Category : Health & Medicine

(JE) Anglican Bishop Steve Wood, COVID-19 and “Beauty from Ashes”

Bishop Steve Wood was released from the hospital following 10 days on a ventilator amidst treatment for COVID-19. An otherwise healthy man in his 50s who had not before been hospitalized, Wood is far from the image of elderly or medically compromised patients we regularly read about in the news.

The rector of St. Andrew’s Church and bishop for the Anglican Diocese of the Carolinas shares with the Institute on Religion & Democracy’s Jeff Walton about what sustained him during a period of intensive care, ongoing recovery and God bringing “beauty from ashes.”

Take the time to watch it all (just under 18 minutes).

Posted in * South Carolina, Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), Children, Health & Medicine, Marriage & Family, Ministry of the Ordained, Parish Ministry

(Washington Post) Doctors express glimmers of hope as they try out new approaches against the coronavirus

Jose Pascual, a critical care doctor at the University of Pennsylvania Health System, recalled those first, mad days treating the sick when he had little to offer beyond hunches and Hail Marys. Each new day brought bizarre new complications of the coronavirus that defied textbook treatments.

“We were flying blind,” he said. “There is nothing more disturbing for me as a doctor.”

Now, for the first time since a wave of patients flooded their emergency rooms in March, Pascual and others on the front lines are expressing a feeling they say they haven’t felt in a long time – glimmers of hope. They say they have devised a toolbox, albeit a limited and imperfect one, of drugs and therapies many believe give today’s patients a better shot at survival than those who came only a few weeks before.

Read it all.

Posted in Health & Medicine, Science & Technology

(Church Times) Cathedrals face sharp drop in income

As churches learned this week that their coronavirus shutdown could end in July, administrators of the nation’s cathedrals are beginning to consider what life in the “new normal” will be like.

With their doors closed, many have adapted new technology, live-streaming services and linking remotely through apps such as Zoom. But cathedrals have also taken a severe financial hit, with the loss of collections, no visitor spending, and the cancellation of events that often fund a significant proportion of their annual expenditure.

“On top of daily worship, events are the bread and butter of what cathedrals do, but they are going to be low down on the list of things relaxed,” the Church Commissioners’ Head of Bishoprics and Cathedrals, Michael Minta, said. The Commissioners fund each cathedral’s dean, two residentiary canons, and some lay staff.

Cathedrals had had great expectations for 2020: the Year of Cathedrals and the Year of Pilgrimage were expected to boost visitor numbers and involvement. “There was a real positive vibe last year that things were really going to be good for everyone,” Mr Minta said. “But, instead, many have had to stand staff down, buildings are closed, their cafés and shops are shut, and income has been lost.”

Larger cathedrals, such as Canterbury and St Paul’s, which rely on tourism from overseas, have been badly affected; Durham’s 750,000 visitors, one third from overseas, provide one fifth of its annual revenue of £7 million.

Read it all.

Posted in * Economics, Politics, Church of England (CoE), Economy, England / UK, Health & Medicine, Parish Ministry, Religion & Culture, Stewardship

(Reuters) Government gives green light for English soccer to return in June

The Premier League’s plans to resume the season next month was given a boost on Thursday when Britain’s Culture and Sport secretary Oliver Dowden said the government was “opening the door” for football to return in June.

Dowden said he held a “positive meeting” with football authorities — which included the Premier League, the English Football League and the Football Association — to “progress plans” for football to resume.

The professional game has been suspended since mid-March due to the COVID-19 pandemic that has killed over 33,100 people in the United Kingdom.

Read it all.

Posted in England / UK, Health & Medicine, Sports

(Der Spiegel) What the Coronavirus Does Inside the Body

Early on, virologists thought that the novel coronavirus would spread only slowly, in part due to the similarities between SARS-CoV-2 and the SARS coronavirus that appeared in China in 2002. From November 2002 and July 2003, almost 800 people died of the disease, the full name of which is Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. But then, the epidemic disappeared. It was a stroke of luck for humanity: That pathogen appears to have been more deadly than SARS-CoV-2, but it focused its attentions on the lungs. The virus multiplied deep within the body, making it less contagious. Furthermore, it was easy to identify and isolate those who had fallen ill from the virus.

Experts initially hoped that the same would hold true of SARS-CoV-2, but they were mistaken. The novel coronavirus doesn’t just attack the lungs. Throat swabs from patients revealed early on that the pathogen first goes after the mucous membrane in the upper respiratory tract.

That is advantageous for the virus. The distance from one throat to another throat is much shorter than the distance from one person’s lung to another. “That means that those carrying the virus are highly contagious,” says Strassburg. A huge number of the viruses are found in the nasal cavity and pharynx, “even in people who aren’t yet experiencing symptoms,” he adds, “which is why the pathogen was able to circle the globe so quickly.”

There are three stages in the attack on the human body….

Read it all.

Posted in Health & Medicine, Science & Technology

(Guardian) ‘My rabbi’s tools now include a phone’: UK Jewish burials changed by Covid-19

Minutes before the rabbi started intoning funeral prayers over a shrouded coffin, his phone rang. The dead man: 90 years old, a victim of coronavirus, had been lying in a morgue for a couple of weeks while the authorities and his synagogue had tried to trace his relatives.

The man was one of 440 British Jews who had died from coronavirus by Monday, a statistic that belies the impact of the virus on the Jewish community, which has been disproportionately hit by Covid-19. Figures compiled by the Board of Deputies of British Jews suggest that more than 1% of all coronavirus deaths are Jewish, while Jews are only 0.4% of the total UK population.

Now the man’s grandson was on the line from Dubai. Although he had lost touch with his grandfather 30 years ago, he was able to give Rabbi Daniel Epstein valuable biographical information to supplement the man’s name, age and cause of death. Even so, the only people present to witness the coffin being lowered into its grave were the rabbi and staff of Waltham Abbey Jewish cemetery, in Essex, on the edge of London.

In normal times, it is rare to conduct a funeral without mourners, but not now. The number of burials conducted by the United Synagogue Burial Society more than tripled in April, Epstein said. Some rabbis have officiated at three or four funerals a day – and in many cases, relatives and friends were unable to say a last goodbye to their loved one due to self-isolation or restrictions on travel.Read it all.

Posted in Death / Burial / Funerals, England / UK, Health & Medicine, Judaism, Religion & Culture

(WSJ) Soaring Prices, Rotting Crops: Coronavirus Triggers Global Food Crisis

The coronavirus pandemic hit the world at a time of plentiful harvests and ample food reserves. Yet a cascade of protectionist restrictions, transport disruptions and processing breakdowns has dislocated the global food supply and put the planet’s most vulnerable regions in particular peril.

“You can have a food crisis with lots of food. That’s the situation we’re in,” said Abdolreza Abbassian, a senior economist at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, or FAO.

Prices for staples such as rice and wheat have jumped in many cities, in part because of panic buying set off by export restrictions imposed by countries eager to ensure sufficient supplies at home. Trade disruptions and lockdowns are making it harder to move produce from farms to markets, processing plants and ports, leaving some food to rot in the fields.

At the same time, more people around the world are running short of money as economies contract and incomes shrivel or disappear. Currency devaluations in developing nations that depend on tourism or depreciating commodities like oil have compounded those problems, making imported food even less affordable.

“In the past, we have always dealt with either a demand-side crisis, or a supply-side crisis. But this is both—a supply and a demand crisis at the same time, and at a global level,” said Arif Husain, chief economist at the UN’s World Food Program. “This makes it unprecedented and uncharted.”

Read it all.

Posted in Dieting/Food/Nutrition, Ethics / Moral Theology, Foreign Relations, Globalization, Health & Medicine, Politics in General, Poverty

(CJ) The Therapeutic Campus–Why are college students seeking mental-health services in record numbers?

“I don’t know anyone [at Yale] who hasn’t had therapy. It’s a big culture on campus,” says a rosy-cheeked undergraduate in a pink sweatshirt. She is nestled in a couch in the subsidized coffee shop adjacent to Yale’s Good Life Center, where students can sip sustainably sourced espresso and $3 tea lattes. “Ninety percent of the people I know have at least tried.” For every 20 of her friends, this sophomore estimates, four have bipolar disorder—as does she, she says.

Another young woman scanning her computer at a sunlit table in the café says that all her friends “struggle with mental health here. We talk a lot about therapy approaches to improve our mental health versus how much is out of your control, like hormonal imbalances.” Yale’s dorm counselors readily refer freshmen to treatment, she says, because most have been in treatment themselves. Indeed, they are selected because they have had an “adversity experience” at Yale, she asserts.

Such voices represent what is universally deemed a mental-health crisis on college campuses. More than one in three students report having a mental-health disorder. Student use of therapy nationally rose almost 40 percent from 2009 to 2015, while enrollment increased by only 5 percent, according to the Center for Collegiate Mental Health at Pennsylvania State University. At smaller colleges, 40 percent or more of the student body has gone for treatment; at Yale, over 50 percent of undergraduates seek therapy.

Read it all.

Posted in * Culture-Watch, America/U.S.A., Anthropology, Ethics / Moral Theology, Health & Medicine, Pastoral Theology, Psychology, Young Adults

(Sightings) William Lawrence–Pandemic Piety: What is proper piety in the season of COVID-19?

What is the proper piety during a pandemic? Should believers gather for prayer, embrace others in the community of faith, and prophesy to the government that it cannot order people with the religious protections of the First Amendment to quit assembling? Or should believers love their neighbors with such spiritual devotion that they decide to prioritize their health and safety over their own liberty by foregoing assemblies and gatherings for public prayers until it is clear that their neighbors’ lives—especially the most vulnerable among them, the elderly and immunocompromised—will not be jeopardized by the virus?

Methodists, my faith family, have affirmed for nearly three hundred years the “General Rules” that the movement’s founder John Wesley authorized for his disciplined group. The first one of the three General Rules is “Do No Harm.” Its specifications include “avoiding evil” and “avoiding… needless self-indulgence.” The coronavirus cannot be seen without powerful microscopes or heard unless one hears the coughing that it can cause. But it is “evil.” It is a source of suffering and death. For Methodists, then, it is to be avoided. And the best way to avoid it is to limit interpersonal contact and physical proximity. It is a wise word for non-Methodists, too.

People who arrogantly insist on their right to assemble with others who share the religious delusion about spiritual protection from the virus are engaging in needlessly self-indulgent forms of behavior. They are doing harm to themselves and, potentially, to others.

In the Hebrew scriptures, when Elisha was called to help a family with a dying child (2 Kings 4), he went into the house and closed the door. In the New Testament, when Jesus was teaching his disciples to pray (Matthew 6), he told them to go into the room and shut the door. The current pandemic is a good time for people who honor a great prophet or who heed the word of the Lord from Jesus to take their advice. Stop the public gatherings for a while. Go back into the house. And pray.

Read it all.

Posted in Health & Medicine, Religion & Culture

(Local Paper) How Summerville, South Carolina businesses have managed amid the coronavirus pandemic

Like countless cities and towns across South Carolina and the world, Summerville was uprooted by a pandemic that left residents secluded at home and many businesses either adjusting their services or closing down shops.

It has led to a delay in the annual Flowertown Festival, an event that brings thousands of tourists and potential customers to Summerville in April. It’s also led to less foot traffic in a town with dozens of small businesses that rely on local customers.

For some owners, this has meant a complete remodeling of their business practices.

The Greater Summerville/Dorchester County Chamber of Commerce recently put out a survey to grasp how the pandemic has impacted local business owners in the area.

Seventy owners have responded so far. Around half were able to remain open while following guidelines. The rest had to either rely solely on new virtual services or close doors completely, like Sutton’s salon.

“It’s a very scary and very pressing time for people,” said Rita Berry, president of the chamber.

Read it all.

Posted in * South Carolina, Consumer/consumer spending, Corporations/Corporate Life, Economy, Health & Medicine

(NYT) The Covid19 Outbreak’s Untold Devastation of Latin America

When Aldenor Basques Félix, an Indigenous leader and teacher, fell ill in Manaus [Brazil] with coronavirus symptoms in late April, he was treated at home — he had no money for the bus ride to the closest hospital. As his condition deteriorated, his friends spent five hours trying to reach an ambulance, but couldn’t get through.

When his impoverished community finally got together the money for a taxi, Mr. Basques Félix, 49, was dead. At the hospital, attendants refused to take the body, saying the morgue was full. His friends had to wait with the corpse in an evangelical church until they could find undertakers to take it away.

“They refused to take his body away, they refused to do the tests,” said Mr. Tikuna said of the hospital workers.

Read it all.

Posted in Brazil, Chile, Economy, Ecuador, Globalization, Health & Medicine, Peru, Politics in General

Hope, nursing and Florence Nightingale: A Sermon by the Bishop of London, Sarah Mullally

The Rt Rev Sarah Mullally, Bishop of London, speaks of her nursing career, hope and Florence Nightingale, in celebration of the 200th anniversary of the nursing pioneer’s birthday.

Watch and listen to it all.

Posted in Church of England (CoE), CoE Bishops, England / UK, Health & Medicine, History, Religion & Culture

(Local Paper) South Carolina religious leaders hope for lasting change as people show renewed faith amid pandemic

Ben Phillips, dean of Christian studies at Charleston Southern University, said the point is not to be suspicious of reports of people’s faith increasing. Rather, it is to recognize that growing faith results in persistence when the crisis passes, while the momentary desire can fade, he said.

“There is a difference between the emotion of the moment and the enduring faith that changes a life,” Phillips said, noting it remains to be seen whether the crisis will bend the curve on the decline of Christianity.

In many instances, faith is being demonstrated in tangible ways as houses of worship come together to meet spiritual and physical needs in communities.

Read it all.

Posted in * South Carolina, Health & Medicine, Parish Ministry, Religion & Culture

(Washington Post) Small business used to define U.S. economy, but pandemic could change that forever

The coronavirus pandemic is emerging as an existential threat to the nation’s small businesses – despite Congress approving a historic $700 billion to support them – with the potential to further diminish the place of small companies in the American economy.

The White House and Congress have made saving small businesses a linchpin of the financial rescue, even passing a second stimulus for them late last month. But already, economists project that more than 100,000 small businesses have shut permanently since the pandemic escalated in March, according to a study by researchers at the University of Illinois, Harvard University and the University of Chicago. Their latest data suggests that at least 2% of small businesses are gone, according to a survey conducted Saturday to Monday.

The rate is higher in the restaurant industry, where 3% of restaurant operators have gone out of businesses, according to the National Restaurant Association.

Read it all.

Posted in America/U.S.A., Corporations/Corporate Life, Economy, Health & Medicine, Labor/Labor Unions/Labor Market

(World) ‘When the help needs help’–why many smaller parishes are struggling

In mid-March, as the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths began to rise in Michigan, Kato Hart braced himself for a particularly grueling season for his community in Detroit. As the founding pastor of Hold the Light Ministries Church of God in Christ, a tiny storefront church of about 15 members, Hart knew that once again, the disaster would strike hardest the poor and the marginalized like those in his church neighborhood, which is about 94 percent black with a median household income of $20,502.

He was right: Over the next several weeks, Detroit became Michigan’s epicenter for COVID-19 cases and deaths. Although black people account for only 14 percent of Michigan’s population, they currently make up 41 percent of COVID-19-linked deaths in the state. Within Hart’s own social circles, a family friend lost her 5-year-old daughter to COVID-19. His denomination, Church of God in Christ (COGIC), which is the largest African American Pentecostal denomination with an estimated membership of 6.5 million, has reported at least a dozen bishops and clergymen who have died with the coronavirus. That list includes a prominent bishop in Detroit.

The pandemic has upended the economic stability of Hart’s community as well: After Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer issued a statewide lockdown, Hart began receiving phone calls from anxious congregants who lost their minimum-wage jobs or faced significant pay cuts. Many are single mothers who live paycheck to paycheck, and now they have zero income, meager savings, and little social support to pay their rent, bills, and childcare. One church member, for example, takes care of a daughter and grandchildren by herself, and she cannot even afford to fix her furnace.

Read it all.

Posted in * Economics, Politics, America/U.S.A., Economy, Health & Medicine, Parish Ministry, Religion & Culture

(IFS) Rob Henderson–Has the Coronavirus Pandemic Ended the Tinder Era of Relationships?

In December 2019, the height of the Tinder era, women and men were setting up multiple dates on the same day. People were sexually carefree, spinning the digital slot machine in their hands, wondering who they would match with next.

Fast forward to December 2020. People will be more careful about who they date because, now, they have to be more careful.

As I wrote in the recent IFS symposium, new relationships and casual hookups will likely decline during this pandemic because of the difficulty to enter the dating scene as bars, clubs, and restaurants have closed. But even after social distancing practices ease up, many people will continue to be vigilant about their sexual partnerships.

When people feel safe, they are willing to take more risks. But when safety is threatened, such as during a disease outbreak, people become more cautious. Indeed, research led by evolutionary psychologists Mark Schaller and Damian Murray found that in countries where pathogens are more pervasive, people are less extraverted and less open to new experiences. They also more strongly urge one another to adhere to social customs.

Furthermore, experimental evidence by Laith Al-Shawaf at the University of Colorado and his colleagues showed that people who read about a parasitic infection expressed less willingness to sleep with someone they just met compared with a control condition. In the world we lived in until very recently, more people were willing to jump into bed with a stranger. In this widely-read Vanity Fair piece about Tinder, for example, a man tells the author that he slept with “30 to 40 women in the last year.” But a recent study in The Journal of Sexual Medicine discovered that people are reporting a decline in the number of sexual partners, as well as a decline in sexual frequency. Additionally, they found that “most individuals with a history of risky sexual experiences had a rapid reduction in risky sexual behaviors.”

In the future, people may be more vigilant about coming into sexual contact with an unknown person. At least for now, Coronavirus has killed the era of ‘Netflix and chill.’

Read it all.

Posted in Health & Medicine, Men, Psychology, Women, Young Adults

(News2 Charleston) Exclusive poll: Many not ready to return to restaurants, gyms during COVID-19 pandemic

While most of the country has started the process of reopening, a majority of people surveyed in three U.S. states aren’t yet ready to return to restaurants and gyms, according to new polling from Nexstar Media Group and Emerson College. People in Texas, California and Ohio indicated they aren’t ready to return to places they frequented prior to the pandemic — even with social distancing and other precautions in place.

In California, 65% said they would not feel comfortable going to a restaurant with some spacing precautions. Similarly, 60% of surveyed Texans weren’t ready to dine-in.

To contrast, a majority of people in Ohio are more ready to return to restaurants. Of those surveyed, 51% said they were comfortable returning to restaurants with precautions.

Read it all.

Posted in * Economics, Politics, America/U.S.A., Dieting/Food/Nutrition, Economy, Health & Medicine, Sports

(Guardian) Rory Kinnear–My sister died of coronavirus. She needed care, but her life was not disposable

So it was coronavirus that killed her. It wasn’t her “underlying conditions”. Prior to her diagnosis, she hadn’t been in hospital for 18 months – an unusually care-free period for Karina. No, it was a virulent, aggressive and still only partially understood virus that was responsible, a virus that is causing thousands of people, despite the unstinting bravery of the medical staff of this country, to say a distanced goodbye to relatives who would still be alive had they not contracted it.

No one could describe Karina as weak: she did not have it coming, she was no more disposable than anyone else. Her death was not inevitable, does not ease our burden, is not a blessing. She was vulnerable, yes. She needed the care of others to live. I will remain for ever grateful to the hundreds of caregivers who have, at one point or another, looked after her with such kindness and dedication, some of whom have maintained a relationship with her long after their retirement. Grateful too to live in a country that makes provisions of care free to all, no matter one’s need, however stretched and fraying their chronic underfunding increasingly makes them.

But this disease is not just killing people who would have died soon anyway. It is making the lives of those most in need of our care and compassion even harder, even more fearful. And if there is anything that I hope might come from Karina’s death, from the tens of thousands of other deaths caused by this disease and its insidious spread, it is that as a country, from government both national and local, we might make our focus the easing of those lives in the future.

Read it all.

Posted in Children, Death / Burial / Funerals, England / UK, Health & Medicine, Marriage & Family

(CTV) ‘I would do anything for a do-over’: Calgary church hopes others learn from their tragic COVID-19 experience

Members of a Calgary church ravaged by COVID-19 in the early days of the pandemic are sharing their stories of grief and healing, after Alberta’s chief medical health officer cited them as a cautionary tale.

“I had the opportunity recently to talk to a faith leader whose faith community gathered together in mid-March before many of our public health measures were in place,” Dr Deena Hinshaw said Thursday. “The congregation had a worship service and then gathered together for a celebratory social event. There were only 41 people present, and they were careful to observe two meter distancing and good hand hygiene. They followed all the rules and did nothing wrong. ”

Despite that, 24 of the 41 people at the party ended up infected. Two of them died.

Rev. Shannon Mang is the minister of Living Spirit United Church.

“One of our most beloved members was having a very important birthday and we wanted to celebrate that,” Mang said of the post-service celebration. “Under the circumstances, we thought we were going to be safe. We were very diligent about physical distancing, very diligent about hand hygiene.”

Read it all.

Posted in Canada, Health & Medicine, Parish Ministry, Religion & Culture

Tim Harford–Why we fail to prepare for disasters

Part of the problem may simply be that we get our cues from others. In a famous experiment conducted in the late 1960s, the psychologists Bibb Latané and John Darley pumped smoke into a room in which their subjects were filling in a questionnaire. When the subject was sitting alone, he or she tended to note the smoke and calmly leave to report it. When subjects were in a group of three, they were much less likely to react: each person remained passive, reassured by the passivity of the others.

As the new coronavirus spread, social cues influenced our behaviour in a similar way. Harrowing reports from China made little impact, even when it became clear that the virus had gone global. We could see the metaphorical smoke pouring out of the ventilation shaft, and yet we could also see our fellow citizens acting as though nothing was wrong: no stockpiling, no self-distancing, no Wuhan-shake greetings. Then, when the social cues finally came, we all changed our behaviour at once. At that moment, not a roll of toilet paper was to be found.

Normalcy bias and the herd instinct are not the only cognitive shortcuts that lead us astray. Another is optimism bias. Psychologists have known for half a century that people tend to be unreasonably optimistic about their chances of being the victim of a crime, a car accident or a disease, but, in 1980, the psychologist Neil Weinstein sharpened the question. Was it a case of optimism in general, a feeling that bad things rarely happened to anyone? Or perhaps it was a more egotistical optimism: a sense that while bad things happen, they don’t happen to me. Weinstein asked more than 250 students to compare themselves to other students. They were asked to ponder pleasant prospects such as a good job or a long life, and vivid risks such as an early heart attack or venereal disease. Overwhelmingly, the students felt that good things were likely to happen to them, while unpleasant fates awaited their peers.

Robert Meyer’s research, set out in The Ostrich Paradox, shows this effect in action as Hurricane Sandy loomed in 2012. He found that coastal residents were well aware of the risks of the storm; they expected even more damage than professional meteorologists did. But they were relaxed, confident that it would be other people who suffered.

Read it all.

Posted in * Culture-Watch, Anthropology, Ethics / Moral Theology, Health & Medicine, History, Natural Disasters: Earthquakes, Tornadoes, Hurricanes, etc., Psychology

(Local Paper) Coronavirus medical trash leaves South Carolina hospitals in a disposal quandary

With limited data and ever-changing guidance about the novel coronavirus and its threats, South Carolina’s health care industry is left to make its own decisions about how to handle waste created by the pandemic.

Some have decided to take extra precautions, while others are sticking to federal standards.

Thirty years ago, Congress allowed a little-known law monitoring the disposal and transportation of medical waste to lapse, instead putting the onus on state regulators to hash out their own management systems….

Read it all.

Posted in * South Carolina, Health & Medicine

(CNBC) ‘Feels like we’re at the bottom’: Some executives see signs of recovery in April

The coronavirus pandemic ground the U.S. economy to a near halt in March and April. But in the last couple of weeks, many company executives and investors across industries say they are seeing small signs business is picking up again. At the very least, there is evidence the sharp downturn has hit bottom.

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said more people have requested rides in recent weeks. Car sales have started to rebound, according to data from J.D. Power. And some retailers, including Costco and CVS Health, said foot traffic is increasing at stores.

But the toll of the pandemic is large, and it will make recovery complex. As the economy reopens in some states, people are slowly returning to stores, restaurants and other businesses — but that comes with risk of another outbreak.

More than 80,000 Americans have died after contracting Covid-19, according to data compiled by NBC News. In some parts of the country, coronavirus cases and hospitalizations are still climbing. With no vaccine or treatment, people may still be reluctant to go to public places.

Read it all.

Posted in * Economics, Politics, Corporations/Corporate Life, Economy, Health & Medicine, Labor/Labor Unions/Labor Market

The Bishop of London’s Statement on the latest Government guidance on the Coronavirus Pandemic

Read it all.

Posted in Church of England (CoE), CoE Bishops, England / UK, Ethics / Moral Theology, Health & Medicine, Politics in General

Christopher Murray on Face the Nation on the Challenges America Faces as the gradual reopening of the economy begins

MARGARET BRENNAN: And you are looking at mobility through tracking cell phone data. Is this mobility because of loosened restrictions or is it just quarantine fatigue and people are going out and about more than they should?

CHRISTOPHER MURRAY, M.D.: You know, I think it is a bit of both. We’re seeing increases in mobility, even in anticipation of the relaxation of social distancing. But there’s definitely a correlation. The places that are taking off the social distancing mandate, the bump in mobility appears to be larger. So somewhere like Georgia, which was one of the first, we’re seeing, is in that category of– of a pretty big increase. So it’s definitely a mixture of both, we believe.

MARGARET BRENNAN: You know, we spoke just before you with one of the White House economic advisers who said one of the reasons they’re waiting on more emergency financial aid is because they want to see what happens in the states as they pull back restrictions and whether that leads to a new outbreak of the disease, as Kevin Hassett put it. Do you have any indication that that is happening?

CHRISTOPHER MURRAY, M.D.: Well, I think that the big challenge here is that when we model the relationship between mobility and transmission, most of the data that’s informing that is coming from when people reduce their mobility and we saw a reduction in transmission, you know, namely social distancing works. Now that we’re coming out, the big question mark is will people’s own behavior, acting responsibly, wearing a mask, avoiding physical– coming into physical close contact, will that be enough to counteract the effects of rising mobility? And so we really are going to have to wait and see. Our suspicion is that there will be about ten days from now in these places that have had these big increases in mobility, we are expecting to see a jump in cases.

MARGARET BRENNAN: And what– what places? What are the potential hotspots in the next ten days?

CHRISTOPHER MURRAY, M.D.: Well, as I mentioned a moment ago, the big increases in mobility, there’s five states at the top. Some of those have had modest epidemic so far. So they may not be huge numbers. But, you know, the top five in terms of increasing mobility are Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota and Georgia. But there’s another ten states or more where there’s been a ten to fifteen percentage point increase of mobility. So pretty– pretty diverse. So we may see quite a lot of states tipping towards increasing cases in the next two weeks.

Read it all.

Posted in * Economics, Politics, America/U.S.A., Economy, Ethics / Moral Theology, Health & Medicine, Politics in General, State Government

(Local paper) Officials announce 113 new coronavirus cases for a South Carolina total of 7,653 cases statewide

South Carolina officials announced 113 new cases of the coronavirus on Sunday, along with one new death.

The state has now confirmed 7,653 cases of the virus, and 331 deaths have been reported.

The most recent death was an elderly person from Marion County.

Read it all.

Posted in * South Carolina, Health & Medicine

(Science Mag) ‘Finally, a virus got me.’ Scientist who fought Ebola and HIV reflects on facing death from COVID-19

I shared a room with a homeless person, a Colombian cleaner, and a man from Bangladesh—all three diabetics, incidentally, which is consistent with the known picture of the disease. The days and nights were lonely because no one had the energy to talk. I could only whisper for weeks; even now, my voice loses power in the evening. But I always had that question going around in my head: How will I be when I get out of this?

After fighting viruses all over the world for more than 40 years, I have become an expert in infections. I’m glad I had corona and not Ebola, although I read a scientific study yesterday that concluded you have a 30% chance of dying if you end up in a British hospital with COVID-19. That’s about the same overall mortality rate as for Ebola in 2014 in West Africa. That makes you lose your scientific level-headedness at times, and you surrender to emotional reflections. They got me, I sometimes thought. I have devoted my life to fighting viruses and finally, they get their revenge. For a week I balanced between heaven and Earth, on the edge of what could have been the end.

I was released from the hospital after a long week. I traveled home by public transport. I wanted to see the city, with its empty streets, its closed pubs, and its surprisingly fresh air. There was nobody on the street—a strange experience. I couldn’t walk properly because my muscles were weakened from lying down and from the lack of movement, which is not a good thing when you’re treating a lung condition. At home, I cried for a long time. I also slept badly for a while. The risk that something could still go seriously wrong keeps going through your head. You’re locked up again, but you’ve got to put things like that into perspective. I now admire Nelson Mandela even more than I used to. He was locked in prison for 27 years but came out as a great reconciler.

I have always had great respect for viruses, and that has not diminished. I have devoted much of my life to the fight against the AIDS virus. It’s such a clever thing; it evades everything we do to block it. Now that I have felt the compelling presence of a virus in my body myself, I look at viruses differently. I realize this one will change my life, despite the confrontational experiences I’ve had with viruses before. I feel more vulnerable.

Read it all.

Posted in Health & Medicine, Science & Technology

(FT) Gillian Tett–Is it safe to go to the shops, see a friend or get on a plane? How to assess risk in the age of coronavirus

…our sense of risk in an epidemic is shaped by the question of who we think has the responsibility for handling it. [Anette] Mikes, for example, identifies four overlapping patterns in how different social groups handle risk. Sometimes it is considered the responsibility of individuals to manage risk (under the principle of caveat emptor). On other occasions there is a more egalitarian approach: everyone in a community voluntarily tries to protect everyone else. A third framework uses hierarchical controls: leaders manage risk by issuing orders.

Then there is a fourth option: fatalism, when nobody tries to manage risks at all.

In peaceful times, we do not often define which of these four approaches we rely on to keep us safe; or not unless we work in jobs explicitly focused on measuring or trading risk, such as finance (where the concept of caveat emptor often collides with hierarchical rules). But Covid-19 crystallises this. Some of us may want to handle the dangers of an epidemic in an individualistic way, like those Lansing protesters. Others, such as the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, who imposed the lockdown, think that hierarchical controls are needed.

Nearly all of us probably have an egalitarian instinct too: we want to avoid infecting ourselves and each other. But few citizens — let alone politicians — want to stipulate explicitly how anyone should prioritise these approaches. Nor do many want to resort to the fourth option: fatalism.

So where does that leave governments and citizens? In a state of confusing flux, it seems, in most countries….

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Posted in * Culture-Watch, * Economics, Politics, Anthropology, Economy, Ethics / Moral Theology, Health & Medicine, Politics in General

(Slate) Small Churches Are in Particularly Big Trouble Right Now

Founded in the mid-19th century, New Hope United Methodist Church had been operating on a razor-thin budget for years. Even after renovating the sanctuary recently, Sunday attendance was low, with $300 in the collection plate on a good week. But the church’s small, bustling food bank served 50 people a week in the low-income Starlight neighborhood of Atlanta. Others came to the church for Bible study and a free meal on Thursday nights, where a volunteer made sure everyone went home with an extra plate.

But the pandemic accelerated New Hope’s struggles. More than half its meager weekly donations came through cash in the Sunday offering basket, and the congregation has not met in person since mid-March. To raise extra money, pastor Abby Norman had recently started renting out the historic church building for documentaries and other film projects, including rap and country music video shoots. (Norman said she mostly stayed out of it but did ask the artists to email her the lyrics first.) The pandemic killed those gigs, too. Last week, Norman told her congregation that the church—and the food bank—would have to close. “We were so close,” Norman said. “It’s not just that we’re losing a church that worships Jesus on Sunday. It’s generations worth of knowledge about how to care for a community.”

Temporary church closings have meant spiritual losses for many Christians. Zoom is no substitute for the fellowship of weekly gatherings and the ritual of communal worship. But for churches as institutions, with buildings to maintain and staff to pay, the pandemic has also prompted a financial crisis. About 40 percent of Protestant pastors say giving has declined since earlier this year, according to an April survey conducted by LifeWay Research, which is affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. Just 9 percent said giving has increased. “This will push some churches over the edge,” said Scott McConnell, LifeWay Research’s executive director. “It’s definitely an existential threat.”

The unexpected dry season is especially acute for smaller churches and those serving low-income communities.

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Posted in Economy, Health & Medicine, Parish Ministry, Stewardship

(Moscow Times) Russia is now the fifth most-affected country in terms of Covid19 infections, surpassing Germany and France on Thursday

  1. Russia confirmed 10,699 new coronavirus infections Friday, bringing the country’s official number of cases to 187,859. Russia is now the fifth most-affected country in terms of infections, surpassing Germany and France on Thursday.
  2. Moscow’s coronavirus lockdown has been extended until May 31, Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said. Starting May 12, Moscow residents will be required to wear face masks and gloves in all public places and transport, Sobyanin said.
  3. Hundreds of thousands of Moscow’s rapid antibody tests labeled as Dutch-made are unreliable at detecting the coronavirus in its early stages, meaning patients who receive false negatives could potentially infect others, a new investigation has said.

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Posted in Health & Medicine, Russia

Anglican Diocese of South Carolina Introduces New Guidelines for Parishes considering the prospect of a gradual reopening for Worship

May 7, 2020
Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

As social distancing restrictions are relaxed here in South Carolina, it’s important to think carefully about how and when we move toward the resumption of public worship as a Diocese.

As the deanery clericus conversations the past few weeks have clearly revealed, this is a complicated challenge.

Therefore, the conditions under which the Bishop will allow public worship to resume are detailed in the attached Guidelines. It is the first step in what we anticipate will be a multi-phased process. These are meant to provide boundaries for each parish to make plans that are fitting for their community. They will be updated periodically as conditions dictate. They go into effect Sunday, May 17, though no church is compelled to begin public worship on that date. Anyone wishing to do so must submit a written plan to the Bishop’s office, following these guidelines, five days in advance.

Also enclosed is an example of how a parish may communicate implementation of these guidelines.

As we seek to understand the restrictions and allowances of the Bishop’s guidelines, it may be helpful to think about three principle issues…

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Posted in * Anglican - Episcopal, * South Carolina, Health & Medicine, Liturgy, Music, Worship, Parish Ministry