President Trump has alleged criminal activity by the Obama administration, while former President Barack Obama said Saturday that some "so-called grownups" are falling down on the job.
Those now in isolation, in mourning, under care or providing care during the COVID-19 pandemic can draw comfort knowing that others in our city once went through similar circumstances.
The actor best known for roles in mockumentaries such as Best in Show and Waiting for Guffman died Friday, according to his daughter. The daytime Emmy winner had a knack for improvisation.
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The British Prime Minister admits there is public frustration with his government's measures to ease the coronavirus lockdown following widespread criticism of the new rules, which have been lashed for being confusing and containing mixed messages.
Fred Willard, the comedic actor whose improv style kept him relevant for more than 50 years in films like This Is Spinal Tap, Best In Show and Anchorman, has died.
Hundreds have rallied in the US state of Georgia to protest the shooting of Ahmaud Arbery, a black man killed during a pursuit by a white man and his son.
Among the reported 311 nursing homes with confirmed cases, 3,011 residents have tested positive and 490 have died. Another 494 residents have recovered, according to the data. At 112 assisted living facilities in Texas with at least one confirmed coronavirus case, 382 residents have tested positive for the virus, and 95 have died.
Statewide, 1,272 people have died, but it was unclear late Friday if all of the long-term care facility patients' deaths were included in that larger figure.
The state had previously released only the number of nursing homes with confirmed cases and fatalities, not the number of people who have tested positive.
The state is still not releasing the names of nursing homes with COVID-19 cases. Many families remain in the dark about whether their loved ones in nursing homes are at risk of exposure.
Throughout Texas and across the nation, long-term care centers continue to arise as coronavirus hot spots.
Reported nursing home outbreaks have emerged in Texas City, Lubbock and San Antonio, among other locations, though the data reveals multiple nursing homes with confirmed cases in each public health region, and each region has at least one assisted living facility with a confirmed case.
As states move on from social distancing, they need plenty of coronavirus testing to prevent future outbreaks. But many communities face testing bottlenecks. Tennessee has a solution.
“Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old EMT, was asleep in her Kentucky home just after midnight on March 13 when police entered with a search warrant for someone else and opened fire, killing her. Now, a lawsuit filed by Taylor’s family accuses the officers of wrongful death, excessive force, and gross negligence.” — CBS News, 5/14/20
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Surgeons are extremely well-educated people.
You only become a surgeon by excelling academically in school, getting a great grade on your MCAT, successfully completing your medical degree, successfully completing your medical residency, successfully completing your specialization in surgery, passing your board exams, and successfully interviewing and beating out several other candidates for an available position.
And even still, despite all this education and training, and in the face of ample evidence of sound judgment and decision-making ability, surgeons STILL use a big black marker to draw a large ‘X’ on someone’s leg so that they don’t accidentally amputate the wrong limb.
JUST IN CASE.
Not because they’re dumb, not because they don’t know which leg is the left leg and which leg is the right leg, not because it’s not readily evident which leg has gangrene and which leg doesn’t.
They draw a large ‘X’… JUST IN CASE.
Just in case they’re wrong.
Because the consequences of making a mistake, although not necessarily life-threatening, are at the very least life-altering, and because surgeons have the common decency to ensure that they’re doing their job correctly before taking an action that has potentially profound consequences for another human being and that human being’s family.
I know this is going to sound crazy, but maybe our police need to adopt that same sort of precautionary attitude and approach before breaking into somebody’s home.
Just by having someone who waits outside of the home with a photograph of the suspect, for example, and who’s responsible for comparing the person in the home to the person in the photo, and who, if the two don’t match with 100% certainty, would be responsible for saying something on the order of, “The person who lives here is 7-feet tall with three arms, but the person in the photo is 2-feet tall with four legs. Weird. It’s almost as if they’re entirely different people. Perhaps we should take a beat to double-check everything before proceeding.”
Or maybe they could have someone responsible for cross-referencing the address of the raid with the address of the suspect? “Is this 123 Drug Dealer Lane, where the suspect lives? It’s not? It’s 456 Paramedic Avenue, where we believe the suspect might be receiving mail? So we’re here for reasons that are… postal? In plain clothes instead of uniforms? At 1 AM? With a no-knock warrant? And, like, a ton of guns? Seems weird, doesn’t it? I mean, at the very least it doesn’t seem not weird. Maybe we should double-check everything before proceeding.”
Or maybe they could have someone that confirms the operation with headquarters before proceeding? “Hey there, we’re going to proceed with apprehending badguy33. Oh, they were already apprehended earlier today? At a completely different address than the one that we’re at now? Weird. Makes you wonder what the hell we’re doing in front of this random person’s home, then. Alright. Reminds me of the time I was looking for my keys when, wouldn’t you know it, they were in my hands the whole time. So silly. Less murderous on that occasion, but silly nonetheless. Alrighty. Thanks for the update. Guess we’ll get a fro-yo instead.”
I don’t know, I’m just spitballing. And maybe this is too complex a solution. Who knows?
But here’s what I definitely know: if a surgeon somehow DOES amputate the wrong leg accidentally, what they definitely DON’T do is double down on their mistake and PRETEND that that leg was SUSPECTED of needing amputation. “I mean, sure, with the benefit of hindsight it appears that I was wrong for amputating the wrong leg, but I wasn’t wrong for SUSPECTING it of needing amputation and DETERMINING if it needed amputation by taking the drastic and irreversible step of PERFORMING its amputation. It was a SUSPECT, after all! And how else to confirm my suspicions if not by methods both extreme and enduring?” That doesn’t happen. Because surgeons aren’t idiots. Be like surgeons. Be not idiots.
BUT!
If you read all this and insist on being not not idiots, then here’s my suggestion: don’t just amputate the wrong legs of black people, and of black people only. That’d be, like, HELLA suspicious. Even if the only wrong legs you want to amputate belong to black people, still, for your own sake, don’t just continue making the same mistake with only black people. You have to sprinkle some white people in just to throw everyone off the scent. So it doesn’t seem like race is playing into your murders mistakes.
And not just regular white people, either. You need to sprinkle in important white people. Rich white people. Relevant white people. People who historically would never expect to walk out — er, roll out — of a hospital with more legs amputated than previously agreed upon.
That’s my suggestion.
Because otherwise you’re just drawing attention to yourselves, and inviting super uncomfortable questions like, “Why do you only mistakenly kill black people in their homes? That seems statistically improbable. Almost as if the way you treat and think about black people is demonstrably different than the way you treat and think about other people. I mean, I’m OK with you being a bad surgeon, but a RACIST bad surgeon? That’s a bridge too far.”
And who wants to deal with that line of inquiry? Ugh. Such a buzzkill.
So, that’s it. That’s my suggestion. Be more precautious, or, should precaution prove too annoying, be less racist, even if not genuinely less racist, as even just superficially less racist would go a long way.
Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams campaigned on fighting voter fraud but says it isn't very common. He's now trying to make "the concept of absentee voting less toxic for Republicans."
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We're looking to tell the story of how school and learning have changed around the country. Parents, if you want to help - have your kids create a postcard, and you can send it to us at NPR.
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NVIDIA is bringing its AI expertise to bear in the fight against COVID-19, the company announced during its GTC 2020 keynote on Thursday. Specifically, the first of NVIDIA’s new line of AI-driven supercomputing systems, the DGX A100, will be sent to Argonne National Lab where it will help government researchers screen potential coronavirus therapeutics far faster than they could do by hand.
The DGX A100 is NVIDIA’s third generation AI supercomputer. It boasts 5 petaflops of computing power delivered by eight of the company’s new Ampere A100 Tensor Core GPUs. A single A100 can consolidate “the power and capabilities of an entire data center into a single flexible platform for the first time,” an NVIDIA press release claimed.
“We’re using America’s most powerful supercomputers in the fight against COVID-19, running AI models and simulations on the latest technology available, like the NVIDIA DGX A100,” Rick Stevens, associate laboratory director for Computing, Environment and Life Sciences at Argonne, said in that statement. “The compute power of the new DGX A100 systems coming to Argonne will help researchers explore treatments and vaccines and study the spread of the virus, enabling scientists to do years’ worth of AI-accelerated work in months or days.”
Once the A100 is installed in Argonne, researchers there will “be able to screen 1 billion drugs in under 24 hours,” Kimberly Powell, Vice President of Healthcare at NVIDIA, told reporters in a briefing. Without the added computing power, researchers would need close to a year to screen the same number of therapeutics.
“This supercomputer is going to combine both accelerated computing and artificial intelligence,” Powell continued. “Critical applications in molecular dynamics simulation, where you can understand how molecules interact with drugs, how to interfere with the virus protein binds to the cell protein and how to block it with a molecule. And then how can we screen as many drugs as possible so we can more quickly get that drug candidate into experimentation and into clinical trials.” Up to 140 A100s can be run in parallel, pooling the combined power of their GPUs into a “DGX SuperPOD” that boasts more than 700 petaflops of processing capability.
NVIDIA also announced a host of other new services it plans to roll out to hospitals across the country. Using its line of Clara Parabrick GPUs, NVIDIA has managed to reduce the time needed to analyze an entire human genome from around 30 hours to less than 20 minutes. The company is also teaming with more than a dozen industry partners and 50 hospitals around the globe to help better protect frontline medical staff through the use of remote monitoring, video conferencing and at-a-distance body temperature monitoring in a program called NVIDIA Clara Guardian.
ObGyn attending physician Bellevue Hospital, New York, NY
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This essay is part of our new series, Flattened By the Curve, which features the voices of doctors, nurses, healthcare workers, and others on the front lines against COVID-19. For information on how to submit, click here.
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Despite what you may think, no one becomes an ObGyn because she loves babies. Babies are cute and all, but we do it because we like taking care of women. ObGyn patients are an unusual patient group in medicine — a relatively healthy population whose main health risk stems from their ability to become pregnant. But despite the relative danger of childbirth, even my high-risk pregnant patients can survive tremendous hits — I’ve seen a woman lose literally all her blood during a massive hemorrhage in childbirth, only to walk out of the hospital three days later. We get to deal with the devil known; the risks are calculable and the solutions are at hand. As a physician, I’ve always liked feeling confident that I can solve my patient’s disasters. I can stop that hemorrhage; I can replace her lost blood; I can save her. Even when my patients are intubated for gynecological surgery, I can confidently hold their hands and reassure them, secure in the knowledge that they’ll be awake in the recovery unit in just a few hours.
But all that is now “pre-COVID” times, as we say. There are no more elective surgeries, and hemorrhage may no longer be the scariest thing that happens to pregnant women at the hospital. And when my department chair told me I’d been “redeployed” to help in our ICU, the idea of managing the rising sea of Covid-19 patients was thoroughly daunting.
I’ve now spent the last four weeks in a crash ICU refresher course, scrambling to remember how to track kidney failure in my patients, how to monitor sedation side effects, how to manage nutrition in a person who can’t eat. I surreptitiously take notes from the brilliant critical care fellows during the day and watch “Vent Settings for the Non-Intensivist” YouTube videos by night. And I’ve watched our ICU struggle to take in a continuous influx of new cases, none of whom we seemed to be able to cure. In a sense, this is everything I’d leaned away from in choosing to become an ObGyn: chronically ill patients, now hit with a devastating threat that we don’t understand and don’t know how to fix. No one on my patient list is going to walk out of the hospital three days later; some unknown number will never walk out at all.
And the inability to be confident, to reassure, may be the hardest of all. Last week, our ICU team evaluated a young man admitted for several days with COVID, previously getting enough support from nasal oxygen but now struggling to breathe despite a high-pressure mask strapped to his face. It wasn’t enough – he was gasping too fast and getting too tired. He needed a ventilator. In the last few minutes, as the anesthesiologists prepared their paralyzing drugs and the tube that would push into his lungs, I helped him dial his wife on WhatsApp. He couldn’t talk — the pressure from the mask was too strong, and the effort too much — but he held his heart and pointed at her, and she simply repeated how much she loved him. Because what can you say to your family in your last few minutes before intubation? Before you fall asleep, and perhaps never wake up?
And I, the doctor, in my mask and gloves and face shield and gown, just held the phone and let them look at each other. Because what can I truthfully say to them both? I don’t know if you’ll ever wake up, either. I don’t know if we can solve this disaster in the timeframe you need. All I can say is that we are here, and we are trying as hard as we can. After years of knowing the solution, and fixing the problem, and saving the life, I can now only say that we will do everything we can.
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Dr. Colleen Denny is the Medical Director of Ambulatory Women’s Health at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, and faculty at the NYU School of Medicine in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology.
IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA, Defendant.
INDICTMENT
The Grand Jury for the District of Columbia charges:
Introduction
1. On or about January 20, 2017, an African-American male in his mid-50s exited a residential and office complex located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C.
2. This African-American male was later identified by multiple witnesses as BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA, an African-American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States.
3. For decades, OBAMA has been a member of the Democrat Party.
4. From in or around the summer of 2016 to November 2016, OBAMA advocated against the election of Donald J. Trump to the presidency.
Other Relevant Individuals
5. PERSON 1 was the vice president of the United States under OBAMA.
6. In or around 2018 through 2019, PERSON 1 was implicated in a criminal conspiracy so sensitive that it could not be investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice, but instead was referred directly to the President of Ukraine for the purposes of announcing an investigation on live television.
Background
7. Due to public health orders issued by various governors in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. economy is currently in crisis.
8. PERSON 1 is the presumptive Democrat Party nominee for the 2020 presidential general election.
COUNT ONE (Obamagate)
9. Paragraphs 1 through 8 of this Indictment are re-alleged and incorporated by reference as if fully set forth herein.
10. From in or around the summer of 2016 through May 2020, within the District of Columbia and elsewhere, the defendant BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA knowingly and willfully Obamagated, in violation of Article XII of the U.S. Constitution.
William P. Barr Attorney General U.S. Department of Justice
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