BEAUTY: Photography--Julia Fullerton-Batten

Wonderful, award-winning fine art photographer Julia Fullerton-Batten created a very touching photography series when COVID started. Called Looking Out From Within, it features Fullerton-Batten's neighbors she saw on her evening walk. The series resulted in a book of her beautiful, highly theatrical, and exquisitely lit portraits.

Her website describes her inspiration and execution:

Covid-19 came. Life changed around the world. For ever. Award-winning fine-art photographer Julia Fullerton-Batten felt she couldn’t sit around helpless. During her evening permitted exercise, walking around her local neighbourhood, she noticed people looking out of their windows onto a newly desolate world. This was sufficient for her to formulate how she would visually portray the disturbing effect of the Covid-19 lockdown had on people’s everyday lives, not only of those in her West London neighbourhood but of millions around the world. Little did she know that she would still be shooting her project over a year later.

Her idea was to photograph her neighbours imprisoned in their homes as they gazed forlornly out of their window onto the surreal, silent and stark world outside. She chose to photograph them during twilight to further enhance the poignancy of their situation and isolation. Julia advertised her idea on social media and in a local newspaper. The response was so large that she was reluctantly forced to be selective in her choice of subjects. She contacted them by phone and email to arrange details of setting, clothing, face mask and agree a date and time. Her subjects were invited to dress up and use props to share their narratives. She also asked them to answer a few informal questions about their lockdown experience, in order to add to the poignancy of their situation and provide a heightened emotional content to their stories.

The result is her series titled Looking out from Within. Fullerton-Batten explains that she has found the most important part of these images to be how they provide a magnifying glass to reflect upon what the pandemic and lockdown meant to us all. The loved ones we lost, the extended isolation from our families and the huge sacrifices that many have made. She was sad to lose one of her sitters shortly after she had photographed him.

These images have won global attention and acclaim, winning numerous awards and have been hung in galleries and at photography exhibitions worldwide. She now brings the project together in a beautifully designed limited-edition artist book, which features full-page images and includes the sitters’ personal stories. The volume will provide an insight into the lives of people not only in Julia’s part of London, but also the lives of others throughout the world. It provides a record for posterity, holding onto the memories of what we have all been through. Above all, the book is a beautiful yet tangible object, important not only for its historical importance but also for the mesmerising fine-art photography that it contains.

You can buy signed copies of her book "Looking Out From Within" at her website:

https://juliafullerton-batten.com/books/

Zen and a Post-COVID World

In a conversation on NHK World Japan, internationally renowned garden designer, chief priest of the Sōtō Zen temple Kenkō-ji, professor at Tama Art University, and president of his own design firm Shunmyō Masuno told design strategist Eisuke Tachikawa that Buddhist principles will guide the post-COVID world.

HOW TO SAVE LIVES

Vaccine mandates are controversial. They’re also an effective way to save lives.

By David Leonhardt and Ian Prasad Philbrick | The New York Times
July 23, 2021

How to save lives
Vaccine mandates are controversial. They’re also effective.

• Before Houston Methodist became one of the first hospital systems in the U.S. to mandate Covid-19 vaccines, about 85 percent of its employees were vaccinated. After the mandate, the share rose to about 98 percent, with the remaining 2 percent receiving exemptions for medical or religious reasons, Bloomberg’s Carey Goldberg reported. Only about 0.6 percent of employees quit or were fired.


• Schools — including Indiana University and many private colleges — that require students and workers to get vaccinated have reported extremely high uptake.


• A recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey of Americans who had been opposed to getting vaccinated and later changed their minds found that mandates — or restrictions on the unvaccinated — were one common reason. One 51-year-old man told Kaiser that he began to feel as if he had “limited options without it.”


• The French government will soon require that people show proof of vaccination or a recent negative test to eat at a restaurant, attend a movie or participate in many other activities. After President Emmanuel Macron announced the policy last week, the number of vaccine appointments surged. Italy announced a similar policy yesterday, The Times’s Marc Santora explains.

It’s true that these mandates often generate intense criticism. In France, more than 100,000 people marched to protest Macron’s policy. In the U.S., critics sued, unsuccessfully so far, to stop Indiana University’s mandate. Some Republican politicians have also tried to stop mandates, including Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio.

The mandates are also not 100 percent effective. Some people will receive exemptions, as was the case at Houston Methodist. A small number may forge vaccine records. And some vaccinated people will still contract mild versions of Covid, through so-called breakthrough infections.

But even with the opposition and the exceptions, mandates can play a major role in reducing the spread of Covid and saving lives. That’s especially true now that the Delta variant is fueling a rise in cases. “The takeaway message remains, if you’re vaccinated, you are protected,” Dr. Céline Gounder, an infectious disease specialist, told our colleague Apoorva Mandavilli. “You are not going to end up with severe disease, hospitalization or death.”

A ‘staggering’ success

Covid is a new disease, and the debates over Covid policy can seem new, as well. But they’re often not wholly new. They instead echo longstanding debates. Vaccine mandates fall into this category.

Throughout history, societies have struggled with when and how to require vaccines. Opponents of mandates have argued that individuals should be allowed to make their own health decisions — and bear the consequences: What, they ask, is more personal than deciding whether to inject a medicine into one’s body? Supporters of mandates have replied that society has a duty to protect its citizens, including those who cannot be inoculated (like young children and some immunocompromised people, in the case of Covid) and are therefore put at risk by people who voluntarily refuse vaccines.

For these reasons, vaccine mandates cause intense disputes. But when supporters win the argument, public health has often benefited. Guy Nicolette, an administrator at the University of California, Berkeley, pointed out to The Washington Post that colleges have long required other vaccines, like the one for measles. “It’s staggering how well a mandate works on a college campus,” he said.

Dr. Aaron Carroll, Indiana University’s chief health officer, has noted that the country’s victories over many diseases — including smallpox, polio, mumps, rubella and diphtheria — have depended on vaccine mandates by states or local governments. “That’s how the country achieves real herd immunity,” Carroll wrote in The Times. (In the U.S., a national mandate may be unconstitutional.)

When states and school districts have opted not to require vaccines, a disease can often spread needlessly, Carroll explained. That has been the case with human papillomavirus, a sexually transmitted disease known as HPV that can cause cancer. It’s also been the case with influenza, which kills about 35,000 Americans in a typical flu season.

Covid now seems certain to join influenza and HPV as diseases that American society chooses to accept. But it is a choice. Companies, schools and communities that decide to enact vaccine mandates will almost certainly save American lives by doing so.

Mark Barnes, a former health official in New York City, told Bloomberg that he expected the number of these mandates to grow in coming months. “We’re going to see more vaccine mandates by large organizations of all kinds,” he predicted.

Link to original article:

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/07/23/world/covid-variant-vaccine-updates#vaccine-mandates-are-controversial-theyre-also-effective

BEAUTY: Photography--Fiorella Baldisserri

Italian photographer Fiorella Baldisserri's approach is that of a photojournalist and her series Morris the "Cinemaio" is entirely charming and nostalgic (some of these images take me right back to the dark and hushed excitement of the little, red-velvet-draped movie theatre in the tiny town in upstate New York where I grew up). In this series, she documents the sole owner and operator of a cinema in a small town in the province of Bologna, Italy. Morris Donini is dedicated to the magical world of film but like many people in many different professions, he has struggled during COVID. She writers about her series below:

"Cinema has always been Morris Donini’s dream. Everyone knows and loves him as Morris the 'cinemaio', the artisan of the cinema. In this year of forced closure due to the pandemic, he decides to keep showing movies in an empty theater. In the darkness of his cinema, Morris sits on an armchair or on the floor at the back of the room, as he used to do during normal times, as if he is savoring lights and atmospheres that only images can give. He keeps the doors open to allow the inhabitants of the small town to hear the voices and the music of the stories projected, while flashes of light come out as reflections that send a message: cinema exists, the show goes on. Resilience is also and mostly this: Morris (and sometimes his dog), as a sole spectator in a moment of great difficulty, with closed cinemas but with rents to be paid, with strength and determination, hoping that lights won’t switch off forever. Since his childhood, Morris drew cinemas in school notebooks with his flans for posters and his film reviews. From an early age, dreams are created and they later become ideals to be pursued. By chance he met the owner of a cinema in a small town in the province of Bologna and since then, every day, he asked him to become part of that world as he wanted to experience the atmosphere of the room, with its red velvet fabrics, the armchairs and the magical screen. In return he offered to run small works. Years passed and on the death of the owner he was asked to manage that cinema. Morris was 29 and without a second thought he accepted. Today he directs three provincial cinemas: cinema to give cultural identity even to small towns. Morris pursued an ideal of life that with patience and dedication became a reality. In Italy, cinema business has undergone a drastic reduction of more than 70% in terms of presences and incomes, causing an estimated loss of more than 25 million spectators: a collapse that has never been seen or even hypothesized since the birth of this sector which today is an industry."

https://www.fiorellabaldisserri.com/morris-il-cinemaio/

Why you can't compare Covid-19 vaccines: What a vaccine's "efficacy rate" actually means

Nicely and clearly explained: why all the vaccines will work...if people will just take them!

https://www.vox.com/

President Biden Addresses the Nation on the Anniversary of the COVID-19 Shutdown

As an American who lived through the horror of the last four years of the last administration, I can't even begin to tell you how relieving and wonderful it is to hear our leader--and dare I say it, the leader of the free world, once again--speak in coherent sentences, and speak with intelligence and compassion.

Reasons To Be Optimistic About The Vaccine

We explain why the vaccine news is better than you may think.

by David Leonhardt
January 18, 2021 for New York Times

‘We’re underselling the vaccine’
Early in the pandemic, many health experts — in the U.S. and around the world — decided that the public could not be trusted to hear the truth about masks. Instead, the experts spread a misleading message, discouraging the use of masks.

Their motivation was mostly good. It sprung from a concern that people would rush to buy high-grade medical masks, leaving too few for doctors and nurses. The experts were also unsure how much ordinary masks would help.

But the message was still a mistake.

It confused people. (If masks weren’t effective, why did doctors and nurses need them?) It delayed the widespread use of masks (even though there was good reason to believe they could help). And it damaged the credibility of public health experts.

“When people feel as though they may not be getting the full truth from the authorities, snake-oil sellers and price gougers have an easier time,” the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci wrote early last year.

Now a version of the mask story is repeating itself — this time involving the vaccines. Once again, the experts don’t seem to trust the public to hear the full truth.

This issue is important and complex enough that I’m going to make today’s newsletter a bit longer than usual. If you still have questions, don’t hesitate to email me at themorning@nytimes.com.

‘Ridiculously encouraging’ 

Right now, public discussion of the vaccines is full of warnings about their limitations: They’re not 100 percent effective. Even vaccinated people may be able to spread the virus. And people shouldn’t change their behavior once they get their shots.

These warnings have a basis in truth, just as it’s true that masks are imperfect. But the sum total of the warnings is misleading, as I heard from multiple doctors and epidemiologists last week.

“It’s driving me a little bit crazy,” Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown School of Public Health, told me.

“We’re underselling the vaccine,” Dr. Aaron Richterman, an infectious-disease specialist at the University of Pennsylvania, said.

“It’s going to save your life — that’s where the emphasis has to be right now,” Dr. Peter Hotez of the Baylor College of Medicine said.

The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are “essentially 100 percent effective against serious disease,” Dr. Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said. “It’s ridiculously encouraging.”

The details

Here’s my best attempt at summarizing what we know:

*The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines — the only two approved in the U.S. — are among the best vaccines ever created, with effectiveness rates of about 95 percent after two doses. That’s on par with the vaccines for chickenpox and measles. And a vaccine doesn’t even need to be so effective to reduce cases sharply and crush a pandemic.

*If anything, the 95 percent number understates the effectiveness, because it counts anyone who came down with a mild case of Covid-19 as a failure. But turning Covid into a typical flu — as the vaccines evidently did for most of the remaining 5 percent — is actually a success. Of the 32,000 people who received the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine in a research trial, do you want to guess how many contracted a severe Covid case? One.

*Although no rigorous study has yet analyzed whether vaccinated people can spread the virus, it would be surprising if they did. “If there is an example of a vaccine in widespread clinical use that has this selective effect — prevents disease but not infection — I can’t think of one!” Dr. Paul Sax of Harvard has written in The New England Journal of Medicine. (And, no, exclamation points are not common in medical journals.) On Twitter, Dr. Monica Gandhi of the University of California, San Francisco, argued: “Please be assured that YOU ARE SAFE after vaccine from what matters — disease and spreading.”

*The risks for vaccinated people are still not zero, because almost nothing in the real world is zero risk. A tiny percentage of people may have allergic reactions. And I’ll be eager to see what the studies on post-vaccination spread eventually show. But the evidence so far suggests that the vaccines are akin to a cure.

Offit told me we should be greeting them with the same enthusiasm that greeted the polio vaccine: “It should be this rallying cry.”

The costs of negativity

Why are many experts conveying a more negative message?

Again, their motivations are mostly good. As academic researchers, they are instinctively cautious, prone to emphasizing any uncertainty. Many may also be nervous that vaccinated people will stop wearing masks and social distancing, which in turn could cause unvaccinated people to stop as well. If that happens, deaths would soar even higher.

But the best way to persuade people to behave safely usually involves telling them the truth. “Not being completely open because you want to achieve some sort of behavioral public health goal — people will see through that eventually,” Richterman said. The current approach also feeds anti-vaccine skepticism and conspiracy theories.

After asking Richterman and others what a better public message might sound like, I was left thinking about something like this:

We should immediately be more aggressive about mask-wearing and social distancing because of the new virus variants. We should vaccinate people as rapidly as possible — which will require approving other Covid vaccines when the data justifies it.

People who have received both of their vaccine shots, and have waited until they take effect, will be able to do things that unvaccinated people cannot — like having meals together and hugging their grandchildren. But until the pandemic is defeated, all Americans should wear masks in public, help unvaccinated people stay safe and contribute to a shared national project of saving every possible life.

Link to original article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/18/briefing/donald-trump-pardon-phil-spector-coronavirus-deaths.html

A Series Of Interconnected Disasters

Yes.

Consequences

"Inside & Outwards"

"'Inside & Outwards,' a short film produced by HunterPark that explores mental health through the lens of COVID isolation, celebrating the inner strength that came out when the pandemic kept us indoors. Narrated by Sarah Jessica Parker, directed by Ezra Hurwitz and featuring music by Sufjan Stevens and Lowell Brams, 'Inside & Outwards' aims to inspire each of us to be our own heroes, embrace our internal struggles, and take comfort in our resilience. With recovery still in motion, we’re all in this together but it takes courage to do this alone. 

https://www.naminycmetro.org/insideoutwards/

200,000

As the US surpasses 200,000 Covid-19 deaths, survivors have a message: This is not a hoax

By Theresa Waldrop, CNN

Updated 7:40 PM ET, Tue September 22, 2020

Even as the nation surpasses 200,000 Covid-19 deaths, there are still people who think the coronavirus is a hoax. Survivors of the disease and members of victims' families beg to differ and are sharing their very real experiences with the deadly disease.

Ann and Marvin Robinson, a married couple in Casper, Wyoming, got the virus almost three months ago. Marvin, 73, still has shortness of breath, and both are battling fatigue.

"We have friends who still believe it's a hoax. They think that it's going to go away on Election Day," Ann, 72, told CNN's Brianna Keilar on Tuesday.

"It's trying to convince people that the 200,000 people who have died were important," Ann said of her efforts to assure people of the reality of the virus.

Their friends "kind of discount the fact that older people get it that have underlying conditions, that they were going to die anyway," Ann said. "Well, I'm an older person and I have underlying conditions, and I intend to live for a lot more years."

As of Tuesday afternoon, more than 6.88 million people have contracted the virus nationwide, and at least 200,477 people have died.

Covid-19 is now the second-leading cause of death in the US, just after heart disease, according to the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME).

Heather-Elizabeth Brown, a 35-year-old police chaplain and corporate trainer in the Detroit area, spent about 100 days in the hospital with Covid-19. More than a month of her hospital stay was spent on a ventilator and in a coma in intensive care.

She said she still has trouble breathing and with fatigue.

"Simple things like getting up the stairs or walking to my car or outside to get something winds me, and the fatigue factor is also a really big part of the after effects," Brown said.

"I find that I can't get through a whole day without having to stop and lie down and rest, just because I'm absolutely exhausted from doing everyday simple tasks like, you know, getting a shower or making breakfast."

"I absolutely want people to know that Covid is a real disease," Brown told Keilar. "It's not fake, it's not made up, it's not a conspiracy. It is something that is communicable and it is something that can be very dangerous."

Sondra Wolfe lost her husband to Covid-19. She is frustrated that the pandemic has become a political issue in the United States.

"People see the numbers and so many of them don't care," Wolfe told CNN last week. "I want to put a human face and a family, what a family is going through, the grief that this has caused, and maybe change some minds that this is a real thing."

Diana Berrent was one of the first in her New York community to be diagnosed with the virus on March 18, she said.

She founded a support group for survivors, Survivors Corps, that has more than 90,000 members.

At the end of August, Berrent was "still having terrible GI issues, massive headaches, and what feels like a deep ear infection," she told CNN's Jake Tapper. "But it pales in comparison to what many of our members are experiencing, really dramatic things, neurological issues, tachycardia, things as dramatic as Covid-onset diabetes and Covid-onset lupus."

What she wants people to know, she said, is that "this is not a matter of either getting the flu or dying. There is a very, very large bucket in the middle, which seems to constitute a huge proportion of people who get Covid, who are not recovering. You do not want to end up in that group of people."

When you see people's stories on Survivor's Corps of, for example, a 25-year-old who is writing a living will and "don't think they're going to make it to see their wedding day, you'll have a change of heart," Berrent said.

Maureen Fagan's sister Adeline Fagan, 28-year-old and a second-year OB-GYN resident living in Houston, died Saturday after battling Covid-19 for a few months. Fagan's family has been speaking out since in an effort to save other lives.

"Everyone could be an Adeline and that's the scary part of this," Fagan told CNN's Kate Bolduan, asking people to follow the guidelines to protect other people.

"If you can do something as simple as wearing the mask, social distancing, even just using hand sanitizer, to do your part," she said.

"I think you have a right to do that, just as a human being and trying to be a good person."

Link to original article:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/22/us/covid-19-survivors-say-virus-not-a-hoax/index.html