The Cut: Their Patients Have COVID-19 and Still Think It’s a Hoax. “On November 14, a South Dakota nurse named Jodi Doering wrote a viral Twitter thread about her experience treating COVID patients in intensive care units who called the virus a hoax (‘Their last dying words are, “This can’t be happening. It’s not real,”‘ she told CNN.) And while her story was criticized for being extreme (and possibly misrepresentative), she highlighted a real crisis in hospitals around the country, especially in red states where governors have refused mask mandates and the president’s false claims about the virus are taken as gospel. In interviews with the Cut, 12 nurses described dealing with COVID-denying patients, from ones who simply refused treatment to those who spit or coughed on them and recited conspiracy theories about the virus.”
Author: ResearchBuzz
WRAL: Carolina Theatre of Durham temporarily closing
WRAL: Carolina Theatre of Durham temporarily closing. “The Carolina Theatre of Durham announced on Wednesday it will be temporarily closing for six months. The performing arts center will be closed from Jan. 1 through June 30.”
NiemanLab: Who shares the news that people see on Facebook — friends or publishers?
NiemanLab: Who shares the news that people see on Facebook — friends or publishers?. “The majority of people in our survey (54%) saw no news within the first 10 posts in their feeds at all. The most common type of news in the sample was hard news from mainstream publishers. I got a good question from Nieman Lab reader and contributor Dan Kennedy: ‘Were you looking only at stories from news organizations popping up in someone’s news feed? Or were you also counting friends who share news stories?'”
New York Times: Facebook Struggles to Balance Civility and Growth
New York Times: Facebook Struggles to Balance Civility and Growth. “In the past several months, as Facebook has come under more scrutiny for its role in amplifying false and divisive information, its employees have clashed over the company’s future. On one side are idealists, including many rank-and-file workers and some executives, who want to do more to limit misinformation and polarizing content. On the other side are pragmatists who fear those measures could hurt Facebook’s growth, or provoke a political backlash that leads to painful regulation.”
New York Times: Smithsonian Archives of American Art Gathers an Oral History of 2020
New York Times: Smithsonian Archives of American Art Gathers an Oral History of 2020. “As the pandemic set in this spring, the historians and curators at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art began doing what they do best: looking through relics of history. They found little information related to the 1918 flu pandemic in their archives, and decided to make sure that future historians would have a lot more material about this time of the coronavirus. So a team at the Archives of American Art, led by Liza Kirwin, its interim director, set out to create a thorough record for posterity.”
Biden Urges Unity: ‘We’re at War With the Virus, Not With One Another’ (New York Times)
New York Times: Biden Urges Unity: ‘We’re at War With the Virus, Not With One Another’. “President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Wednesday delivered a raw but optimistic address to Americans in his first nonpolitical speech since winning the election, pleading with the nation to ‘hang on’ and have hope even with the number of coronavirus cases spiking across the country and a hard winter on the horizon.”
New York Times: After Admitting Mistake, AstraZeneca Faces Difficult Questions About Its Vaccine
New York Times: After Admitting Mistake, AstraZeneca Faces Difficult Questions About Its Vaccine. “The announcement this week that a cheap, easy-to-make coronavirus vaccine appeared to be up to 90 percent effective was greeted with jubilation. ‘Get yourself a vaccaccino,’ a British tabloid celebrated, noting that the vaccine, developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford, costs less than a cup of coffee. But since unveiling the preliminary results, AstraZeneca has acknowledged a key mistake in the vaccine dosage received by some study participants, adding to questions about whether the vaccine’s apparently spectacular efficacy will hold up under additional testing.”
‘We are capacity now’: Task force says St. Louis hospitals will start sending patients to out-of-area facilities (KSDK)
KSDK: ‘We are capacity now’: Task force says St. Louis hospitals will start sending patients to out-of-area facilities. “St. Louis Metropolitan Task Force head Dr. Alex Garza had a grim message after touring area hospitals on the busiest travel day of 2020 so far: ‘We are at capacity now.’ Garza said that in one hospital, there was one bed for three waiting patients. He expects the Thanksgiving holiday — which traditionally comes with extended-family gatherings, travel, and shopping sprees — will increase local coronavirus cases.”
KSDK: Exclusive: Inside Mercy Hospital’s COVID-19 ICU
KSDK: Exclusive: Inside Mercy Hospital’s COVID-19 ICU. “It’s a once-in-a-century fight to save lives that, until now, most have never seen. For eight months health care workers have waged war against COVID-19 mostly behind closed hospital doors – until now. Monday, Mercy Hospital St. Louis granted 5 On Your Side access to its COVID-19 Intensive Care Unit (ICU) at a time when the region’s pandemic task force reports St. Louis area hospitals are in danger of running out of room for the most critical coronavirus patients.”
Washington Post: Trump, Carson tout covid-19 treatments as lifesavers. But regular people find them harder to get.
Washington Post: Trump, Carson tout covid-19 treatments as lifesavers. But regular people find them harder to get.. “Frustrated doctors say they have had to ration the Regeneron medication given to Trump, and a similar one by Eli Lilly — if they can get them at all — because of extremely short supply. The government has distributed just 205,000 doses of the drugs so far, at a time when around 170,000 people are being infected by the coronavirus every day. Nonetheless, patients are clamoring for the medications, in part because of Trump’s comments, as well as testimonials from Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson and former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who also got the drugs before they were approved.”
New York Times: Evidence Builds That an Early Mutation Made the Pandemic Harder to Stop
New York Times: Evidence Builds That an Early Mutation Made the Pandemic Harder to Stop. “As the coronavirus swept across the world, it picked up random alterations to its genetic sequence. Like meaningless typos in a script, most of those mutations made no difference in how the virus behaved. But one mutation near the beginning of the pandemic did make a difference, multiple new findings suggest, helping the virus spread more easily from person to person and making the pandemic harder to stop.”
ABC7: Nevada seeing COVID-19 cases of one 1 per minute, 1 death per 2 hours
ABC7: Nevada seeing COVID-19 cases of one 1 per minute, 1 death per 2 hours. “The coronavirus is spreading so fast in Nevada that one person is diagnosed with it every minute and someone is dying from it every two hours, state health officials said Wednesday. Nearly half of the state’s 142,239 total cases since the start of the pandemic in March have occurred since September – fully one-fourth of those in the month of November and 10% in just the last seven days, according to the Nevada Department of Health and Human Services.”
Politico: Major shift at Supreme Court on Covid-19 orders
Politico: Major shift at Supreme Court on Covid-19 orders. “The Supreme Court signaled a major shift in its approach to coronavirus-related restrictions late Wednesday, voting 5-4 to bar New York state from reimposing limits on religious gatherings. The emergency rulings, issued just before midnight, were the first significant indication of a rightward shift in the court since President Donald Trump’s newest appointee — Justice Amy Coney Barrett — last month filled the seat occupied by liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died in September.”
CNN: Disney increases number of planned layoffs to 32,000 employees
CNN: Disney increases number of planned layoffs to 32,000 employees. “Walt Disney Co. is planning to shed 32,000 employees by the end of March — 4,000 more than previously announced — as the coronavirus pandemic continues to hammer its parks and resorts business.”
Washington Post: Pay Americans to take a coronavirus vaccine
Washington Post: Pay Americans to take a coronavirus vaccine. “The vaccines are likely to arrive at the same moment Washington is, belatedly, taking up much-needed stimulus legislation. The timing couldn’t be better: Money would go into Americans’ pockets just when the U.S. economy can begin fully reopening with a vaccinated population that can go about their daily lives without fear of catching the disease or infecting others.”