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Health
HEALTH COVID-19 UPDATE
Biden Says He’ll Turn to Science, Experts to Defeat COVID-19
Stacy M. Brown WI Senior Writer @StacyBrownMedia
Soon-to-be former President Donald Trump once suggested several cures for the coronavirus. Among the unhinged Republican’s off-beat recommendations: sunlight.
“The whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute, that’s pretty powerful,” a wild-eyed Trump stated during an April 24 news conference.
Another suggestion by Trump which alarmed not just medical experts, but most reasonable thinking Americans: ingesting disinfectant.
“And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute,” Trump bellowed back in April, clearly clueless about how to stop the pandemic. “And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that, so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me.”
The president never developed a plan to combat the virus, which has now infected nearly 10 million Americans and claimed more than 237,000 lives.
With the dawning of winter and the arrival of flu season, the pandemic is worse today than when most U.S. states initially shut down to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
As of press time, the U.S. had recorded five consecutive record-breaking amounts of COVID-19 cases.
President-elect Joe Biden said he has a plan.
He outlined it earlier this year, and, on Monday, Nov. 9, Biden began putting a team in place to battle the pandemic.
“Daily cases are skyrocketing,” Biden said in remarks from Wilmington, Del., just one day before being declared the president-elect. “I want everyone — everyone — to know on Day 1, we’re going to
James Wright WI Staff Writer @JamesDCWrighter
Jacquay Henderson, the president and founder of Square Peg Technologies in Southeast has had to weather the coronavirus like other entrepreneurs in the District. Henderson’s company, which supplies data analytics to the United States intelligence community, had an economic scare earlier this year due to put our plan to control this virus into action.”
Biden’s coronavirus task force will be led by former Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy and Dr. David Kessler, who led the Food and Drug Administration during the 1990s.
Reports indicated that Biden
D.C. Wrestles With COVID-19’s Economic Effect
FUTURE Page 38 the coronavirus pandemic, like many of the District’s housing and commercial sectors. Nevertheless, Henderson, speaking at a Nov. 10 business town hall meeting sponsored by the District’s Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development John Falcicchio, said he will endure the coronavirus’s negative effects on the local economy. “Early on during the pandemic,
COVID-19 Page 21
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5 Jacquay Henderson is president and CEO of Square Peg Technologies located in Southeast D.C. (Courtesy photo)
COVID-19 from Page 20 I was trying to keep my people confident that I could drive the ship,” he said. “I wanted to give my people that sense of comfort.” Henderson seeks to navigate the District’s COVID-tainted climate at a time when 18,173 people have been diagnosed with COVID-19 and 657 people have died between March 24 and Nov. 9. The city faces a downward spiral in employment in the hospitality and tourism industries with tens of thousands having lost jobs and hundreds of business shuttered due to the pandemic, according to the D.C. Office of the Chief Financial Officer. That office released a report on Oct. 29 articulating the city’s new construction and housing woes. The report said the number of multi-family housing permits issued in the 12-month period ending in August dropped 20 percent compared to the same time last year. Permits for housing dropped from 6, 800 permits issued in August 2019 to 5, 600 three months ago. The report also revealed other dour statistics: multifamily unit average rents declined 1.4 percent during the second quarter of 2020; office construction in the District fell 2.4 million square feet in June as opposed to the prior year; August property sales at $12.2 billion, down 23.5 percent from the previous year; and August hotel tax collections, 10 percent of the previous year. The District’s downtown sector has suffered economically since the onset of the pandemic, according to data from the D.C. Downtown Business Improvement District (BID). Its latest quarterly report showed economic activity in the area just 18 percent of what it was in the fall and up slightly from the 12 percent the area posted this summer. Many employees worked from home as a result of the pandemic, the report said, but 10 percent are back working in their downtown offices as opposed to five percent in the summer. The BID report said downtown shops sales in October ranged from 40 percent to 60 percent of 2019 levels and July sales registered 30 percent to 50 percent of 2019 levels. Restaurants in the downtown corridor, the report said for October posted 30-50 percent of 2019 levels and in July registered 20-40 percent levels. The District government faces its own set of problems with a four-year budget deficit at $782 million, according to data from the chief financial officer. In late September, Bowser, after hearing the report of the District’s chief financial officer, said everyone will have to share the pain to balance the budget for the next four years. By law, the District must balance its budget each fiscal year or face the return of a federal managing authority to manage the city without being accountable to leaders or residents. However, former D.C. Councilmember Vincent Orange, who served on the legislative body from 1999-2007 and 2011-2016 and recently led the District of Columbia Chamber of Commerce, said the city government could use grants and tax incentive alleviate some of the pain stinging the housing industry and downtown retail corridor. However, Orange, who chaired the Committee on Business, Consumer and Regulatory Affairs at one time, said a plan is needed.
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“The city leaders don’t have a consensus plan,” he said. “We don’t have any planning taking place. We have a piecemeal approach that will not work. The D.C. government and the business community are not on the same page.”
Orange said Bowser and the D.C. Council to work together to formulate a plan like the one forged in 1999 to bail the city out of financial paralysis and into growth. Henderson said he realizes the District lingers in an economic quandary but remains optimistic the city will rebound from COVID-19. “I tell people not to let a good crisis go to waste,” he said. “The keys to success are perception and direction. If you have to, make a pivot and don’t let opportunities go to waste.” WI
HEALTH
New Study Suggests COVID Patients More Susceptible to Mental Illness
Stacy M. Brown WI Senior Writer @StacyBrownMedia
Again, medical and scientific experts have sounded the alarm, wanting people to understand that COVID is not the flu or a common cold, and recovery may not be permanent.
According to a new study, 20 percent of recovering coronavirus patients develop mental illness within 90 days.
Researchers at Oxford University in Great Britain noted that first-time diagnosis of anxiety, depression, and insomnia increased two-fold in patients after they’ve recovered from COVID.
Further, they discovered that COVID survivors also found significantly higher risks of dementia.
“People have been worried that COVID-19 survivors will be at greater risk of mental health problems, and our findings ... show this to be likely,” Paul Harrison, a professor of psychiatry at Oxford, told Reuters.
“(Health) services need to be ready to provide care, especially since our results are likely to be underestimates (of the number of psychiatric patients),” he added.
The study, published in The Lancet Psychiatry journal, analyzed electronic health records of 69 million people in the U.S., including more than 62,000 cases of COVID-19.
The findings are likely to be the same for those afflicted by COVID-19 worldwide, the Oxford researchers noted, according to Reuters.
In the three months following testing positive for COVID, 1 in 5 survivors were recorded as having a first-time diagnosis of anxiety, depression, or insomnia – about twice as likely as for other groups of patients in the same period, the researchers said.
The study further revealed that people with a pre-existing mental illness were 65 percent more likely to be diagnosed with COVID-19 than those without.
More than 10 million Americans have been diagnosed with the coronavirus, and over 238,000 have died.
African Americans comprise more than 20 percent of the total deaths in the U.S.
Blacks and other communities of color continue to suffer disproportionately from the economic consequences of the coronavirus pandemic, according to the Urban Institute.
Over one-quarter of adults in Black households surveyed between August 19-31 used savings or sold assets to meet economic needs on the previous week.
Twenty-four percent of Black adults lived in households that were behind on rent payments. And approximately one-third of African Americans shared a home
with someone expected to lose employment income this month.
“COVID-19 affects the central nervous system, and so might directly increase subsequent disorders,” Simon Wessely, regius professor at King’s College London, told Reuters.
“But this research confirms that is not the whole story and that this risk is increased by previous ill health.” WI
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