Texas doctor, 28, dies of Covid: ‘She wore the same mask for weeks, if not months’ | US news | The Guardian

The physician tested positive for the virus in early July and died on 19 September after spending over two months in hospital. She had worked in a Houston emergency department, and a family member says she reused personal protective equipment (PPE) day after day due to shortages.

Fagan is one of over 250 medical staff who died in southern and western hotspot states as the virus surged there over the summer, according to reporting by the Guardian and Kaiser Health News as part of Lost on the Frontline, a project to track every US healthcare worker death. In Texas, nine medical deaths in April soared to 33 in July, after Governor Greg Abbott hastily pushed to reopen the state for business and then reversed course.

Source: Texas doctor, 28, dies of Covid: ‘She wore the same mask for weeks, if not months’ | US news | The Guardian

Boris Johnson asks the questions as he runs out of answers | John Crace

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When Starmer has him on the ropes, the only way Boris knows how to respond is to go on the offensive

It wasn’t the most orthodox of openings to prime minister’s questions, with Tory MP Sir David Amess plugging his new book – out next week – and asking whether Boris Johnson agreed with his central proposition that the country had not voted for the Conservatives at the last election because it believed the party would be good at dealing with the coronavirus, but because it wanted “to get Brexit done”. Boris was caught cold and was surprisingly quick to agree. Thereby implicitly admitting that the government’s response to the pandemic had become increasingly clueless.

None of which was lost on Keir Starmer, who challenged Johnson on the out-of-date spreadsheets that led to 16,000 cases being left out of official Covid figures and another 48,000 people not being warned they had been in contact with the virus. Lives had been put at risk, said the Labour leader. It does no harm to sometimes point out the obvious.

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Why herd immunity strategy is regarded as fringe viewpoint | World news | The Guardian

The declaration was drawn up at the American Institute for Economic Research, a right-leaning organisation in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, that promotes individual rights, small government and open markets. It registered a web domain for the document.

The appearance of Mr Matt Hancock, a “public health academic”, and the Rev Booker Clownn at Trump University suggest not all are serious…

“We know that immunity to coronaviruses wanes over time and reinfection is possible, so lasting protection of vulnerable individuals by establishing herd immunity is very unlikely to be achieved in the absence of a vaccine,” said Rupert Beale, a group leader at the Francis Crick Institute in London. He called the declaration “wishful thinking”, not least because it is impossible to fully identify who is vulnerable and it is not possible to fully protect them.

Infection rates in the UK reveal that as new cases rise in one age group, they spill over into older groups, and from there drive up numbers of people in hospital and, ultimately, deaths. “Individual scientists may reasonably disagree about the relative merits of various interventions, but they must be honest about the feasibility of what they propose,” Beale said.

Source: Why herd immunity strategy is regarded as fringe viewpoint | World news | The Guardian