The Offline Report

These letters to the editor were clipped from the Dec. 4 e-edition of the Los Angeles Times. Web versions can be read at this link . Rebuttals published on Dec. 6 settled the matter. (Web versions not found.) A letter published Dec. 9 showed some could not let it go. This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

Three letters to the editor today respond to a story of a church pastor who defies limited capacity directives meant to slow the pandemic. The article the letters respond to describes what happened: “There’s another virus loose in the world, and it’s the virus of deception,” MacArthur told the congregation in his Aug. 30 sermon. “And the one who’s behind the virus of deception is the arch deceiver Satan himself.” Throughout the summer, MacArthur repeatedly insisted no one from the church had contracted the coronavirus or been hospitalized with COVID-19. Yet congregants have indeed been stricken and hospitalized with COVID-19, according to MacArthur’s own account in a church interview in April. They included a young couple who were hospitalized and a visiting pastor who died of the disease shortly after attending a church conference in March. ---------------------------------- Further Reading: L.A. megachurch pastor mocks pandemic health orders, even as church members fall il...

This is a no-brainer. If the tables are far apart, you don't need a mask because you're outside. The waiter should be wearing a mask. Aerosoles drift down. I was jogging an empty street and a woman shamed my unmasked self from a block away. This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

A bar in San Francisco called "Pittsburgh's Pub" exploited the closed-off streets of quarantine by transforming into an outdoor beer garden. Circle "six feet" stickers rained the sidewalk. The masked bouncer milled the crowd pointing at the ground reminding couples and friend pods to keep to their cliques. Patrons lifted masks to sip pints and, semi-inebriated, conscientiously re-covered their faces. Epidemiologist Larry Brilliant called last Thursday for the federal government to pay all bars and pubs to stay closed. These are super-spreader environments, he contends. Enclosed spaces. And after a pint or two patrons talk louder to each other, spraying droplets into a concentrating air block of viral load. Wired: Maybe we should have done that months ago. Isn’t it too late for that? Larry Brilliant: It's less effective, obviously, when you have 3 million cases and 130,000 deaths in the US than when you had 15. But it’s never too late to stop a virus fr...

Still in use today, a yellow naval flag indicates a ship cleared infection. A ship with infected passengers, waiting out a 40-day quarantine (quarantine derives from Italian word for forty) hoists a checked "yellow jack" flag. (Both solid and checked flags are called "yellow jack".) Its use traces back to at least the bubonic plagues in 1300s and 1600s in Europe, if not earlier. The yellow jack was also hoisted above squares to signal infections were still burning through the premises. The red 'X' of "one foot high" on a home doorfront indicates a "locked house" or infected house in 1665 London. A man smokes tobacco which was believed at the time to drive away plague miasmas. Elders demanded children smoke too. When the inhabitants either died or cleared infection, a white 'X' painted atop the red 'X' served the purpose of immunity passports. (Source: Shiver documentary .) No symbol is known to indicate a lifelo...

Problem: public service announcements are contradicting other public service announcements: ->point-> Public Service Announcement: "answer your phone, and give your home address, email address, and birthdate to the person on the other end. It could be a contact tracer!" Public Service Announcement: "don't give away personal identification information, such as a social security number or birth date, to random callers. It could be coronavirus fraud!" Solution: allow people being traced (the trace-EES) to call back a well-publicized, or state-approved, or both, public health phone number. How it works: Person A gets tested for coronavirus. Test lab routes positive test result to contact tracing worker (the trace-ER.) Trace-ER calls trace-EE and leaves a voicemail notifies trace-EE of test result and requests callback at [state approved number] with routing number sequence. "Please call me back at the tracing hotline, 1-877-xxxx and personal co...

The first treatment of COVID-19 patients was intubating patients so they could rely on a ventilator, news reports show. The first innovation off that mainline treatment, aside from plasma infusions, was experimental delaying of intubation/ventilation. This medical site article urging intubation/ventilation delay consideration was pointed to from a mainstream news outlet, TalkingPointsMemo.com, on April 7th . Reader should note these treatments are available to post-symptomatic people. News reports hint of a smattering of asymptomatic people, including healthy people in their 50's, dying at home and posthumously testing positive for COVID-19. (Test and trace could save these lives.) ---- Timeline of treatment development, most procedural, some pharmaceutical : April 6, 2020: Procedural   - intravenous treatment via "convalescent blood plasma" blood plasma donated from recovered COVID-19 patients who now have antibodies. NBCNews reports people who recovered from COVI...

March 20 2020   Coronavirus Testing Chaos Across America   wsj.com   On Wednesday, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem said its state lab was forced to temporarily stop processing tests because it ran out of the necessary supplies. Ms. Noem said they have been trying for weeks to get more of the chemicals used to process the tests from suppliers and had asked Vice President Mike Pence to help. Shortages:  Federal health officials have said in congressional testimony that they are aware there are possible shortages used in tests. April 15 2020   California’s coronavirus reopening: Gavin Newsom’s six-point plan will alter daily life   sfchronicle.com   Dr. Mark Ghaly, the state health and human services secretary, said the state is working to expand testing so that anyone with symptoms — not just the sickest people already at hospitals — can be tested. Ghaly said he hopes California will test tens of thousands of people each day by the end of April. The...