Archive for April, 2020

Covid-19 and the nursing home ‘death pits’

Posted: April 28, 2020 by chrisharper in Uncomfortable Truths
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By Christopher Harper

Covid-19 has uncovered an incredible dirty secret that nursing home and long-term care facilities are killers.

Not only have roughly 20 percent of the 50,000-plus deaths occurred in these facilities, but the virus has also shown an industry that thrives on death, allowing nearly 400,000 to die each year—often from diseases they get in the homes.

Moreover, many hospitals rejected virus victims during the crisis after they become ill because those in nursing homes are among the most vulnerable because of their age and underlying conditions.

In New Jersey, 17 bodies were piled up in a nursing home morgue, and more than a quarter of a Virginia home’s residents died. At least 24 people at a facility in Maryland have died; more than 100 residents and workers have been infected at another in Kansas; and people have died in centers for military veterans in Florida, Nevada, New York, Maine, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Washington. In the Philadelphia suburbs, a top-rated facility, the Southeastern Veterans’ Center has had nearly 30 people die and expects to see more.

New York officials disclosed the names of 72 long-term care facilities that have had five or more deaths, including the Cobble Hill Health Center in Brooklyn where 55 people died. At least 14 nursing homes in New York City and its suburbs recorded more than 25 coronavirus-related deaths. In New Jersey, officials revealed that infections have broken out in 394 long-term facilities — almost two-thirds of the state’s homes — and that more than 1,500 deaths were tied to nursing facilities, DaTimes reported. See more at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/17/us/coronavirus-nursing-homes.html

“They’re sitting ducks, the veterans,” said one family member told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “They are dying alone, that makes me utterly mad. It’s inhumane. And they’re withholding information about how dire it is.” For more, see https://www.inquirer.com/news/southeastern-veterans-center-coronavirus-chester-county-covid-20200425.html

The center is one of the best in the State of Pennsylvania, with a long waiting list. 

All told, there are about 15,000 nursing homes in the United States, which house about 1.3 million people. 

In Pennsylvania, about 126,000 people live in these facilities. Nearly half of Pennsylvania’s known coronavirus-related deaths have been residents of long-term-care facilities. 

Because one of the first outbreaks of Covid-19 occurred in a Washington nursing home, most facilities were put on notice about the problems. 

But the underlying issues left many facilities unprepared. These problems include a lack of personal protective equipment, the inability to maintain social distancing among residents, inadequate staff, and the failure to act quickly enough when residents exhibited symptoms of the disease.

Many of the staff are paid at the minimum wage and often job at a facility for a short period. 

Moreover, many state agencies fail to enforce local and federal standards on how the facilities should function. 

As the pandemic slows down, investigators should turn their attention to the severe problems that exist in nursing homes and long-term care facilities to protect those who are most likely to die and have no other place to go.

I’m not the only one thinking this way about Tara Reade…

Posted: April 28, 2020 by datechguy in Uncategorized

Via Hotair my: “CNN thinks he did it” meme is getting support:

A generous and even sensible reading of this call is that it confirms what Reade originally alleged in 2019, that Biden, as we’ve known he’s done for years, creepily touched her neck and generally invaded her personal space, albeit with no obvious intent of personal gratification, sexually or otherwise. Even if you’re the most die-hard Democrat in the media, it makes little sense why you wouldn’t just want to investigate and then exhaust the Reade allegation so it doesn’t hang over his head until Election Day. But after months of the media hedging on the Reade story, the specific Larry King Live episode apparently featuring Reade’s mother has inexplicably gone missing on CNN’s Google Play archives of the show.

All of which raises the question: What does CNN know that we don’t?

Jazz expands on this:

 Even with the addition of the Larry King tidbit, Reade’s most serious claims still generally fail the tests we normally apply to these types of ancient, nearly unprovable, “he said, she said” situations. We lack any sort of physical evidence or even a direct witness to the claimed attack. We would also normally be looking for multiple contemporaneously corroborating witnesses, of which Reade has a few, but far more of her former coworkers in Biden’s Senate office tell very different tales. We would also normally check for a consistent description of events by the victim over the years. Reade fails that test entirely.

With all that in mind, why wouldn’t CNN do precisely what the New York time and other liberal outlets have done? Interview her, along with any available witnesses for both sides and publish their findings. They could state that Biden definitely has a history of invading women’s personal spaces and making them “uncomfortable,” but never in a way signaling that he was seeking sexual gratification. Then simply note Reade’s changing tale over the years, and conclude that she has a right to tell her story, but they simply can’t find enough hard data to conclude that her version of events is accurate. At that point you can simply ignore Reade and if anyone complains about the lack of coverage you can simply point them to your previous investigation and say that there’s nothing new and relevant to add.

Surely the powers that be at CNN are aware of all this. They could have flushed the Reade allegations out of the public debate weeks ago, perhaps briefly revisiting it this weekend after the Larry King material came out. Why didn’t they? Is it conceivable that some of the reporters at CNN know, or at least suspect something that may come to light about the Reade allegations later?

To ask the question is to answer it.

Personally if I was the left and wanted to kill all this I’d pay a woman to make wild accusations that could easily be proven false and then contrast this with Reade and lump them together in coverage.

Don’t be surprised if this happens next.

Report from Louisiana: Education Disparity during Covid Closure

Posted: April 27, 2020 by Pat Austin in Uncategorized
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By:  Pat Austin

SHREVEPORT – One of the issues this pandemic has exposed has been the complete and utter lack of preparedness by education systems for such an event. Granted, nobody could have expected a nationwide shutdown of the economy and stay-at-home orders for weeks on end. But, in Louisiana at least, this is not completely without precedent. When Hurricane Katrina decimated New Orleans, we dealt with extended school closures in specific areas of the state. The difference, of course, as far as education goes at least, is that those displaced students had other school systems still in operation where they could transfer. That is not the case now.

What has emerged is a patchwork of fixes and plans between school systems. Each district is working in different ways to educate their students and there is little uniformity between systems much less within each individual district.

The result is that some students are receiving an education and others are not. The Advocate reports on survey results by the state Department of Education:

Educators said the coronavirus pandemic has exposed a national digital divide that is especially jarring in a state like Louisiana, where about two-thirds of students — nearly 500,000 youngsters — live in low-income households.

When the shutdown order came, the school in which I teach, for example, was winding up Spring Break. We walked out of our classrooms that previous Friday fully expecting to return in ten days. My classroom right now is exactly as I left it on March 6.

School districts across the nation scrambled to enact a plan. Nobody knew how long we would be closed. Students did not leave the campus with textbooks, work packets, or technology.

In a Title I school, like mine, the problems are compounded by the fact that many of our students do not have home computers or Wi-Fi.  But, in another school across town, kids have Wi-Fi, strong parental support, and personal computers.  

What were districts to do? How can you level this field over night?

We did the best we could, I guess. We set up dates where students could come to the school and sign out Chromebooks if they needed technology, but that doesn’t solve the Wi-Fi problem. Some students were given copied work packets. We enacted a “do no harm” policy where students can be graded on the work they turn in, but can’t be given a zero for work they don’t do, and overall a student’s grade can not go down from what it was on March 6.

Is this ideal?  Nope. But what’s the answer?

And how do you prepare for something like this?

Some school districts across the country have set up mobile Wi-Fi hotspots in buses parked in the neighborhoods, but obviously this has not been a uniform practice.

According to the survey:

Officials in the East Baton Rouge Parish school district told the state that 55% of their students lack access to a laptop; Central, 50%; Jefferson Parish, 40%; Livingston Parish, 38%; St. John the Baptist Parish, 65%; West Baton Rouge Parish, 65%; and St. Landry Parish, 60%.

At the other end of the spectrum for students lacking laptops is Ascension Parish, 1%; Lafayette Parish, 20%; Orleans Parish, 20%; St. Bernard Parish , 15%; St. Charles Parish, 5%; Plaquemines Parish, 10% and Zachary, 0%.

The shortage is even worse in rural areas, where five mostly north Louisiana school districts say 75% or more of their students lack access to a laptop or tablet at home.

Governor Edwards is planning to begin to reopen Louisiana for business at the end of the week and will announce his plans during a press conference later today. He has cautioned residents to temper their expectations and notes that this will be a very gradual process.

One of the things we certainly must address in the near future is to develop some kind of emergency plan that does not contribute to the already huge disparities in our education systems. While it’s impossible to prepare for what you don’t know, it is possible, now that we DO know, to create some kind of contingency plan for our students.

Pat Austin blogs at And So it Goes in Shreveport and is the author of Cane River Bohemia: Cammie Henry and her Circle at Melrose Plantation. Follow her on Instagram @patbecker25 and Twitter @paustin110.

Opinion: I think CNN Believes Tara Reade’s Charges vs Biden are True

Posted: April 27, 2020 by datechguy in elections, News/opinion, politics
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I have to give the MSM in general and CNN in particular credit. Every time I think they are incapable of surprising me in terms of how low they will go they manage to surprise me.

To wit:

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This is actually even worse than the whole: “Beware of the Leopard “ business that MSNBC played with their Morning Joe Jeffrey Epstein clip during Election 2016. You could find it if you jumped through hoops, these guys have removed this clip from a public archive where it has been presumably for decades.

The embarrassment of this clip being uncovered by the MRC from their own archives actually forced CNN to cover the story on air for the very 1st time this weekend. That was telling but the removal of this clip without comment is more so.

If they thought that this clip was no big deal, if they thought that the evidence in it was at best circumstantial, which it might be considered, then they would have left it be.

But they took the proactive stance to have it removed from Googleplay, and yes I said proactive because unlike Hotair I’m not going to give them the benefit of the doubt here:

I originally had reservations about the episode because the caller isn’t identified by name and she doesn’t specifically mention which “prominent senator” her daughter worked for or what her “problems” were that prompted her to leave that job. But it’s since been confirmed that Jeanette Altimus did indeed live in San Luis Obispo at that time. It was also the exact period when Tara Reade was leaving Washington. That’s a few too many coincidences to write this off, and Reade has confirmed that it’s her mother’s voice we’re hearing and that she knew her mom had called King’s show.

The real question here is how the show wound up not being listed in the Google Play directory, assuming this isn’t just some bizarre technical glitch. (I have an account and checked myself. It’s not there.)

I suppose, just to be fair, we should at least mention the possibility that either the episodes are mislabeled or the original was never loaded. But the dates of the shows all line up until August 10th, episode 154. And the next entry is dated August 12th, but it’s labeled as episode 155. Again, we’re asking the word “coincidence” to do a lot of heavy lifting to sweep this away as some sort of glitch.

Or to put it another way, if there had been a clip of Christie Blassey Ford’s mom talking calling into a Fox show about her daughter getting assaulted at a party from two decades ago and Fox removed it from their online archive the entire Corona Virus story would disappear from CNN’s airwaves, smothered by their coverage and every single GOP senator would be asked about it.

Of course in fairness every Democrat Senator has been asked about this, but their offices won’t even acknowledge the questions:

Every Democrat in the Senate has refused to acknowledge the sexual assault allegations against 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden that were brought forward by a former staffer, even after new evidence lends credibility to the alleged assault.

The Daily Caller contacted every Democrat in the Senate, asking them if they would even consider the allegations by Biden’s accuser, Tara Reade, who has accused the then-senator of kissing her, touching her and penetrating her with his fingers without her consent in 1993. Each Senate office was given 24 hours to respond but not one did.

Given the proactive move by CNN and the unanimity of the silence of Senate Democrats I am forced to conclude that this is not because they believe Ms. Reade’s accusations to be false, but because they believe them to be true.

Fyi here is the video via The other mccain

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Who comments:

This is far more solid corroboration for Reade’s claim against Biden than there was for any of Brett Kavanaugh’s accusers, yet the media devoted round-the-clock coverage to the Kavanaugh accusations. Scott Whitlock at the Media Research Center asks:

Journalists have largely buried this story. ABC, NBC and CNN have not reported on it AT ALL. CBS, PBS and MSNBC have offered very minimal coverage. How long will journalists keep covering up this explosive story?

How long, indeed?

This is why I no longer give Joe Biden the benefit of the doubt here.

Update: CNN is denying it did anything with the Larry King stuff, here is my response

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After all after “Hands up Don’t shoot”, the Covington Kids and their regularly featuring the creepy porn lawyer why on earth would I presume their denial is true?

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