Category: Covid-19

GOVERNOR CELEBRATES 3RD ANNIVERSARY OF ROADS TO PROSPERITY PROGRAMGov. Justice took time out of his remarks on COVID-19 to announce that Wednesday marked the 3rd anniversary of the historic passage of Gov. Justices Roads To Prosperity bond program.

I think all of us across West Virginia should cheer in celebration, Gov. Justice said.

On October 7, 2017, West Virginians were asked to cast their vote on whether to approve the issuance of $1.6 billion of state bonds to build and upgrade the states roads and bridges. This historic road bond passed with an overwhelming majority of voters 73 percent supporting the Governors Roads To Prosperity initiative.

Of course it took a leader someone to come up with an idea and it took the Legislature to pass it, Gov. Justice said. But at the end of the day, West Virginia, you deserve the credit for all the great work thats happening and continues to go on today.

According to the West Virginia Department of Transportation, 811 projects worth $482.9 million and spanning 1,543 miles have already been completed through the Roads To Prosperity program to-date. Those projects, spread across all 55 counties, include paving, slip/slide repairs, bridge repairs, and other road improvements.

Well over $1 billion-worth of major infrastructure improvement projects through Gov. Justices Roads To Prosperity program have either been completed to date or are currently underway.

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COVID-19 UPDATE: Gov. Justice honors first West Virginia nurses to pass away from COVID-19 - West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources

Live webcast: Tuesday, October 20 89:20 a.m. (Pacific)

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This event will be broadcast live on this page. You can also watch this event live on the UC Berkeley Facebook page.

Join the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) at UC Berkeley, Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), and the Joint Data Center on Forced Displacement (JDC) for the first in a webinar mini-series focused on the impacts of COVID-19 on forcibly displaced people in the Global South, and efforts by NGOs and governments to support them.

As the COVID-19 pandemic persists around the globe, refugees and others uprooted from their homesdue to conflict, economic hardship, climate change, and other pressuresmust combat the dual hardships of disease and displacement. Already among the worlds most vulnerable, displaced individuals often have experienced violence and trauma first-hand, face limited access to services, and have no home in which to safely wait out the virus. On Oct 20, Mushfiq Mobarak (Yale), Nandini Krishnan (World Bank), Dennis Egger (UC Berkeley), and Daniel Stein (IDinsight) will share early insights from rapid phone surveys being carried out with refugee populations in Kenya, Uganda, and Bangladesh. Carson Christiano, CEGA Executive Director, will moderate.

This webinar is part of the Berkeley Conversations Series, IPAs RECOVR Webinar Series: Bringing Evidence to COVID-19 Policy Responses in the Global South, and the JDCs Event Series on Forced Displacement.

Panelists

Mushfiq Mobarak, Professor of Economics at Yale University and faculty director of the Yale Research Initiative on Innovation and Scale (Y-RISE), will present insights on the impacts of COVID-19 on refugees and host communities in Coxs Bazar, Bangladesh. This work is joint with Paula Lpez Pea (Yale), C. Austin Davis (Yale), and Shabib Raihan (IPA Bangladesh), and is based on the Coxs Bazar Panel Survey (CBPS), a larger effort to track outcomes for a representative sample of refugees and host communities in Coxs Bazar over time.

Nandini Krishnan, Senior Economist with the Poverty Global Practice at the World Bank, will present on the impacts the COVID-19 crisis is having on labor markets, wages, and household coping strategies for recently displaced Rohingya households and their host communities in Coxs Bazar. This work, joint with Bank colleagues Maria Eugenia Genoni, Afsana Khan, Nethra Palaniswamy, and Wameq Raza, also builds on the CBPS implemented by Mobarak and team.

Dennis Egger, Economics PhD Candidate at UC Berkeley, will share insights from weekly phone surveys about the impacts of COVID-19 on a range of social and economic outcomes being carried out with a representative sample of refugees in Kenya. The project, joint with Theresa Beltramo (UNHCR), Utz Johann Pape (World Bank), Michael Walker (UC Berkeley), and CEGA Faculty co-Director Ted Miguel (UC Berkeley), is part of a larger effort to maintain the Kenya COVID-19 Economic Tracker.

Daniel Stein, Chief Economist at IDinsight, will discuss findings from a recent study with colleagues Emma Kimani, Heather Lanthorn, and Rico Bergemann on the impacts of COVID-19 lockdowns on inhabitants of the Kiryandongo refugee settlement in the Western Region of Uganda. Additionally, leveraging an ongoing randomized controlled trial (RCT) being carried out in partnership with the NGO GiveDirectly, Stein will report on the effectiveness of cash grants in mitigating the economic impacts of lockdowns.

Carson Christiano, CEGA Executive Director, will moderate the panel.

This event is sponsored by Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA).

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COVID-19 and forced displacement in the global south - UC Berkeley

The Jasper County School District released a statement about Mrs. Kidds passing. In part it says, We lost a most beloved member of our school district family. She served the people of Jasper County as a professional educator for 26 years. Our deepest sympathies go out to her family, friends and co-workers at RES.

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Ridgeland community mourns loss of teacher who died due to COVID-19 - WTOC

For many people, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic lockdown measures have led to increased feelings of isolation, stress, and depression. As a result, many have turned to opioid use, thus leading to elevated instances of related overdoses and deaths.

With these initial restrictions on access healthcare services came the rise of and reliance on telemedicine.

In an interview with HCPLive, Paul Christo, MD, Professor of Anesthesiology and Critical Care, Medicine, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, explained that telemedicine and tele-mental health services have become increasingly useful for those in need.

As a practitioner, I think that its important to advocate to patients that they have connections that are available online via telehealth services, he said.

He went on to underscore this relationship between addiction and a lack of communication and loss of control.Thus, he believed that the use of tele-mental health services can help such individuals to address these concerns.

Further, Christo mentioned certain agonist therapies, such as methadone and buprenorphine, have become easier to access and acquire through mobile / remote means. These medications are critical to maintaining sobriety and preventing relapse.

Another important medication is naloxone (Narcan), which is an opioid-reversal agent. And yet, there is little visibility of it across the population. According to Christo, there is certainly potential to improve communication related to the importance of the drug for individuals who overuse opioids.

In reference to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemics effect on the opioid crisis, he nonetheless offered encouraging words.

I think theres hope, because of what weve learned from the initial stages of COVID-19, when everything was closed, he said.

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Paul Christo, MD: Addressing Opioid Addiction during the COVID-19 Pandemic - MD Magazine

Find all of the most important pandemic education news on Educating N.J., a special resource guide created for parents, students and educators.

While New Jersey officials have not announced the total number of COVID-19 cases in the states schools, data self-reported by educators themselves shows at least 100 schools have teachers or students who have tested positive for the coronavirus.

The National Education Association, the parent group of the NJEA and other teachers' unions around the country, recently launched a website for educators around the nation to report when there is a confirmed COVID-19 case in their schools.

NEAs goal is to use this data to protect educators, students and their families from unsafe reopening policies, as well as to shine a light on the complete failure of policymakers to listen to educators' and parents' warnings about reopening schools and campuses with no plan or regard for student and faculty safety, the group said.

As of Wednesday, there were 130 New Jersey schools on the list, though a few appeared to be possible duplicates or cases reported over the summer before the start of the current school year. All had links to news stories, school websites or other documents reporting the positive cases.

The NEA staff regularly reviews and verifies the crowdsourced data, the group said.

In New Jersey, there has been no comprehensive, public effort to track the total number of coronavirus cases reported in the states 2,500 public schools or in more than 1,000 private and religious K-12 schools.

Gov. Phil Murphy and state officials unveiled a new schools dashboard on the states coronavirus information hub at covid19.nj.gov last week. It showed there have been 11 coronavirus outbreaks in schools traced to in-school transmission of the virus. Those outbreaks included 43 cases.

However, the dashboard is only broken down by county and does not include the names of the schools. It also didnt identify the school districts, when the outbreaks were reported or any other details.

New Jersey has released a dashboard on its COVID-19 website tracking in-school outbreaks of the coronavirus. The dashboard only records cases where health officials believe students and teachers transmitted the virus on school grounds or in extracurricular activities.

The dashboard only gives a glimpse into the number of cases reported in the states schools because it only counts cases in which a local health department investigation has concluded the student or teacher caught or transmitted the virus on school property or in extracurricular activities. It does not include cases in which students or teachers tested positive after contracting COVID-19 from family members, friends, at parties or at events outside of school.

State health officials said they are releasing limited information about coronavirus cases in schools for privacy reasons.

As the Governor said at the briefing when the dashboard was rolled out, we are presenting the data this way to protect the privacy of those in our school communities, said Dawn Thomas, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Health.

An outbreak is considered two or more laboratory confirmed COVID-19 cases among students or staff with onsets within a 14-day period which are epidemiologically linked within the school setting, do not share a household, and were not identified as close contacts of each other in another setting during case investigation or contact tracing, Thomas said.

The state Health Department has no plans to track the total number of coronavirus cases reported in schools.

Since COVID-19 is spreading in the community, it is to be expected that some people who test positive will be students and staff. So a case among a student or staff member doesnt always indicate transmission at school, Thomas said.

The state released the outbreak data as more New Jersey schools that began the school year all-remote are preparing to switch to hybrid plans combining at-home and in-class learning.

Nationwide, teachers and parents have expressed frustration about the lack of information about how widespread the coronavirus is in schools. Neither the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention nor the federal Department of Education is tracking COVID-19 cases in schools or colleges.

Some states and schools districts have declined to release any information about positive COVID-19 tests for students and teachers, citing health and privacy laws. Indiana, Tennessee and Florida are among the states that have been criticized for holding back or limiting information about coronavirus cases in schools.

Some local news organizations, including NJ Advance Media, have compiled updated lists of schools that have publicly announced closures related to positive coronavirus cases. But it is difficult to gather all the information in states with thousands of schools, including private schools that are less likely to announce cases publicly.

Some educators have turned to crowdsourcing to gather the information. A teachers' union in Texas started a StoptheSpreadTX.school website that has received 1,750 reports of more positive cases and safety violations in schools in their state.

A Kansas high school teacher started a national database of positive cases in schools from her sofa in early August after failing to find anyone else tracking the data. Her spreadsheet was eventually taken over by the National Education Association after she and a group of volunteers had found and logged reports of 4,300 positive cases at more than 1,000 schools by the end of August.

That spreadsheet became the NEA School and Campus COVID-19 Reporting Site that now includes the more than 100 schools that have reported COVID-19 cases in New Jersey. Other states, including Florida, Pennsylvania and Texas, have hundreds of schools with positive cases, according to the site.

Under New Jerseys guidelines, public schools are only required to notify the families of students in individual classrooms or schools when a teacher or student tests positive for COVID-19. It is up to local health officials to notify the wider community if they think an alert is warranted.

Schools with one or two positive COVID-19 cases can stay open if the cases appear to be unrelated, though students and teachers who were in close contact with the infected person should be asked to stay home for 14 days, the state guidelines say. A school should close for two weeks if there are two or more cases in different classrooms with no clear link between them.

Many New Jersey schools have gone beyond the guidelines and temporarily switched to remote learning as soon as a case has been reported in a school.

Though the level of reporting and the decision on whether to close has varied from district to district, the governor said parents and students should be confident they will be notified if there has been an outbreak in their school.

If youre in the school, believe me, you know it, Murphy said last week.

Thank you for relying on us to provide the journalism you can trust. Please consider supporting NJ.com with a subscription.

Kelly Heyboer may be reached at kheyboer@njadvancemedia.com.

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More than 100 N.J. schools have reported COVID-19 cases, according to data collected by teachers - NJ.com

President Donald Trumps physician Sean Conley, joined by members of the Presidents medical team, delivered remarks to reporters. Trumps doctors have acknowledged withholding information about his health after contracting COVID-19, something other administrations have done in the past. (White House photo by Tia Dufour)

President Donald Trumps administration has long been a baffling phenomenon for political historians like UC Berkeleys Martin Jay, a professor emeritus of history, who has studied political untruth for more than 50 years.

The information swirling as Trump and his allies communicate strength, health and resolve in the face of the presidents COVID-19 diagnosis and weekend-long hospital stay makes clear just how polarized the truth has become, he said.

Martin Jay is UC Berkeleys Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History Emeritus. (UC Berkeley photo)

Its no longer about whether someone is telling the truth or lying, but rather, who that person is and what our characterological assumptions are of them that makes them a truthteller or a hypocrite, said Jay. Thats a real problem when you cant fully trust anybody anymore.

Jay is the author of The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics, a book that explores the historical role that lies and hypocrisy have played in American politics and presidencies. He spoke with Berkeley News recently about how the Trump administrations use of lies and misinformation has sowed doubt in what the public believes.

Martin Jay: We have developed a very complicated attitude toward people who have traditionally given us information, with many people no longer confident that they are telling the truth. This applies to both camps in our current polarized political culture.

This president and his people have bent the truth so often that people dont believe what they say. They take all of it with an immense grain of salt. Trump squandered away the ability to come off as sincere, because for most of us, he lacks the fundamental capacity for sincerity.

In American politics, its always been the case that politicians are seen as people who spin the truth, and so we never expect that what theyre saying is what they would be compelled to say in a court of law.

On the other hand, we normally maintain a basic sense that at least most of the time they are saying what is close enough to the truth that we can avoid total cynicism.

Toward Trump, most people have become extraordinarily suspicious, which has encouraged a pervasive cynicism about public life in general.

But ironically, the people who support this president think of him as a truthteller. They think of him as authentic, someone who courageously cuts through the b.s. of political correctness.

So, while some people damn him for telling 20,000 lies, his supporters think hes the only guy on the block who is, in fact, telling it like it really is.

In other words, with Trump, there is a complex relationship with truth-telling, because there is a mirroring effect and cynicism that goes in both directions.

For both sides, its no longer about whether someone is telling the truth or lying in a specific assertion, but rather who that person is and what our characterological assumptions are of them that makes them a truthteller or a hypocrite.

Whenever one deals with politics, you have to understand the relationship of discrete facts to larger narratives or explanations.

Trump is ill, he has COVID-19. Thats a simple fact.

But the facts themselves are never isolated, theyre always embedded in prior and ongoing narratives. In this case, the narrative is very clearly constructed by his previous denial on the importance of wearing masks and his downplaying of COVID-19, in general.

We may all agree that, yes, he went to the hospital. But is he in the hospital out of precaution? Or is he in the hospital suffering from a life-threatening disease and is, in fact, leaving for political purposes?

Political discourse is always a mixture of discrete facts, including the historical facts we choose to remember or forget, and the narratives which imbue them with hope, despair, anxiety, caution or God knows what else.

That makes it very, very problematic, from the point of view of absolute versions of the truth.

President Donald Trump posed for photos days after testing positive for COVID-19. Berkeley professor Martin Jay said photo ops like this are the presidents way of framing a narrative that he is not in real medical danger. (White House Photo by Tia Dufour)

Politics is precisely a space where our interests, our opinions, our values, our prejudices, our hopes for the future play an extraordinarily important role. When it comes to the truth, were not simply disinterested scientists looking at it from afar far: Were in the middle of it all.

Thats why, inevitably, I think therell always be a kind of spin or attempt to reframe the narrative. Whats made it more problematic now is the exacerbation of the lack of trust that some people have with this administration, or the so-called lamestream media.

We have a politics where people dont just distrust their adversaries, but despise them. They are seen as enemies, and not just as competitors who can still be honored, even if we disagree with them.

While there are people on the left who are, alas, gleeful about Trumps illness, thered certainly be people on Trumps side who would be jumping for joy if Joe Biden had a stroke in the middle of that last debate. I dont think this is new in politics, but those tendencies have dangerously increased.

The capacity for people to truly listen to each other has diminished, because youre not listening to be persuaded, youre not listening to learn, youre not listening to compromise: Youre listening to find ways to defeat or manipulate the enemy.

President Trump greets supporters during a drive outside of Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Trump was scrutinized for putting Secret Service agents and others in danger of contracting COVID-19. (White House Photo by Tia Dufour)

Putting this into perspective, as far as American political history goes, this whole Trump phenomenon is baffling.

The inclination of presidential doctors being protective and duplicitous, or withholding information when it comes to the health of our leaders, is not new. There are many other examples throughout history where the health of presidents was kept secret, from Woodrow Wilson to Franklin Roosevelt and beyond.

John F. Kennedy had several diseases and used a lot of medicines which impacted his performance. Dwight Eisenhower had a heart attack and a stroke, and his physicians tried to minimize what the public knew.

Its understandable that leaders want to reassure the public to avoid a panic or a sense of impending crisis.

So, what Trumps doctors did in omitting some things and giving a positive spin to others is pretty much par for the course.

But when his Chief of Staff Mark Meadows spilled the beans about the more serious nature of the situation, he created a discrepancy between the narratives we were being fed, exacerbating the distrust in this administrations ability to tell the truth, which was already extraordinarily high.

The sound you could hear in the background was that of chickens coming home to roost.

Most of us understand that he is more a showman, a conman, and a grifter, than a statesman or true leader.

His exorbitant narcissism, self-interested ploys and endless lies are mercilessly mocked in the media and television. Yet somehow, despite all that, he exercises an extraordinary hold on the still large number of people who support him.

How he managed to work this magic will not be easy to explain.

But Trump has always tried to embody an ideal of strength and health, and contrast his vitality to the alleged weakness of his opponents. We saw that in his mocking of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election, when she had pneumonia and was not looking well on the campaign trail.

And we saw him trying to bolster that narrative recently in the joy ride he took to greet his supporters outside of the hospital. I think almost everybody whos against him saw it as a transparent ploy to reassure his base, while jeopardizing the health of the Secret Service riding with him in the car.

But his supporters saw it as evidence of his miraculous recovery.

I think we all have our own political opinions about Trump, but it is becoming increasingly clear to people on both sides that we are witnessing the death agony of this particular presidency. There are just too many fiascos to recover from, and the time is too short for a reversal of public opinion.

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In Trump's own case of COVID-19, narrative matters more than truth - UC Berkeley

CLARKSBURG, W.Va. On October 7, 2020, Harrison County Schools confirmed COVID-19 cases at the following schools.

According to the release, a continued epidemiological investigation, contact tracing, and deep cleaning will be conducted. Harrison County Schools will remain under a category orange status through October 9, 2020.

School board officials explained that in accordance with privacy laws, information specific to these cases will not be released publicly.

To prevent the spread of COVID-19, the school board is urging individuals to follow best health practices as issued by the Governors Executive Orders and outlined by the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources (DHHR) and the West Virginia Department of Education (WVDE) guidance. The release includes wearing face coverings and practicing social distancing, hand washing, and cleaning protocols regularly.

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Additional COVID-19 cases announced in Harrison County Schools - WBOY.com

If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware.

If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices.

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How Much Should Governments Pay For COVID-19 Monoclonal Antibody Therapies? - Pink Sheet

People with persistent waking anxieties also tended to play out scenarios involving future work, relationships and life generally in their heads over the course of a day. Previous research has correlated this pattern to scene-shifting in dreams: the frequent changing of the setting, from indoors to outdoors, city to country, mountains to coast. Dr. MacKay and Dr. DeCicco found that dreamers during the first phase of the pandemic recorded far more such shifts in their REM mini-dramas.

These are classic anxiety dreams, Dr. DeCicco said.

In another of the studies, Dr. Barrett recruited nearly 3,000 people online to track, describe and write about their dreams in a digital form. She assessed the content of those essays, using a language-analysis algorithm that maps words onto categories like anger, sadness, body, health and death. These dreams, too, had all the hallmarks of heightened waking anxiety, but emotions like anger and sadness were much more prevalent among women than men.

I wasnt expecting this, but the findings suggest to me this idea that men are mainly experiencing fear of getting sick and dying, health fears, Dr. Barrett said. Women have been weathering more secondary effects; they tend to be the ones nursing sick family members, more often than males, for instance. I suspect this is the single most likely reason that sadness is up for women in these times.

Not all the dreams, in either study, were infused with darkness and fear, and many were pleasant, involving reunions with friends or family, or featuring the containment and elimination of the virus. They included wishes and threats, healthy measures and mistakes, and adjustments to news of the spread: learning and emotional processing. There were also periodic injections of hope.

I dreamed that SARS-Cov 2, as proteins, make music and so, to find the cure, scientists had to compose a melody that fit with the one SARS-Cov 2 produced, one respondent wrote in Dr. Barretts survey. Then they injected this as a vaccine and people get well.

In short, the studies suggest that dreaming does not serve just one purpose but many, likely including most of the above explanations from theorists. Dr. Hobsons warming-the-circuits idea is equally impossible to rule out, given all the dream activity that qualifies as mental gibberish and defies even the cleverest of metaphor-makers.

For everyday dreamers during the pandemic, it may be enough to know that Covid-19 nightmares, like any others, tend to be emotionally over-the-top. It was scary in the dream, but you wake up and its funny, Dr. Barrett said. The crisis is smaller than you thought.

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What We Dream When We Dream About Covid-19 - The New York Times

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Metro East could see loosening of COVID-19 restrictions by Friday - KMOV.com