breakthrough covid breaks into this blog

"Breakthough covid" is typically a mild case that one can get after being fully vaccinated. Masha Gessen wrote about getting such a case for The New Yorker, and others have described it as well. It sounds like vaccination is not at all perfect immunity although it seems to be a reason that cases and deaths have declined in the United States and United Kingdom. In better news, vaccines are also showing an ability to improve the lives of those with "long covid"—enduring symptoms that have been known to stretch the illness out over months.

Unemployment 2020

"Before the pandemic, Detroit restaurant server Deshan Hedrick used to worry about saving for a new home. Now she has a new problem: where to find food to last her through the next few days.

"Hedrick, who lives in a small house with a roommate and had never been laid off in 25 years of waitressing, hasn't received an unemployment payment since she lost her job on March 16. . .

"By one measure, Michigan is a relative success story. As of April 25, the state had enrolled 21.1% of eligible working-age adults into unemployment programs, the third-highest rate in the country and above the national rate of 13.3%, U.S. Labor Department figures show.

"That’s little comfort to Hedrick, 40, who says she wrestled for more than a month with a website for processing claims that repeatedly failed and couldn’t get through by phone. Her claim wasn't accepted until April 18. Under federal guidelines, she should have received funds by early April.

"Hedrick, who has no kids and grew up poor in Detroit, earned about $3,200 a month at Starter’s Bar and Grill. By mid-April, she exhausted her $1,700 in savings. Now she's surviving on noodles and canned soup donated by friends and faces a $4,000 backlog of bills --- from utilities and insurance to her monthly rent of $825.

"Michigan's Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity spokeswoman Erica Quealy acknowledged there have been delays but said that it has extended call center hours due to the surge in demand and delays, and has quadrupled the number of staffers helping customers."

~~ from "'The government is failing us': Laid-off Americans struggle in the 

     coronavirus crisis,"  

     Reuters, May 7, 2020

Hunger 2020

"City Harvest, a nonprofit that distributes food donated by restaurants and other retail outlets to nearly 250 food pantries and soup kitchens citywide, says it delivered 6.6 million pounds of food between March 9 and April 12, or almost 5 million pounds more than the year-earlier period, according to Racine Lee Droz, City Harvest’s director of food sourcing. . .

"Food Bank for New York City — the biggest anti-hunger organization in the city — says the number of users could double or even triple from the pre-coronavirus level of 2.5 million. . .

"As of last week, 791,000 New Yorkers had applied for unemployment benefits, according to the Department of Labor. A New School study found that the state has lost 1.2 million jobs so far, and estimates that one-third of the city could soon be out of work.

"On Wednesday, Mayor de Blasio announced a plan to spend $170 million on food for the hungry. . .

"Now, Rethink Food, a local nonprofit, has launched a pop-up soup kitchen outside the church and is doing 600 to 1,000 meals a day, five days a week. “We could easily do 5,000 meals a day,” Rethink founder Matt Jozwiak said — and lines would be even longer if it weren’t for fear of infection."

~~ from The New York Post, April 19, 2020

Kimarlee Nguyen, R.I.P.

"Ms. Nguyen earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Vassar in 2008 and a master of fine arts degree from Long Island University Brooklyn in 2016. Her writing has appeared in PANK, Hyphen Magazine and The Adroit Journal; she has had numerous fellowships and residencies and was at work on a novel, Lion’s Tooth, about a Cambodian-American family living in Cambridge, Mass."

"Intimacy, Six Feet Apart" by Yoojin Na

Writer and ER doctor Yoojin Na's "Intimacy, Six Feet Apart" describes romance in the age of social distancing.

Adam Zagoria

Sports reporter and college classmate Adam Zagoria survived the novel coronavirus and wrote about its debilitating impact and his "scariest times" while recovering.