I used to travel overseas. Every time I came home I kissed the ground and was glad to be home. I’ve enjoyed other places and we have our problems here but I’ll take it.
My sons like to travel. My oldest son went to China a few years ago on HS trip. After returning he hasn’t talked about traveling too much. Again, nice to visit but when you see how other people live you appreciate what you have.
I’m sure the food bank does love the venison - who wouldn’t? Venison is fabulous. Squirrel and possum less so. I’ve never seen or heard of anyone eating bats but maybe that’s because in the area I grew up it was well known that bats are one of the main carriers of rabies, so people know not to touch even the dead ones.
I asked the question about what’s behind the wild animal consumption in China to get a better understanding of possible solutions to prevent future epidemics. If poverty is driving the consumption of wild animals, the solutions would be different than if it’s cultural preference. I know most people in America would be fine with never again eating squirrel or possum (or any of the other things that are more rarely, but still eaten like racoon, groundhog, etc) if they had money to buy other meat. But even when people have all the money they need for food, many will still want to eat venison because it tastes good. If wild animal consumption is what caused SARS and now Covid 19, it might be worth understanding why people are eating the wild animals and seeing what might work to persuade them not to do that.
I think this is a really human nature thing - humans like “home” wherever that is. At school we have quite a few exchange students and refugees - refugees going back to the Bosnian conflict. We also get immigrants (legal and illegal) and most (in our area) come due to economic reasons. The vast majority prefer home. They like things about our country and are usually wonderful people, but their hearts are home. Some of our refuge children return home as adults if the conditions bringing them here has changed. Some immigrants do too.
I’ve always lived in tourist areas in this country and often have interactions with tourists. It’s interesting talking with them both here and when we travel. When discussing pros and cons of different places, the vast majority prefer home - wherever that is - even countries one wouldn’t expect (though note if they are traveling they have money so aren’t among the economically disadvantaged within their country).
If it weren’t for economic and war conditions there would be a lot less country change around the world. Humans care about their lives and their families and for this reason many will do anything they can to protect them - traveling miles away from home in any way they can. I don’t blame them one iota. The best solution for those who are anti-immigrant is to help improve the economic or war situation in other countries.
H and I are from different areas of our own country (met in college). We looked around a lot and tried a few places before we settled on one we now call home. I suspect if it weren’t for me, he’d return to where he grew up. I’m happy leaving where I grew up (weather issues), but that was within the US so not really a country change! Even being happy with where I live now vs where I grew up, it still feels like home when I return to a visit.
I doubt most eat bats because there would be very little meat on the varieties we have in this country. I know they are eaten where the species are larger.
My youngest lad has willingly eaten groundhog and tells us it’s not bad. He did it because he’s very green (back to the earth type) and we have a lot around us. I haven’t eaten it because I don’t share his beliefs to that extent. I don’t eat bear either. I know my grandmother’s cookbook has a recipe for it.
My H loves squirrel as do others in his family. Taste is very personal.
Venison can be dangerous if in the wrong areas. Chronic Wasting Disease made a big splash around here a couple of years ago and it’s still something being watched in our state.
Mad Cow Disease was an issue in a couple of places worldwide a few years back. Squirrels in some places had a similar warning - I recall reading news articles about it.
Neither of those last two would be pandemic things (just deadly to those eating them), but if one were to assume only certain types of animals can do this sort of thing I think they’re being shortsighted. Swine flu anyone?
@socaldad2002 : I am so sorry.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/02/us/albany-georgia-coronavirus/index.html
How two funerals helped turn one small Georgia city into a hotspot for coronavirus
When a retired janitor suddenly died in southern Georgia, crowds of relatives and friends flocked to a local funeral home and mourned together. Within weeks, their city was overrun by coronavirus cases.
That cluster of coronavirus cases was linked to the funerals of 64-year-old Andrew J. Mitchell and another man, held in late February and early March, Dougherty County Council Chairman Chris Cohilas said. Albany, a city of roughly 75,000 people – as well as Cohilas’ county, where Albany is based – is the latest example of how the virus has started disrupting smaller, more rural areas as much as the country’s larger, urban cities.
As of Wednesday afternoon, there were at least 490 confirmed coronavirus cases reported in Dougherty County and at least 29 coronavirus-related deaths, the Georgia Department of Public Health said.
…
The cluster of cases began emerging shortly after a 67-year-old man tested positive for the virus. The man traveled from Atlanta to attend one of the funerals and was hospitalized in Albany during his trip, said Steiner, the hospital system’s CEO.
“The next day it’s when we began seeing people coming to our emergency room who were sick,” Steiner said. “Two (people) the first day, six the next day, eight the next day, and it just began to cascade from that point.”
Some of those patients had attended the funerals, others were members of the same churches, Steiner said.
Life changed quickly in Albany
The virus had been traveling through this close-knit community for several weeks by the time social distancing warnings came in. Before the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued guidelines limiting gatherings to 50 people in mid-March, hundreds of runners flooded the city’s streets for the Snickers marathon and half-marathon – one of the top 10 qualifiers for the Boston Marathon.
They enjoyed live music during a downtown festival and packed the local churches on Sundays.
As more people fell sick, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp told reporters that he was concerned about the growing number of cases in Albany.
…
Georgia has at least 4,748 confirmed coronavirus cases, and at least 154 deaths in the state. The highest number of cases has been reported in Fulton County – which includes Atlanta, and has a population of about 1 million people. But Dougherty County – which has a population of about 85,000 people, and where Albany is – is a close second.
…
Health care workers at Phoebe Putney Health System went through six months’ worth of supplies in less than a week, Steiner said. Some health care workers are sleeping in their garages to protect their families and the intensive care units are quickly filling up.
Friday, the Georgia National Guard deployed two medical teams to assist with COVID-19 response at Phoebe.
…
Hopson told CNN. “People are grieving, we are really hurting right now. We are not New York, but we are still impacted.”
I work in a school, and our lunch ladies are also poorly paid and part time. I am very frustrated about this.
“It’s still early days, but one of our ICU’s is having success with one dose of an IL-6 inhibitor plus steroid given at precisely the right time. Too early and it inhibits helpful immune response, too late and the patient’s own immune system has done too much damage already. This really looks like it’s keeping some people off vents (so far). The immune systems of this subset of patients seem to be responding to COVID-19 with a Th17 immune response. This response is more effective for fungal and extracellular bacterial infections, and it looks like it’s counterproductive in fighting an intracellular virus. If you can use an IL-6 inhibitor to block this pathway at the right time, it’s looking good that we can keep these people from going in the wrong direction. (Source: DH)”
This knowledge is more widely shared within the medical community than we are privy to. I am on a COVID response team with my company and a doctor talk about this in very similar verbiages “…too early it’s not effective it’s dangerous, too late it’s not effective…”
There is hope everyone
Pangolins are a delicacy in China, not food for the poor.
New England Patriots Plane Bringing 1.2M Masks From China
The Kraft family paid $2 million for the N95 masks. There are another 500,000 that couldn’t fit on Thursday’s delivery.
The New England Patriots’ private plane is delivering more than 1 million sorely needed masks from China, the Wall Street Journal first reported.
The team plan is set to land at Boston’s Logan Airport Thursday with 1.2 million N95 masks. There are another 500,000 masks set for another delivery, but the plane could only handle 1.2 million.
Team owner Robert Kraft and his family paid $2 million, about half the cost, for the masks, which are a crucial piece of personal protection equipment needed on the front lines in the fight against the coronavirus.
The National Guard will bring the masks from the plane to a Marlboro stockpile, Politico reported. Some 300,000 masks will then be sent to New York, which is being overwhelmed by the pandemic.
Gov. Charlie Baker, who helped push things into motion, lauded the team’s championship effort.
“No days off,” he tweeted. “Thanks to some serious teamwork, Massachusetts is set to receive over 1 million N95 masks for our front-line workers. Huge thanks to the Krafts and several dedicated partners for making this happen.”
In order to avoid a quarantine, the crew was not allowed to leave the plane in Shenzhen, China.
Note from Sue22- No matter what you think of Kraft and the Patriots, you have to applaud this effort.
Sadly, this is not new news. The information about the funeral and the hospital going though 5 mos worth of supplies in 3 days is several weeks , if not a month old (the funeral was Feb 29). I think they also reported that someone from the funeral works in the prison system and its a problem there too, such that they are actually planning on releasing some prisoners to cut down on the problem.
But the (##%&#_)%#@ governor waited until late yesterday afternoon to FINALLY shut things down, but the lockdown doesn’t go into effect until tomorrow, and then (at least for now) only for 12 days. He is trying to claim that they “just” found out that the virus can be silent in some and they can be “hot spreaders”. That is a bold faced lie. This is NOT new information. He was just more worried about $ than lives. If he hadn’t stolen the election form Stacy Abrams, things would have been handled differently here.
Why is New Orleans’ coronavirus death rate seven times New York’s? Obesity is a factor
The coronavirus has been a far deadlier threat in New Orleans than the rest of the United States, with a per-capita death rate much higher than in New York City. Doctors, public health officials and available data say the Big Easy’s high levels of obesity and related ailments may be part of the problem.
“We’re just sicker,” said Rebekah Gee, who until January was the Health Secretary for Louisiana and now heads up Louisiana State University’s healthcare services division. “We already had tremendous healthcare disparities before this pandemic – one can only imagine they are being amplified now.”
Along with New York and Seattle, New Orleans has emerged as one of the early U.S. hotspots for the coronavirus, making it a national test case for how to control and treat the disease. Chief among the concerns raised by doctors working in the Louisiana city is the death rate, which is seven times that of New York and ten times that of Seattle, based on publicly reported data.
New Orleans residents suffer from obesity, diabetes and hypertension at rates higher than the national average, conditions that doctors and public health officials say can make patients more vulnerable to COVID-19, the highly contagious respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus.
Some 97% of those killed by COVID-19 in Louisiana had a preexisting condition, according to the state health department. Diabetes was seen in 40% of the deaths, obesity in 25%, chronic kidney disease in 23% and cardiac problems in 21%.
New Orleans, which so far has reported more than 270 coronavirus deaths, could be a harbinger for the potential toll the pandemic could take in other parts of the South and Midwest that also have high rates of obesity, diabetes, and hypertension.
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‘MORE VULNERABLE’
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released for the first time this week a report showing that 78% of COVID-19 patients in ICUs in the United States had an underlying health condition, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and chronic lung disease.
The CDC report was based on a sample of under 6% of reported coronavirus infections, but doctors in Louisiana said it was consistent with what they are seeing, and it is in line with what other countries like Italy and China have faced.
Those percentages, said Dr. Joseph Kanter, an emergency department doctor and the top public health official in New Orleans, are likely similar in cities across the United States.
“What we worry about here is that we have more people in our communities with those conditions,” he said. “We’re more vulnerable than other communities, and the number of deaths we’ve seen illustrates that.”
The New Orleans metropolitan statistical area ranks among the worst in the United States for the percentage of residents with diabetes, high blood pressure, and obesity, a Reuters analysis of CDC data shows. An estimated 39% have high blood pressure, 36% are obese and about 15% have diabetes.
Nationally, the median is 32% with high blood pressure, 31% obese and 11% with diabetes.
“The burden of disease in Louisiana and the Deep South is higher than in rest of the country,” said Gee. “Invariably that means that the South is going to be hard hit by this.”
Yes! But I was looking at colorsafe bleach (not Cl)
How is this even possible??? How difficult is to put a ban on PPE export??? This is such an obvious step to take.
Yes - I think you are exactly right on both.
The GA case is an example of how luck (bad in this case) created a hot spot. If the one person hadn’t attended the funeral, there wouldn’t be one (not likely anyway) in that area. Had that person gone elsewhere instead, they’d have been the location with the bad luck.
At that period of time, no one was expecting things in that area. I know in Feb we were traveling too - watching warily mostly overseas. Had we contracted the virus and not known about it there would be several different hot spots.
But now, we all know what’s going on including that it can be transmitted by folks who aren’t even aware they have it and we know how to slow it down until the medical experts can hopefully succeed.
Agree! In my state some areas got a D-. They are on top of mountains so all 10 residents didn’t stay far enough apart? Other than that very interesting graphic.
I don’t know if this has been said here before but … when this hits the very poor, it is going to be disastrous. White collar folks with big houses and computers can sit a long time but in a crowded area with poverty. I cant even imagine.
Speaking of funerals - My friend’s sister died of cancer a week ago, she was 60. No services, no funeral, nothing. She was a devout catholic, she would have liked to be buried and having funeral service at a church. Instead her body was cremated and nothing else.
They said when you die with COVID, you died alone, but I think it’s not much different with other kind of deaths. Thousands of people die each day due to diseases. I feel so bad for everyone who die for whatever reason during this time. One of my dearest friend died of colon cancer in December. Never thought someone would say this about his wife’s death “I am so glad D died last year…”.
Strange time.
hugs to you.