The recording is hard to hear, the doctor's voice a bit distant. But he tells Hickson: "The decision is: Do we want to be extremely aggressive with his care or do we feel like this would be futile?"

And then he adds: "As of right now, his quality of life — he doesn't have much of one."

Hickson challenges the doctor. "What do you mean?" she asks. "Because he's paralyzed with a brain injury, he doesn't have quality of life?"

"Correct," the doctor replies.

“The mass mourning I hear my able-bodied counterparts partake in – over their loss of in-person social contact, of concerts and comedy shows and nights at the movie theatre and pub crawls, of hugs and tickles, of a big vacation they had planned – hits a numb wall of protective indifference in my brain. Some of these are things I barely ever got to experience as an adult, and certainly rarely without physical consequences. Others I lost the ability to do more recently and am still grieving for afresh.

And then there’s the at-home activities they are doing and posting on social media. Things I pine for. The jigsaw puzzles that hurt my neck too much. The DIY projects that I lack the dexterity for. The rekindling of a passion for playing a musical instrument, something that I can technically still do but usually only up to five minutes daily. The snuggling with pets that I am now too allergic to own. The cozying up to significant others and children that I lack. The gluten-filled comfort snacks and alcoholic drinks that my body rejects.

Even the housecleaning and organizing projects that I simply lack the strength for. The cooking that I can’t do. The Netflix binges and movie marathons that I cannot do (on a very good day, I can get through a single movie, but usually not uninterrupted). The reading that I cannot do. The video games that I cannot play. It’s not just one thing. It’s all the things.“

Every prison sentence is a life sentence.

Diabetes seems to be a complication of covid infection.

Oertel said people want a place to gather, and he hasn’t seen “any evidence” of the coronavirus and doesn’t think it’s anything more than “a bad flu.”

Oertel said he knows he’s violating health orders, but he rejects them and describes them as “torture.”

Slaoui agreed to sell stock worth $12 million and resign from the board of Moderna, the developer of a leading potential vaccine. But Slaoui insisted on keeping his roughly $10 million stake in his former company, GlaxoSmithKline, another contender in the Operation Warp Speed vaccine race. “I won’t leave those shares because that’s my retirement,” he has said.

There are “more than 3.2 million deserted oil and gas wells in the U.S. and one of an estimated 29 million globally, according to Reuters. There's no regulatory requirement to monitor methane emissions from inactive wells, and until recently, scientists didn't even consider wells in their estimates of greenhouse gas emissions. With the pandemic depressing demand for fossil fuels and renewable energy development booming, why should owners idle or plug their wells when they can simply walk away?“

The total number of postal workers testing positive has more than tripled from about 3,100 cases in June to 9,600 in September, and at least 83 postal workers have died from complications of COVID-19, according to USPS. Moreover, internal USPS data shows that about 52,700 of the agency’s 630,000 employees, or more than 8%, have taken time off at some point during the pandemic because they were sick, or had to quarantine or care for family members.

no need to click: headline says it all.

friendly reminder that research publications are notoriously biased-- who can pay the most to publish?

"Several employees told DPH investigators that they saw Ciezynski not wearing a mask during her double shift on July 24. None of them questioned her about it because she was their boss."

“Like poverty and racism, school shootings and police brutality, mass incarceration and sexual harassment, widespread extinctions and changing climate, COVID-19 might become yet another unacceptable thing that America comes to accept.”