I would blow Dane Cook posted:

ah

well Florida was never a good idea in the first place

quote:

Ending federal benefits was supposed to lower Florida’s unemployment but that didn’t happen, data shows

Governor Ron DeSantis ended Federal pandemic unemployment assistance early in June in order to get Florida back to work. But newly released data from the Department of Economic Opportunity shows unemployment has actually increased since the benefits ended.

Meanwhile, Floridians are still struggling to make ends meet throughout new COVID-19 spikes.

It’s been a rough 18 months for Dustin Adams.

The master electrician had risen to some of the highest levels in his trade. He’s the local president of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, Moving Picture Technicians, Artists and Allied Crafts of the United States, Its Territories and Canada. And for nearly 30 years, he’s been the house electrician at Ruth Eckerd Hall, one of the Tampa Bay region’s premier performing arts venues.

“I have a great skill set,” Adams said. “I can walk into any theater in the world and make stuff work.”

Then COVID hit. And his industry, like much of the world, just kind of shut down.

“It changes when I’m gonna retire,” Adams said. “Because now my retirement is almost completely wiped out. I just turned 50. I had a little sun on the horizon in 15 years. But now that sun on the horizon is gonna be a lot further away.”

At a max of $275-per-week, Florida already had some of the lowest unemployment benefits in the country. Under Donald Trump, Americans temporarily got a $600-a-week federal boost. President Joe Biden reduced that to $300 in his stimulus package. It was supposed to be a lifeline to the millions of Americans whose lives and careers were put on hold.

But as the economy opened back up, many employers, especially in the hospitality industry, said they couldn’t hire anyone because the workforce was stuck at home living off of stimulus checks and beefed-up unemployment.

According to DEO chief economist Adrienne Johnston, the hiring shortage was felt everywhere.

“Every job, category, class, sector is experiencing some level of tension in the labor market,” Johnston said.

I would blow Dane Cook posted:

ah

well Florida was never a good idea in the first place

etalian posted:

https://www.wmnf.org/ending-federal-benefits-lower-floridas-unemployment-but-didnt/

quote:

ECONOMIC THEORY predicts that as unemployment insurance becomes more generous, fewer people will work. Assuming that wages on offer remain constant, as the amount that people can earn without a job grows, the comparative financial gain they reap from working shrinks. Moreover, if insurance is sufficient to cover necessities such as rent or mortgage payments and food, the unemployed can pass over less desirable job offers while they search for one they like.

Measuring the size of the disincentive to work created by unemployment insurance is a well-studied area of economics. Most research has detected at least some effect in the expected direction, though estimates of its magnitude vary.

Among the core provisions of the $1.9-trn Covid-19 Relief Act that America’s Congress passed in March was the renewal of numerous forms of supplemental unemployment insurance, which were first approved a year earlier. Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation (FPUC) increased payments by $300 per week; Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) extended benefits for recipients who had already exhausted them; and Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) provided aid to people who were not eligible for standard unemployment insurance and could not work remotely. The new policy extended federal funding for these schemes until September 6th, but let states choose to opt out. In June and July, 26 states, all but one with Republican governors, ended some or all of these benefits early, ostensibly in the hopes of encouraging the unemployed to return to work.

The contrast between states that cut off this aid and those that retained it makes it possible to estimate the impact of changes in unemployment insurance on the labour market. If ending PUA, PEUC or FPUC caused people to seek or find work, then employment performance in “cut-off” states should have been superior—either in the form of larger job gains or smaller job losses, depending on the national trend—to the results elsewhere. One study, which reviewed banking records from 18,000 low-income workers, found that in states that ended benefits, 26% of the people in the study were employed in August, compared with 22% of people in states that continued the insurance programmes. However, it also showed that the overall economic effect of the cut-offs was still negative, because unemployed people responded to the loss of their benefits by reducing their spending.

On August 20th America’s Bureau of Labour Statistics released state-level employment numbers for July, the first full month of data since most of the cut-off states ended the additional aid. So far, stopping benefits does not appear to have yielded the effect these states’ governors desired. Between June and July, the share of working-age people in the cut-off states who were employed rose from 53.3% to 56.0%, a strong gain of 2.7 percentage points. However, in states that maintained benefits, this share rose by an even greater 3.5 percentage points, from 53.2% to 56.7%.

Large-scale polling data also fail to produce evidence of superior employment performance in cut-off states. In April 2020 America’s Census Bureau launched the Household Pulse Survey (HPS), interviewing tens of thousands of people each week about how the pandemic is affecting them. One of the questions is whether respondents had worked in the past week. Using a statistical technique called “difference in differences”, we first measured how the share of people aged 24-65 in each state who said they were working had changed since January. Next, we aggregated these results into two groups, based on whether states had ended PUA, PEUC or FPUC early. Finally, we compared the two groups’ average changes in reported employment rates. The numbers were virtually indistinguishable: in months when employment rose in cut-off states, it climbed by a similar amount in all other states. The same was true of periods when employment declined.

However, the HPS did reveal an important distinction between the two groups of states for a different question: the share of adults saying it was “somewhat” or “very” difficult to pay for typical household expenses. Between January and May, fluctuations in this proportion were also similar in each group. But starting about one month before FPUC, PUA and PEUC cut-offs began, the share of respondents reporting financial hardship surged in the states that terminated the programmes early, climbing by an average of three percentage points once 50 days had passed since benefits ended. In all other states, the number did not change.

The fact that employment gains in states that cut off aid have been below average so far does not mean that the bulk of economic literature on disincentives is wrong. The effects of the cut-offs could take longer to show up in the data. They could also be inconsistent across states due to variation in which programmes were ended when. There may also be other factors unrelated to FPUC, PUA and PEUC that boosted employment in non-cut-off states in July relative to cut-off ones: given that all but one of the cut-off states have Republican governors and most of the others have Democratic ones, the two groups differ in myriad other ways as well. Nonetheless, other studies have also shown small or entirely undetectable disincentive effects from supplemental unemployment insurance in America during the pandemic. New economic models may be needed to account for the strange times we now live in.

turd in my singlet posted:

anyone got that story about transmission occurring across a hospital hallway bc the doors were open at the same time?

Steve Yun posted:

it was a quarantine hotel

https://i.stuff.co.nz/national/health/coronavirus/300383287/covid19-delta-transmission-at-aucklands-jet-park-miq-hotel-via-opening-of-doors

Nodelphi posted:

Posting through it. Lost sense of smell and tachycardia sucks. Can’t sleep.

So, story time: Had a lady come into the ER with typical covid symptoms last week, very short of breath. Unvaccinated, tried Bipap but it didn’t work at all. Had to intubations her and she was super hard to bag and was cyanotic.

Her lungs looked awful, worse than your typical covid pneumonia, I mean like concrete, only time I see lungs that bad are severe asbestosis, so I asked family some more questions. Turns out they were nebulizing colloidal silver into her for two weeks.

They insisted we continue doing this and of course I refused, saying it was killing her. They did not believe me and reported me to administration. Luckily they had my back but apparently there’s some dude in the community selling “nebulizable” colloidal silver in the community.

quote:

One of the latest supposed silver bullets is inexpensive antiparasitic drug ivermectin. The drug, which was discovered in 1975 and commercialised in the early 1980s, came into the Covid-19 picture after Australian researchers last year reported it could inhibit in vitro coronavirus replication in large doses. Commonly used to treat parasites in animals and head lice in humans, the drug has now been permitted as a treatment for Covid-19 patients in several of the worst-hit countries, including Slovakia, the Czech Republic and swathes of Latin America.
...
The pro-ivermectin campaign has taken a particularly strong hold in South Africa, where coronavirus infection rates are among the worst in the continent and the vaccination programme has yet to cover all of the country’s most vulnerable. Some doctors have been prescribing the worm drug to Covid-19 patients, claiming anecdotally that it alleviates virus symptoms, despite the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority (SAHPRA) warning against its use. Ivermectin is also thriving on the country’s black market, where one tablet can sell for as much as R500 (£25), and sales of veterinary forms of the drug have skyrocketed.
...
Grassroots collectives such as the Ivermectin Interest Group – formed of South African health practitioners, public health experts and medical scientists – have campaigned for approval of the drug, while civil rights group AfriForum earlier this year filed a court case against SAHPRA to have the treatment approved for Covid-19 patients. After initially allowing “controlled compassionate use” of the drug in an attempt to curb illegal sales, the health agency this month received a high court order to permit the off-label prescription of ivermectin by doctors.

The Philippines’ Food and Drug Administration has faced similar pressure, as the country faces surging coronavirus cases and a dwindling supply of vaccines. The agency recently granted permits for two hospitals to use ivermectin on a controlled basis, admitting there had been “pressure” to issue the approvals. The agency did not specify the source of the pressure, but many Filipino doctors and health experts have called for ivermectin to be approved in recent months. In March, one doctor was even found to have sold self-made ivermectin tablets to at least 8,000 patients without a permit.
...
In Latin America, widespread recommendation of the antiparasitic was largely based on findings in a now-retracted preprint by health analytics company Surgisphere, which fell into disrepute after its Covid-19 data was found to be largely unreliable. Though Peru reversed its inclusion of ivermectin in national coronavirus treatment guidelines following the scandal, several other countries in the region continue to recommend it.

Demand for ivermectin as a Covid-19 preventative has surged in nations like Bolivia, where last May healthcare workers distributed 350,000 doses to northern residents. One former Peruvian health minister told Nature that clinical trials investigating ivermectin in the south of the continent last year struggled to recruit participants because much of the population was already using the drug.

strange feelings re Daisy posted:

My boss is an old Chinese man who had a huge crackping today. We had an extended discussion on COVID news and he said "Why the gently caress aren't they doing anything? Are they just going to let everyone die in this insane country?" He then told me he's moving back to China as soon as he can get his affairs in order.

etalian posted:

Also similar to cruise ships it was found the that whole idea of packing potentially infected people into something like a hotel wasn't the best idea in hindsight...

Lugubrious posted:

just lmao forever at people who are still somehow naive enough to think that we will ever do "another" lockdown, or that we even did an actual lockdown at any point in the past

quote:

Millersville is one of 14 state universities in Pennsylvania, which say they do not have the legal authority to mandate the vaccine. Millersville is requiring students to show proof of vaccination or submit a negative COVID-19 test to move into their dorms.

Chamale posted:

It was real fun to call 911 to have an ambulance roll up and ask "He's conscious? You have first aid training?" I said yes and they left.

Steve Yun posted:

it was a quarantine hotel

https://i.stuff.co.nz/national/health/coronavirus/300383287/covid19-delta-transmission-at-aucklands-jet-park-miq-hotel-via-opening-of-doors

fosborb posted:

it's ironic because an imhe prediction is what originally triggered the US "lockdown"

Isentropy posted:

semi related - what do you think got the gravity of the situation across to Americans?

like I'm thinking the NBA stopping did a lot more to get people to realize this wasn't going to be like Ebola or SARS-1

If you had family in China or Italy you knew, but outside of that...

I would blow Dane Cook posted:

Relevant Tangent posted:

I don't get people who are antivaxx under the assumption that the vaccine is designed to do something bad to the people who get it. If you're a shadowy cabal looking to reduce global population aren't the people who just do whatever you tell them to do the people you'd want to survive? Especially when the people who refuse the shot are all clearly strong independent survivors, the exact opposite of who you'd want to live through your global cull.

Relevant Tangent posted:

I don't get people who are antivaxx under the assumption that the vaccine is designed to do something bad to the people who get it. If you're a shadowy cabal looking to reduce global population aren't the people who just do whatever you tell them to do the people you'd want to survive? Especially when the people who refuse the shot are all clearly strong independent survivors, the exact opposite of who you'd want to live through your global cull.

Jon Irenicus posted:

horseshoe theory is real for yoga and crystals

quote:

A Kambo cleansing, also known as a Kambo circle or Kambo ceremony, Kambo, vacina-do-sapo, or sapo (from Portuguese "sapo," lit. meaning "toad"), is a purge using skin secretions of the kambô, a species of frog. The effects on humans usually include nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea; use of kambo has caused several deaths. Kambo, which originated as a folk medicine practice among the Amazon indigenous peoples, is also administered as an alternative medicine treatment in the West, often as a pseudoscientific cleanse or detox. The ceremony involves burning an arm or leg and applying the kambo secretion directly to the burn. Promoters claim that kambo helps with several illnesses or injuries. There is no scientific evidence that it is an effective treatment.

Gio posted:

they dont actually believe any of that op

Steve Yun posted:

I think I measured the dose wrong

fosborb posted:

lol farmers market is 2% masked. no one is freaked out yet

Spoondick posted:

masks are for sheeple

sheep drugs are for people

Throatwarbler posted:

My wife and son are going back to China on the earliest flight that we could book. Even if they get the kid vaccine here out before they leave, I am only going to trust the Chinese vaccine for my son.
...