ago, but it seems he said that a week ago Friday.  Since then, he was apparently told that he might not actually have that authority, because this Friday, he switched to the "emergency" rule from the State Board of Education to use Florida State money.

Either way, he wants to use Floridians' money to pay for what truly looks like the coming loss of public education in Florida.

(Jae C. Heng / Associated Press)

Whatever happens, you can bet that the governor's children and the Board Members' children and their friends' children will not be hurt.  But you can also bet on the certainty that your wallet will be hurt, because this is a big opportunity for some politicians and their cronies to make a buck by privatizing your children's education even if you have to pay for it, and even if your children are hurt by it.

These people are not letting anything or anyone stand in the way of their making money.  Journalists would do well to explore the bank accounts of these people and their stock holdings, wherever the public has access to this information.  For that matter, Freedom of Information Act requests might cover this information even when it is not publicly accessible.

(Photo taken by Dr. Scott Kobner in an ER / Los Angeles Times)

If they are going to issue rules in our name with our money that are likely to hurt our kids, we have a right to know whether they are profiting from it.  It really is as simple as that.

Please read the disclaimer.   ©2021 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.

CATCH COVID? PAY FOR TREATMENT TOO? STILL THINK INSURANCE BORING?

 

Covid treatment in ICU.  (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)

At least some health insurance companies began charging their policyholders the full amount of their deductibles, copays, and coinsurance.   Other carriers are joining them, even as a pandemic continues to ravage their policyholders with illness and, in some cases, death.

          When the pandemic began a year ago, these same health insurance carriers voluntarily waived all deductibles, copays, and other costs because people who fell ill with Covid-19 had enough to deal with, what with hospitalizations, doctor visits, medications, and other treatments.  Then, it was good public relations for these carriers to waive what they call "cost sharing."

          "Cost sharing."  What a polite way of saying "You got Covid, now pay for it."  What was put into place with great fanfare is now done in silence.  Most if not all of these health insurance carriers are secretly ending their voluntary waivers of cost sharing, and many have already done so.  What was good public relations in the sunshine, is taken back in the dark.

          Except for Covid tests and vaccinations.  They should still be free to people, because the federal government requires that these costs be free.

          Some people think it's wrong to make a profit off of other people's misery.  The insurance companies' profits are going through the roof since the pandemic began.  They can afford to pay for Covid treatments; Covid patients, not so much.

          Still think insurance is boring?  Catching Covid?  Pay for the full treatment on top of being hospitalized and treated for Covid?   People can EMail, write and telephone their own state's Insurance Commissioners.  Let them know that you know what's going on in the dark, and let them know if you don't like it. 

          Let them and your federal Representatives and Senators know, too, if you want the federal government to require the costs of treatment to be paid by you or by your insurer, or if you want the costs of treatment for Covid to be treated (pun intended) like the costs of testing for Covid.

Please read the disclaimer.  ©2021 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved. 

"THE COVID REPORT": THE PRONING PATIENT EDITION.

COVID Proning (Jae C. Hong / Associated Press)

Can you imagine what proning is?  The term applies to people who cannot breathe.  Medical workers change the patient's position in bed so that, hopefully, she can breathe easier.

           Proning means that you are being turned from lying in bed on your back, to lying in bed on your stomach.  Try that.  Find it easier to breath when you lie on your stomach than when you were lying on your back?

           Proning works in large part because of gravity.  Lying on our  stomachs helps most of us by opening airways in our lungs.  If we have contracted COVID, natural forces that may be compressing our lungs are enhanced by the compressing effects of fluid and inflammation that come from the infection.

           When we human beings lie on our backs, our hearts are now sitting on top of our lungs.  Naturally, the lungs compress in that position.  Our rib cage cannot move the way it usually does when it is flat against the bed.  Flipping over to our stomachs tends to free the back of our lungs to open, allowing our bodies to breathe easier.

           Proning takes much hard work.  And a lot of hands to do it.  Before COVID came, the standard protocol for proning teams sometimes involved as many as 8 workers.  Most of the time, workers were experienced and trained in the technique.

           Proning teams formed before COVID could have fielded a team under traditional sandlot baseball rules, which provide either that the other team provides the missing player (who plays a position carefully chosen by the short-handed team) or that one of the outfields (usually right field) is out of bounds for play.

           The reason for so many hands being involved in proning is what can happen if it is done wrong.  It is the product of anxiety, to be frank about it.  Care has to be exercised during proning lest a patient's breathing tube come loose during the procedure, or a person's intravenous lines detach while she is being moved from her back to her stomach in her hospital bed.

COVID Proning and Supinating (Hilary Swift / New York Times)

           But the rules regarding proning have changed since COVID arrived.  There just aren't enough workers.  Since the pandemic began, proning teams have sometimes been fielded with only 3 or 4 people.

           Another way to look at proning is that before COVID, proning was used for only about 15% of patients diagnosed with acute respiratory-distress syndrome (ARDS) and embedded with breathing tubes accordingly.  The technique can result in compressing nerves in limbs including shoulders and legs.  This increases the chance of disability.

           There is also reportedly a lot of evidence that proning actually decreases the patients' life-spans.

           The jury is out on whether proning shortens COVID patients' life-spans, or to what degree proning COVID patients results in disabilities, but in the meantime there may not be any good options but to go ahead and prone the COVID patients.  Proning can save our lives today even if we are uncertain what it will do to us tomorrow.

           Obviously, proning is a procedure of choice only when there do not seem to be any better alternatives.

           In terms of procedures, supinating is the opposite of proning.  Like proning, supinating still applies to people who cannot breathe, but the term means something different than proning does.  That term, supinating, refers instead to changing a patient's position in bed from lying on her stomach, to lying on her back.

           In my case, I prefer to lie on my back.  I sleep on my back or on my side in fact.  Having tried a few positions on my back and on my side as an experiment for this article, it is easier for me to breathe when I am in those positions.  So proning is an extreme measure.

COVID19 ICU Help Turning Sign (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

           So extreme that proning carries with it important protocols.  It's used during the coronavirus pandemic because hospitals have never had so many patients at the same time that are so sick that their lungs have essentially stopped functioning.  Respiratory distress is the chief sign that the coronavirus is present.  At the present time, the anxieties involved with proning patients including the possible after-effects of the procedure, pale in comparison to a patient's inability to breathe because of COVID.

Please read the disclaimer.  ©2021 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.

"THE COVID REPORT". PART ONE: I AM A PATIENT.

(Jae C. Hong / Associated Press)

  The Beginning, Imagined.

I have never been a COVID patient, but I want to understand what it is like to be one.  Imagination must thankfully take the place of the virus for me.

           The many symptoms of COVID are mentioned in many articles published over the last 10 or 11 months.  See also the article posted here this week, "THE COVID REPORT."  PART ONE:  THE PATIENTS.  The Beginning.  That was written as a summary of what patients, doctors, nurses, and families have reported about their real-life experiences with having or treating COVID from the onset through the first several days following admission to the hospital.

           The present article is written as an act of imagining what COVID patients go through during that time.  If I get COVID, I imagine that I will probably run a fever for days.  Some people run a fever of 103º or more for three or four days before they go to the hospital.  I can imagine what it is like to have such a fever, because I have experienced my own bedsheets wringing with sweat.  Wringing with sweat the way a face cloth in a sink is wringing with water, so that they both need to be wrung out. 

           I imagine too that I will have chills to go with this fever, if I get COVID.  Chills are part of my own experience with fever, so I know what chills can do to a body.  I have also gone septic as they say, when it is impossible it seems either to stop shaking or to feel warm.

           And then from among all the other symptoms that so many people get (and so many people don't get) with COVID, I expect that I will have fatigue and sleep deprivation.  However, I also expect that I may not recognize the difference any time soon after the onset of COVID.  Perhaps because of the stage of my life, or because I am a cancer survivor, or for other reasons, fatigue and sleep deprivation are often my companions.  Unlike the effects of fatigue and sleep deprivation on COVID patients, which can be severe, I will have to imagine fatigue so great that I cannot concentrate on watching the television and to imagine sleep deprivation so great because it is the result of aches all over my body, particularly in my joints.

           The key symptom of COVID, shortness of breath in the sense of difficulty breathing, is frightening to me.  I don't believe that I have ever experienced shortness of breath in that extreme.  Oh, sure, I have experienced shortness of breath during and after exercise and things like that.  However, that is not what people mean when they talk about difficulty breathing because they have COVID.

(Victor J. Blue / New York Times)
     

    They mean gasping for air.  Sometimes they mean that they have so much difficulty in breathing on their own that they need outside help, a machine like a respirator, in order to breathe.  I have difficulty imagining  that from my own experience.

           I am left to imagine that from the experiences of others, from the experiences of people who have had COVID and from the experiences of people who have treated COVID, but there are few stories and understandably there are no videos that I have yet found showing exactly how respirators make COVID patients able to breathe.  It may be too personal an experience, having a respirator help you breathe.  I do know it is so extreme a procedure that at his press conferences in 2020, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said that if you have to be on a respirator, that's pretty much it for you because your chances of surviving COVID are not good after you have been put on a respirator.

           That does not help me imagine it any better.  It does add to making the difficulty breathing part of COVID scary.

           But wait a minute.  I had pneumonia and bronchitis together when I was in high school.  I just remembered.  That was a time of wringing sweats, chills, high fever, and many times, difficulty breathing.  That may be comparable to having a mild case of COVID, sufficient at least for the task of imaging what having COVID would be like.

           So far, I continue to be fortunate to only imagine what having COVID is like.

To be continued.  Please read the disclaimer.  ©2021 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.

COVID-19 AND THE FLORIDA CONSUMER IN THE PANDEMIC.

For information about Covid-19 and the coronavirus pandemic response in Florida, check the options for consumers at https://www.fdacs.gov/Consumer-Resources/COVID-19-Information.

(Photo by Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

Please read the disclaimer.  ©2021 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.

THE VACCINES ARE COMING. AND WE'RE STILL HERE FOR NOW.

COVID Christmas FaceTime (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)

The good news that vaccines are on the way is welcome.  Welcome, even though the good news is tempered by the news that inoculations are not moving very fast at all, and as usual, there is no plan.  So 2020.

Still, it is good news that vaccines are on the way.  And in the meantime, we're still here.  Pundits pundit -- isn't that what pundits do, namely, pundit? -- that it may be Spring, it may be Summer, or maybe they don't really know when large numbers of people in the United States will get inoculated.

And in the meantime, we're still here.  We can do this.  We have been waiting so long that a few more months of waiting will not kill us.  Reports continue of deaths and hospitalizations even as we wait to receive the vaccines.

COVID Coffins (Associated Press)

We hope and pray.  For ourselves and for one another.  So help us God.

Please read the disclaimer.  ©2020 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.

NURSING HOME WORKERS FIGHT TO PROTECT PATIENTS.

(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)

Nursing home workers fight to protect patients.  They fight the pandemic, they fight conditions, and they stand up to nursing home management to protect patients.

 

Nursing home workers are heroes.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

 

 

See Joe Mozingo, Surrounded by Death, Nursing Home Workers Battle Management and Fear to Protect Patients, LOS ANGELES TIMES (online Dec. 27, 2020).

 

Please read the disclaimer  ©2020 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.

LOTS OF MASKS, DISTANCING, ISOLATION IF WE'RE ALL IN DENIAL.

The truth is we are not all in denial.  Most of us in America accept wearing masks, social distancing, and isolation for the good of the country.

Some do not.

Guess who ends up getting the headlines?  The ones who wear masks, or the ones who don't?  The ones who socially distance, or the ones who don't?  Or the ones who isolate themselves from public congregations as much as they reasonably can, or those who don't even try?

Well, the good guys are actually and overwhelmingly in the majority just as they were in the presidential election regardless of the reports driven by fear.

The stories of "pandemic denial" are the stories that are told in the corporate media.  Pandemic disruption despite compliance by the vast majority of people in America is the real story.  See Jacob Hale Russell, Associate Professor at Rutgers Law School, and Dennis Patterson, Professor of Law and Philosophy at Rutgers, Let's Put the Straw Man of Pandemic Denial Out of His Misery, STAT (December 23, 2020), Let's put the straw man of pandemic denial out of his misery - STAT (statnews.com).

Please read the disclaimer.  This blog article ©2020 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.

IT'S NOT ABOUT POSITIVE TESTING. IT'S ABOUT SICKNESS AND DEATH.

(Ted S. Warren / Associated Press)

The number of people who test positive is not a measure of the pandemic.

The number of sick people is a metric.  7 Million at last count in the United States.  Many more throughout the world.

The number of people who died from COVID-19 is a metric.  217,000 is the latest number in the United States.   Again, many more throughout the world.

The measures of suffering are sickness and death.  Those are the measures of the coronavirus pandemic.

They cannot be replaced.

Please read the disclaimer.  ©2020 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.

UNFORTUNATE PHOTOS AT AN EXHIBITION, PART 3, THE FINAL PHOTO.

Judge Amy Barrett's son exposed to COVID19 Positive Man, Sept. 26, 2020 (Doug Mills / New York Times).

COVID and brown shoes with a dark blue suit?  Both of them wearing brown shoes with a dark blue suit, the 8-year old boy and the much older than 8-years-old man?

Please read the disclaimer.  This blog article ©2020 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.

AT NOTRE DAME, SENATE KEEPS PRESIDENT IN OFFICE. JENKINS, THAT IS.

(Notre Dame Campus photograph by Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)

This past week, the Notre Dame student senate reportedly refused a student petition that John Jenkins, the university president, should resign because he didn't follow Notre Dame's own pandemic guidelines for wearing a mask and social distancing.  Jenkins tested positive for COVID19 after he attended the closely-packed, largely unmasked crowd at the White House rally last Saturday for Judge Amy Coney Barrett.

(Jabin Batsford / Washington Post)

    Reportedly, students have been threatened with disciplinary action, even threatened with being expelled from Notre Dame, for their failure to follow the guidelines.  Those voting against the petition said that it is important to keep a dialogue open with the president.  The university president, that is.  

    "With these considerations in mind, the majority voted against the resolution with further discussion on formerly {i.e, formally] condemning the president’s actions and opening up dialogue on the situation slated for next week’s meeting."  The Observer, The Notre Dame Student Newspaper, Fri., October 2, 2020.

Please read the disclaimer.  ©2020 Dennis J. Wall.  All rights reserved.