South Carolina’s public health agency plans to test nearly a quarter million people for COVID-19 over the next two months, partnering with healthcare facilities and a private lab as part of a new, coordinated assault on the pandemic.

As part of that new strategy, the state Department of Health and Environmental Control will quickly test all 40,000 residents and employees of South Carolina’s nearly 200 nursing homes, where the respiratory disease can spread quickly and prey on vulnerable residents. At least 84 nursing home residents and employees have died so far from COVID-19.

The agency also is stepping up plans to hire contact tracers. It is identifying a pool of up to 1,000 people who can be hired and trained to track down where the virus has been and where it might spread next, a crucial piece of the state’s outbreak containment strategy.

Read it all.

South Carolina’s public health agency plans to test some 220,000 more people for COVID-19 over the next two months, including all 40,000 residents and employees of the state’s nearly 200 nursing homes.https://t.co/pdqd9rWONC

— The Post and Courier (@postandcourier) May 6, 2020

A few years ago, “zoom-zoom” referred to a Mazda car commercial. Today people are more likely to think of an online screen filled with small squares of virtual people holding a meeting. In the Anglican Church of Canada, this is especially true for all of the bishops and the Primate!

Prior to the imposed isolation, my calendar was filled with travel to different parts of Canada to share in parish and diocesan celebrations, present the Award of Merit to last year’s recipients, and meet with diocesan leaders, clergy and parishioners to talk about their mission and ministry. Suddenly I was confined to home in London, Ont., with my cat, feeling disconnected and unsure what I could and should do now.

Over these past weeks a new rhythm of life and ministry has emerged—and with it, reflections on what the future might hold. First, many activities prior to COVID-19 have been transformed into virtual meeting opportunities. Church House staff meet regularly online to continue the work General Synod is called to fulfill. This even includes a weekly coffee break to stay in touch with one another in our relationships and share coping strategies. It is good to see and hear colleagues, though it can be mentally exhausting to engage online for hours every day. We are learning to pace meetings, provide breaks and even have online breakout groups for discussion. Our technological learning curve is steep, but new skills are being mastered!

Read it all.

We are starting to get new data measuring the possible impact of the coronavirus situation on religious behavior in this country. Gallup’s April 14-28 survey finds 27% of Americans reporting having worshipped virtually within the past seven days. Another 4% claim to have worshipped in person, despite the coronavirus restrictions in place in most states.

The combined total of 31% who have worshipped within the past seven days either virtually or in person is roughly in line with recent, pre-virus trends. This tracks with what I reported in 2001 and 2008 — little lasting change in general worship behavior after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the beginning of the Great Recession. As was the case then, the disruptive virus situation has apparently neither expanded nor diminished Americans’ existing worship propensities.

The unique feature now, of course, is the fact that this pattern of worship behavior has stayed stable even as the way in which worship is carried out has shifted dramatically. While we don’t see a substantial change in the number of Americans who are worshipping, we do find a major shift in how they are going about it.

The 27% of Americans who say they have worshipped virtually is calculated on the base of the entire U.S. adult population. But about 20% of the population has no personal religious identity and would not be highly likely to be worshipping in any situation. Among the population of those with a religious identity, 33% have worshipped virtually.

Read it all.

New data show little evidence of major change in the percentage of Americans worshipping during the virus situation, although most now worship virtually. https://t.co/jbwwFLVEx1

— GallupNews (@GallupNews) May 1, 2020

How shall we understand freedom? Perhaps because I am in a state, South Carolina, where candidates….[not long ago] were running around saying “you are free so vote for me!” this has been much in mind.

There is a lot of sloppy thinking about freedom these days. For too many it only means the ability to choose a candidate or a product. Or it is understood to be the removal of external constraints, as in I need the government out of my—then fill in the blank: my business, my body, and on and on.

Christian thinking about freedom is a totally different animal.

For one thing, in the Scriptures, freedom has an interesting relationship to time. Freedom is something which was present in creation, and which will be fully present again at the end of history when God brings it to its conclusion. But what about the present? The people Jesus spends time with—say, for example, the woman at the well (John 4), or Zaccheus (Luke 19) are not free but constrained, imprisoned, and encased. When Jesus rescues them, freedom begins, but even then it is lived out in the tension between the already of new life in Christ and the not yet of the fullness of the eschaton.

So apart from Christ people who think they are free need to hear the bad news that their perceived freedom is an illusion. One would like to hear more from preachers these days on this score, since they are addressing parishioners who are workaholics or poweraholics or sexaholics and/or addicts to heaven knows what else. Why is it that a group like AA seems to know more about real freedom than so many churches? Because they begin with the premise which says their members are enslaved—that is the first of the twelve steps.

And there is so much more to freedom then even this. In the Bible, real freedom moves in not one or two but three directions.

Freedom from is one piece of the puzzle—freedom from sin, from the demands of the law, from the tyranny of the urgent, from whatever constricts us from being the people God intended us to be.

Equally important, however, is freedom for, freedom for Christ, for service, for God’s justice, for ministry. Paul wonderfully describes himself as a bondservant of Christ Jesus, and the Prayer Book has it right when it says God’s service is “perfect freedom.”

Freedom with should not be missed, however. For Paul in Galatians Christian freedom is not the Christian by herself changed by the gospel. This has too much in common with the individual shopper in Walmart deciding exactly what kind of popcorn or yogurt she wants. No, real freedom is to be liberated to live for Christ with the new pilgrim people of God who reflect back a little of heaven’s light on earth. A real church is one where people enjoy koinonia, fellowship, the richness of God’s life shared into them which they then share out in Christ’s name by the power of the Holy Spirit to the world.

Paul says it wonderfully in Galatians: “For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” Do not settle for anything less than this real freedom, freedom from bondage, freedom with our fellow pilgrims, and freedom for the God who made the heavens and the earth.

–The Rev. Canon Dr. Kendall Harmon is the convenor of this blog

Freedom! 😁😀👍❤️

U:Cheezeburger pic.twitter.com/sq7lYuVYc4

— Carlos Andreas (@candreas2k) May 5, 2020

How should colleges educate students? We have wandered a long way from what Michel de Montaigne thought should be the first principles of education.

For it seems to me that the first lessons in which we should steep his [the student’s] mind must be those that regulate his behavior and his sense, that will teach him to know himself and to die well and live well. Among the liberal arts, let us begin with the art that liberates us.

Montaigne did not mean “liberation” as the devotees of Paolo Freire’s pedagogy understand it. Montaigne wrote, “He who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave. Knowing how to die frees us from all subjection and constraint.” No education matters more.

Modern American colleges dedicate themselves instead to life without limits, and the cant progressive politics of our day. The mission statements sprawl, paragraph piled on paragraph. Bureaucrats and professors unable to edit themselves teach an object lesson in the fruits of indiscipline. “Virtue . . . is a state of character concerned with choice,” said the philosopher; and colleges unable even to choose one guiding institutional virtue educate their students to a similar incapacity to choose, to develop character, to live by virtue.

Of course, students miseducated in such a regime display little virtue in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. They have no knowledge of how to die well, or even that they should.

Read it all.

Today’s college students no longer know what it means to live or die well.https://t.co/xd3HUc2y8D

— First Things (@firstthingsmag) May 5, 2020

Listen to it all.

Lyrics:

Most glorious Lord of life, that on this day
Didst make thy triumph over death and sin,
And having harrow’d hell, didst bring away
Captivity thence captive, us to win.
This joyous day, dear Lord, with joy begin,
And grant that we may for whom thou diddest die,
Being with thy dear blood clean wash’d from sin,
May live for ever in felicity.
And that thy love we weighing worthily,
May likewise love thee for the same again;
And for Thy sake, that all like dear didst buy,
With love may one another entertain.
So let us love, dear love, like as we ought;
Love is the lesson which the Lord us taught.
The day of resurrection! Earth, tell it out abroad;
The Passover of gladness, the Passover of God.
From death to life eternal, from earth unto the sky,
Our Christ hath brought us over, with hymns of victory. Amen.

The Vanderbilt-AstraZeneca team is far from the only group trying to identify or engineer monoclonals against SARS-CoV-2. Unlike the many repurposed drugs now being tested in COVID-19 patients, including the modestly effective remdesivir, the immune proteins specifically target this virus. Whereas some groups hope to sieve a neutralizing antibody (a “neut”) from the blood of a survivor like Dr. X, others are trying to produce a neut in mice by injecting them with the spike protein. Still others aim to re-engineer an existing antibody or even create one directly from DNA sequences.

Many researchers are optimistic that antibodies will, relatively quickly, prove their worth as a preventive or remedy that buys the world time until a vaccine arrives—if it does. “We’ve got at least 50—and probably more we don’t know about—companies and academic labs that are all racing horses,” says immunologist Erica Ollmann Saphire of the La Jolla Institute for Immunology, who leads an effort to coordinate and evaluate these candidates. Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, which developed a cocktail of three monoclonal antibodies that worked against the Ebola virus—a notoriously difficult disease to treat—may be out of the gates first with a candidate monoclonal drug entering clinical trials as soon as next month.

Saphire says many questions remain. “We need a sense of the landscape: What are the most effective antibodies against this virus? If we need a cocktail of two, what is the most effective combination?” she asks. “And you might want a very different kind of antibody to prevent infection versus treating an established one.”

Read it all.

Monoclonal antibodies could potentially be used both for treatment and prevention of #COVID. @WHO happy to work with developers on facilitating trials & mechanisms for affordable access.
The race is on for antibodies that stop the new coronavirus https://t.co/2vNmdFVw3l

— Soumya Swaminathan (@doctorsoumya) May 6, 2020

By Aug. 4, DHEC projects the state could have over 1,100 deaths from the coronavirus, up from about 360. DHEC’s website no longer notes, as it had, that the projections assume social distancing into June.

“I believe we’re moving in the right direction at exactly the right time,” Gov. Henry McMaster said Tuesday. Statistics from businesses as well as health professionals informed his decision to allow businesses around the state to resume some services, he said.

“We probably had fewer restrictions than any state in the country,” McMaster said. “We have information, facts, statistics from businesses to see what’s happening, we’ve had experience to see what’s happened with other states… we certainly know how to contain it.”

Residents in a trio of Richland County ZIP codes where the coronavirus is most prevalent will have access to nasal swab testing next week, in a partnership between local officials and the Medical University of South Carolina.

“I do think we have the tools and resources necessary to defeat this pandemic, but it takes exactly what we’re doing right now,” state Rep. Ivory Thigpen, D-Columbia, said during a Tuesday press conference at the South Carolina Statehouse.

Read it all.

As of Tuesday evening, South Carolina has documented a total of 6,841 positive tests for the virus, and 296 patients who have died.https://t.co/dZPuCucTcS

— The Post and Courier (@postandcourier) May 5, 2020

Almighty God, Who didst bring again from the dead our Lord Jesus, and hast brought life and immortality to light with Him through the Gospel: grant that we, who are raised together with Him and are partakers of the joy and hope of His Resurrection, may daily die unto sin and walk on earth in the power of His endless life in heaven; to Whom with Thee and the Holy Spirit be praise and thanksgiving, dominion and power, both now and for evermore.

–Frederick B. Macnutt, The prayer manual for private devotions or public use on divers occasions: Compiled from all sources ancient, medieval, and modern (A.R. Mowbray, 1951)

Common Carder Bee ‘Bombus pascuorum’ on Green Alkanet. This must be one of the nicest things for me, seeing bumblebees on wildflowers.”Let us linger a while…It is a glory of tender green and shaded amethyst and the grateful hum of bees, the very voice of Spring.”~A Morse Earle pic.twitter.com/8iUSv8oo9Z

— Nature Delights (@byNatDavidson) May 5, 2020

For you yourselves know, brethren, that our visit to you was not in vain; but though we had already suffered and been shamefully treated at Philippi, as you know, we had courage in our God to declare to you the gospel of God in the face of great opposition. For our appeal does not spring from error or uncleanness, nor is it made with guile; but just as we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the gospel, so we speak, not to please men, but to please God who tests our hearts. For we never used either words of flattery, as you know, or a cloak for greed, as God is witness; nor did we seek glory from men, whether from you or from others, though we might have made demands as apostles of Christ. But we were gentle among you, like a nurse taking care of her children. So, being affectionately desirous of you, we were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you had become very dear to us.

For you remember our labor and toil, brethren; we worked night and day, that we might not burden any of you, while we preached to you the gospel of God. You are witnesses, and God also, how holy and righteous and blameless was our behavior to you believers; for you know how, like a father with his children, we exhorted each one of you and encouraged you and charged you to lead a life worthy of God, who calls you into his own kingdom and glory.

–1 Thessalonians 2:1-12