AFTER THE LOCKDOWNS: ADDICTION, DISEASE, DESPAIR

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Oops. Today the smile slipped
- but doesn't she look nicer without it? 

Mass murderess Ardern down 15 points! 

Despite valiant efforts by her media minions to gloss over it, the 1News Colmar Brunton poll had to admit tonight that MM/PM Ardern has plunged in popularity. Is New Zealand coming to its senses at last?

Maybe Kiwis didn't like her telling us to nark on one another, even on our own families. Maybe Auckland hospo people didn't like being given half an hour to get out enough knives forks and spoons for Level One. And all for a bug with an infection fatality proportion the same as seasonal influenza.

“Everyone is angry," she said. Thank God. At last. About time. 

“It is not appropriate and it is not OK for members of the team of five million to let the rest of us down," she said. 

So let's assume that for all of us who are NOT members of "the team" - which would make it an awful lot less the 5 mill - it is OK, and appropriate.

"I absolutely accept that people want to see repercussions," she said, deftly shifting the blame for all the mayhem and misery her stupid lockdowns have caused onto the criminally put-upon public. And in the same breath, putting across the notion that any putative criminal charges and fines for breaking lockdown laws would not her idea, but ours. Hah.

Ours, meaning her 'team of 5 million'. Aka "the entire nation", as in her statement that breaking the rules was unacceptable and that those who had done so were “facing the full judgement of the entire nation”. 

Count me out. I am not one of her team of 5 million. And neither do I belong to any such nation, and not to any nation of her wicked imagining which would pass any such "full judgement". 

"At the same time," she said, "how do we make sure people tell us the truth?"

That's rich, that is. Anyone know of any way to make sure Ardern is telling us the truth? After her proven lies? Give up?

Ardern&Little Inc, Dealers in Death and Denunciation, won't give up that easily. "Ve haf vays of making you talk."

And what does the 'Opposition' make of all these wonderful opportunities to demolish the Dealers in Death, Derogation and Denunciation? Judith 'Kitty-cat' Collins and her COVID-19 'response person' Chris Bishop (someone shout that man a tie) are chiming in! They're threatening fines and sanctions for those flouting the rules. 

Talk about #MeToo!

 

(L) Charles Perez wears a protective face mask and gloves as he waits on tables at the Morada Bay Beach Cafe in Islamorada, in the Florida Keys on June 1, 2020. (Lynne Sladky/AP). (R) The doors of the Baby Blues BBQ restaurant are seen locked in Los Angeles, Calif., on Jan. 25, 2021. 

Today we learn that in the US in California (a Deadly Dem state), nearly a year after the first state-wide lockdown (for a bug with an infection mortality proportion the same as 'flu), masks remain mandated, indoor dining and other activities are significantly limited and Disneyland remains closed.

But hey, in Florida (Republican) there are no statewide restrictions, municipalities are prohibited from fining people who refuse to wear masks and Disney World has been open since July. And California and Florida have experienced almost identical outcomes in COVID-19 case rates. 

Same with Connecticut (Deadly Dem) which imposed numerous statewide restrictions over the past year and South Dakota (Republican) which issued no mandates.

Daniela Lamas

"We focused on covid. Now our other patients are suffering."

Daniela Lamas is a pulmonary and critical care doctor at Brigham & Women's Hospital, Boston, US. She writes:

"Doctors like me are now treating patients who’ve succumbed to the virus’s many unintended consequences — addiction, untreated disease and despair.

"By the time his landlord found him, the older man must have been on the floor of his apartment for days. He was too delirious to tell us what had happened, but his labs and exam told the story for him.

"He was living alone, dehydrated and malnourished, his muscles wasted, bones protruding. There was no infection to explain his decline. He had not suffered a stroke or a seizure.

"His was a story of isolation, of what can happen to a person who is deprived of human contact. Our patient had successfully avoided the coronavirus, but he was a casualty of the pandemic all the same.

"We have spent the past year reacting to crisis after crisis," ...

 ... hyped up by the merciless msm

... "planning for the next wave and tallying the cost of this virus in body counts." ...

... as you do in body counts for influenza pandemics

..."Here in the hospital, where we meet patients in extremis, it often feels as though the alarms are so loud that it is impossible to hear anything else.

"But now, as the number of new coronavirus cases mercifully falls throughout the country, a quieter suffering demands our attention. Though we have always known that the cost of this pandemic "...

... just like a pandemic of seasonal influenza 

... "would be greater than the number of the dead, we are only beginning to understand its true magnitude. In what might be a final wave of this pandemic, we find ourselves treating patients who have avoided the virus only to succumb to its many unintended consequences — addiction, untreated disease and despair.

 

"The hospital stopped my cancer treatment to make room for pandemic overflow

I recently cared for a young man who had barely left his apartment for months. By the time he made it to the emergency department, his organs were failing as a result of the heavy drinking that he must have turned to in his loneliness.

"When his mother arrived at the bedside, shocked to find her son intubated and on dialysis, she told us how he had struggled, first when his job had gone remote and then when he was let go. She and her son talked on the phone every week, but they had not seen each other for months, a decision they had made out of love to keep each other safe"...

... Now who does that remind you of? 

"She knew that he was having a tough time, but it is so hard to truly appreciate the depth of someone’s suffering over the phone. As we talked, she started to stroke my patient’s arm and then stopped. Had we tested him for the coronavirus?" ...

Poor, poor woman. Scared witless. Soulless. 

"I explained that we had, multiple times, and the tests had all come back negative. He had managed to stay safe from that threat. But he was not okay.

In this, he is not alone. It comes as no surprise that alcohol consumption is far higher among adults this year. Drug overdose deaths are the highest they have been in any year in history."...

Now I wonder what New Zealand's statistics are? Will Jacinda's msm let us know? Or do we have to find out for ourselves?  

"And these are not the only secondary effects of the pandemic. Another recent patient of mine, a woman with multiple complex chronic diseases, was so terrified of catching the virus that she refused to see a doctor, even as she grew sicker at home.

"When she was so short of breath that she had no choice but to come to the hospital, she made sure to dress nicely and carried her good leather purse. She had not gone anywhere in so long that even the emergency department felt like an event. She died a few weeks later, and we packed up those clothes and purse in a plastic bag for patient belongings.

"We do not yet know how delays in routine care and screening will impact mortality on a population level in the months and years to come.

"But a colleague of mine who works as a palliative-care doctor tells me that she has recently been called to the emergency department to see patients with new diagnoses of advanced cancer, who are presenting for the first time with widespread metastases, too late to be helped.

"Some of these patients missed their scheduled cancer screenings, first out of necessity and then out of fear. For others, telemedicine appointments, which by definition do not include a full physical exam, might have failed to pick up subtle signs of worsening disease. These people were scared. They just wanted to avoid getting sick. And yet.

"Fighting cancer during the coronavirus pandemic

The long shadow of this disease is everywhere. I cared for a woman with lymphoma who was sent to the hospital after she started spiking fevers at a rehab facility where she had spent the last three months. Once we treated her sepsis and it became clear how quickly her cancer was progressing, she asked to see her teenage children and husband. The rehab facility had been in complete lockdown, and she had not hugged them since November.

"Though my hospital’s rules still limit patients to only one visitor at a time except for when someone is actively dying — at which point two people are allowed at the bedside — we were able to get an exception. Watching the small family’s tearful reunion from outside the room, I realized that my patient had been separated from the people who loved her for what might have been the last decent months of her life. She, too, had stayed safe. But at what price?

"Our public health system, already stretched to its breaking point, is poorly equipped to deal with the wave of social isolation and mental health issues that are inevitably coming down the pike.

"In my hospital, we started a multidisciplinary clinic where we see people who have survived the coronavirus, screen them for common issues they might face and offer referrals with the goal to help them reenter their lives.

"But there is no such plan for the rest of our patients and their families, who might have stayed safe from the virus but were broken by it anyway. For now, those of us in the hospital do what we can. We intubate those who cannot breathe on their own. We give fluids to deal with dehydration and malnutrition. We call social workers and arrange legal guardianship for the people who have no one. This type of tragedy is not new. But there is more of it now, and as we look ahead toward a more hopeful future, it all feels more poignant.

"As I stood at my delirious older patient’s bedside, he moaned and flailed about, batting his arms and kicking his legs free of the hospital sheets. I tried to make eye contact and to explain that he was in the hospital and that he was safe with people who were trying to make him better, but he pulled away. Maybe with more fluids and time, he would start to wake up.

"But maybe the pandemic had exhausted what little reserve he had. He had been so alone for so long. I took one of his arms and moved it away from his oxygen tubing. Then, thinking about how long it had been since he felt another person’s touch, I paused a moment to hold his hand before letting go."

 

St Damien de Veuster, priest and leper

St Damien of Molokai, pray for all those in danger of death.