PA is allowing anyone to vote by mail this year and has actively encouraged it. I’ll be doing my first this coming Tuesday for our Primary (even if it’s just a symbolic vote). Otherwise, I wouldn’t have voted due to heading to FIL’s and not being willing to take the risk. It would have been my first missed vote ever.
Personally, I think all states should allow voting by mail this year. Our poll workers are in the higher risk age group. It’s not worth their lives to insist on in person voting. Apparently some poll workers have pulled out of the job because I’ve seen advertisements looking for more.
There are comments like this in the school in the fall thread. The same thing was said about low income hotel workers who “have” to clean up Covid rooms if colleges end up renting them to quarantine students who test positive.
It seems safe to say no one, faculty nor student, will have an optimal experience this fall. Just as students may be unwilling to pay for a semester they deem suboptimal and seek alternatives, faculty and staff may seek alternative employment if they believe conditions are suboptimal from their perspective. Everyone ( students and adults) is replaceable
I thought a lot of schools were still looking for students this year. Did I miss something?
Generic professors can quite possibly be replaced, but it’s impossible to replace experience by hiring mass amounts of younger folks.
Staff? I guess that would depend upon how many are willing to risk their lives for work or how many are available who aren’t in a high risk group - how many want to be in the cafeteria or cleaning crews, etc.
If the virus doesn’t go away or get tamed by treatments, it’s tough to imagine the typical college or school is going to be ok simply by replacing people if that’s even possible.
Very interesting article about the origin of the pandemic in US.
‘Coronavirus Epidemics Began Later Than Believed, Study Concludes‘
“In Washington State and Italy, the first confirmed cases were not linked to the outbreaks that followed, the analysis found. The epidemics were seeded later.”
“This viral line then hopped from Europe to New York several times, Dr. Worobey and his colleagues found, confirming previous studies. They estimated that the coronaviruses circulating in the city by March were introduced into the city around Feb. 20.
Around the world, the new study suggests, the coronavirus arrived more than once without starting runaway outbreaks. In these cases, there was little or no transmission, and the virus simply died out.”
“To Dr. Worobey, the time before the pandemic took off in the United States was a lost opportunity, when testing and contact tracing could have made a big difference.
“There were weeks before the virus really got a foothold,” he said. “It does start to make those missteps seem much more consequential.”
The study is “a very careful and rigorous analysis of what we can and can’t say about the U.S. and European outbreaks from genomic data,” said Edward Holmes, a virologist at the University of Sydney who was not involved in the study.
“To me, what this all highlights are the challenges about drawing strong conclusions on virus introductions and spread based on limited data.”
I’m not seeing vitriol about the nursing home deaths, more of an examination of what has worked and what we should avoid in the future, but we may be reading different sources. I am definitely seeing the same level of concern about disproportionate deaths in minorities vs white C19 patients. I think the media isn’t covering that as much because the root causes and cures for that aren’t as obvious as they are with the nursing home issue. With the nursing home deaths, it’s not hard to put together a list of 3-4 fairly straightforward fixes: don’t allow hospitals to discharge C19 patients to nursing homes, prioritize nursing homes in PPE allocations, monitor nursing home infections and activities, provide support for sequestering/sheltering nursing homes and staff. Much harder to do that sort of list to address the deaths in minority patients because they’re still seeking to understand all the causes, much less come up with solutions.
totalnumbersmatter More deaths in nursing homes in NYS than any other state. And I've read that NYS is not even counting as nursing home deaths when the NH resident died in a hospital.
Where’s the outcry over the disproportione number of deaths of POC? My state is quite concerned about that.
In my state, 78% of the confirmed Covid deaths have been in nursing homes. Our governor is just now implementing a plan to address the nursing home travesty.
The whole problem with voting by mail is so strange to me. Here in Arizona, anyone can request a mail ballot. There’s a permanent early voting list that gets you a mail ballot for every election. The ballot comes with a postage paid return envelope which must be returned and received by Election Day or you can drop it off at a polling place or some other designated locations. Something like 80% of the state’s voters vote this way. It’s been this way for years and is just no big deal. I haven’t voted in person in a voting booth in years, but usually do drop my ballot off the day of the election. They are collected in a box and counted last so the signatures can be verified. Apparently you can also sign up for text alerts so you know when your ballot is received, and when it is counted/verified.
My mom lives in the Independent Living section of a retirement community. Visitors have not been allowed since mid March to any part of the community (Independent, assisted, memory care, skilled nursing). Only essential health care. Residents are allowed to leave for quick trips to the store or medical appointments, but otherwise required to stay in the building. The dining room is shut down, meals are delivered. Hair salon and fitness room shut down.
The isolation, especially for those that don’t drive and haven’t been out since March is severe. My mom started a downward health spiral that landed her in the hospital this week.
Guess what? The hospital allows visitors! So my sibling and I visited her, on different days. We had to wear a mask, get our temperature checked, and sign in with the floor nurse, but we got to see her, which was good for her mental health and physical health. She has been discharged to rehab back in her CCRC, so we can’t see her again, probably until July.
So. We had to cross state lines to see her, and we have not been hermetically sealed in our homes for 14 days prior to the visit. We have been to the grocery store, my DH has been to work, my sibling has taken a pet for veterinary care. And there we were visiting an old lady in the hospital. We think it was the right call.
Not every hospital patient is elderly. If you have a mask, can pass a temperature check, and know the name of a patient you can visit anyone. They don’t really know if you are a relative. Are other hospitals any different?
This is an interesting article on the baffling disparities in deaths. Of particular interest is the Switzerland situation. Switzerland has the same health care system across all the cantons.
But Italian speaking Swiss are 2.4 times more likely to die of the virus than German speaking Swiss.
French speaking Swiss are 1.6 times more likely to die than German speaking Swiss.
The article states that these disparities are comparable to the disparities in death rates among white, black and Latino Americans.
Questions like this will keep researchers busy for a long time.
Colorado (and OR, WA, HI, UT) has mail in voting. It’s great. They send you a ballot, you have about 3 weeks to send it in, and that’s it. If you don’t want to mail it, you can drop it off at any ballot box in the state and they are everywhere - rec centers, bus and rail stations, police stations, in business centers. If you still don’t like that, there are places to go vote in person but they are centralized, and there aren’t nearly as many in little precincts as there used to be so they don’t need as many poll workers. There are places for homeless to vote. They mail you an I Voted sticker.
I like it because I can look up all the issues and races and pick the candidate or ballot issue I want to vote for or against on the computer while voting, so that judge I hadn’t heard of or that city council member whose name doesn’t ring a bell can still get my consideration.
We have very little fraud and voter turn out is way up. If you are OOS or not at home because of illness, you can get an absentee ballot mailed to you anywhere (military base, college, second home). They have a bar code scanning system that insures you only vote once. They scan the signature too. I get an email when my ballot is accepted.
Just thinking about workers and their risk. Overall I think people in the workforce are in the end at much less risk of dying. Why, age…
I’m just going to use Maryland numbers because I’m familiar.
6.1 million residents
800,000 over age 60
598,000 over age 65
Corvid-19 deaths under age 60 259
Corvid-19 deaths over age 60 1951
I can’t get good numbers for deaths split at 65 years old but you get the idea.
Most workers by far are under 60. Percentage of deaths of people under 60 are 11.4%.
Yes, this is with all the essential workers who should be most at risk out there. Anyways, looking at this the risk for most workers is much less than for elderly. I’m sure vulnerability plays into worker deaths too. Average age of death from Corvid-19 is @80.
I guess my point is, healthy working people are not really that much at risk comparably. Are they? Of course just as they are for other illnesses.
In the end 259 deaths out of a population of 5.3 million (population under 60) is not insane. Of course we’d rather have no deaths but that is not where we’re at.
Workers will have to go back to work at some point, sooner rather than later. I think it will be ok for most.
We should protect the elderly (less than 10% of population) and the vulnerable and get on to opening more up. Of course many workers have been terrified by the media and will have to make personal choices. In the end the entire death rate is well under 1%. Yes, that’s bad if you’re the less than 1% but how long could we hide? 6 months? A year? Two? More?
I am really surprised that people don’t get the controversy. I won’t go into details lest it become political, but in my state they don’t want to make voting easy for some people for fear they’ll lose their jobs, plain and simple. It’s also why a student ID is not allowed as proper ID at the poll but a concealed carry handgun license is. rolls eyes
Here, over 65 can get a mail-in ballot automatically, but others have to qualify and check a box that says either they 1) will be out of town during the whole early voting period and day of; 2) are in jail; 3) are disabled. In good news, the state doesn’t make you prove your disability so a lot of people are asking for mail-in ballots and checking “disability.” The whole thing is in the courts.
ETA: Cross-posted with TatinG, but I don’t see why what we see on the ground about voting during corona is off-topic.