Free Republic

ANALYSIS: Students no longer know how to relate to one another face to face College students are isolated. A Harvard study from last year found 61 percent of young adults ages 18 to 25 feel “serious loneliness,” with 43 percent of these respondents reporting increases since the pandemic. The Healthy Minds Study, which surveyed students at 36 schools during fall 2020, also found 66 percent felt isolated from others. Every month or so, I see a new post on my university Reddit board from a student, who has nowhere else to turn, asking how to make friends. The college subreddit...

White House press secretary Jen Psaki suggested that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s isolation during the pandemic could be affecting his decision-making as he pushes on with his deadly invasion of Ukraine.

The newly updated CDC guidelines don't require testing at the end of isolation because PCR tests can stay positive for up to 12 weeks, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told "Good Morning America" Wednesday. "So we would have people in isolation for a very long time if we were relying on PCRs," Walensky said. Walensky also addressed Tuesday's news from the FDA that, according to early data, rapid antigen tests may be less sensitive when it comes to the omicron variant. "We do know that the most sensitive test you can do is a PCR test," Walensky said. "So if...

President Biden's chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci on Monday said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) decision to cut its recommended isolation time for people infected with COVID-19 who are asymptomatic will allow people to get back to work more quickly. The decision comes amid a huge uptick in cases that is only expected to get larger because of the highly contagious omicron variant.

The UK is reducing its COVID-19 isolation period from 10 to seven days starting Wednesday for people who get a negative rapid test two days in a row. The UK Health Security Agency, which is the equivalent of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, made the decision as the Omicron variant spreads rapidly across the country. As cases surge, many industries have been left short-staffed in the past week as workers who test positive have to isolate. “We want to reduce the disruption from COVID-19 to people’s everyday lives,” Health Secretary Sajid Javid said. The British health agency...

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene today released “Unusually Cruel- An Eyewitness Report From Inside The DC Jail,” her report about what she saw when she was finally allowed to meet the January 6 political prisoners. Reps. Greene, Gohmert, Gaetz, and Gosar tried, unsuccessfully, to visit the January 6 political prisoners twice earlier this year. They were turned back for no stated reasons. They sent a congressional letter and forced a confrontation with the D.C. mayor’s office and the Washington D.C. Department of Corrections (DOC) staff just so they could inspect a jail that “they have the right, prerogative, and duty as...

A school nurse spoke out against masking students at a Prior Lake school board meeting and then quit her job. In a video of the school board meeting, shared by Representative Erik Mortenson, the nurse said that what happened over the last year “goes against my beliefs and morals and against my oath as a mother and a nurse.” The Prior Lake school nurse said that when she brought up her concerns during the 2020 school year, she had been told to “censor” her views on masking because of the “opinions” of others. “This offended me,” she shared, saying that...

Lost my Cable and internet for two whole days -due to a regional outage. Finally a technician shows up and fixes everything in 15 minutes. I had no idea how miserable it could be to have no news and weather updates - but worse - I could not log on to FReeRepublic or get emails. Not a crisis, like floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, fires or hurricanes - but it made me realize how fortunate I am to live on this Earth in this country. right now. God Bless sod

If you are someone who has an elderly family member in an assisted care facility, you know how difficult this past year has been when dealing with Covid and being totally isolated from your loved ones. This video hit close to home for me having lost my mother almost 1 year ago not from Covid but I truly believe it was the isolation and being cut off from my Brother and his wife and to a lesser degree myself. The Woman at the center of this video is from Jacksonville, Fl, I have to say she seems to be a...

There are probably multiple reasons why coronavirus cases in the US are down nearly 50% in the US in the last month. Could be seasonal. Could be the vaccine. Could be herd immunity from natural infection. Could be the post-holiday default to endemicity. Could be a change in the cycle threshold of PCR that generates fewer positive cases. Could be data tweaks in light of political changes. Anyone who says he knows for sure which is dominant is pretending to know the unknowable. The New York Times, which obliquely reports the case decline, is still certain that you should still...

Dr. Deborah Birx said she took her Thanksgiving jaunt to Delaware because her parents were so down in the dumps, they “stopped eating and drinking”—a justification ripped by people who said it was her coronavirus restrictions that prevented them from seeing their own dying loved ones. In her interview with Newsy, in which the White House coronavirus task force coordinator revealed she plans to retire over the scandal of breaking her own travel guidance, Birx complained about how her family had been suffering over her own guidelines. “My parents stopped eating and drinking because they were so depressed,”the 64-year-old complained...

Mask scolds have been monomaniacal about this virus as if there is no other way to die. What they don’t seem to understand is that this is no way to live.Those of us who are unsettled by mask mandates often cite the loss of freedoms as the reason behind our concerns, but that doesn’t even begin to tell the whole story. Mask mandates are not just dehumanizing in the context of today’s society, preventing us from reading the faces of others. There is yet another level of dehumanization. Getting “used to” masks suggests something more spiritually sinister: a Borg-like facelessness...

Life is too short to live it in fear of dying.More than eight months after “15 days to flatten the curve,” our so-called medical experts, politicos, and pundits are bidding us to avoid our family at all costs over the holidays, lest we die. This Thanksgiving week, family separation is the name of the game, with governors and local authorities implementing onerous restrictions to discourage people from leaving their homes.“If you are planning to spend Thanksgiving with people outside your household, we urge you to reconsider,” wrote a group of governors in the pages of the Washington Post. These authors...

One of the most important aspects of controlling the spread of COVID-19 is making sure that anyone who has been infected remains quarantined from others until the virus runs its course and is no longer able to pass it to others. Since the start of the pandemic, researchers have been attempting to pinpoint exactly how long individuals remain infectious after their first symptoms appear — to identify when they can safely return to their work, family, and lives without worry of infecting others. Initially, the CDC relied on coronavirus testing to determine whether the virus was still infectious. However, new...

Yes, Joe Biden has been quarantined. Yes, Joe Biden is vulnerable to the CV-19 virus as an frail, elderly man - sickened before by several bouts of cancer before serving as Vice President. Yes, Joe Biden could be threatened by being exposed to the general public - one of whom "might have" the virus. But, you see, Joe Biden faces an even more deadly threat than the remote risk of CV-19: He and his handlers are deathly afraid of the public being exposed to Joe Biden. Since 1 Sept, I count less than 8 "public visits" and "open meetings" (or...

As you send your kids off to college, you might be apprehensive about them getting killed. But if you follow the data instead of the media, you will understand that they are exponentially more likely to die from a car accident or from getting convinced to drink or shoot up drugs than from COVID-19. ... What is shocking and laughable, yet tragic at the same time, is the lack of recognition that not wearing masks (even assuming they work) is the least of the “high-risk” behavior on campuses. ... Drugs, alcohol, and deadly car crashes, unfortunately, are not limited by...

President Donald Trump's campaign called for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden to stop holding campaign events virtually and resume campaigning publicly. After an extended pause on large-scale events such as campaign rallies due to the threat of coronavirus, Trump announced a series of four in-person events on Wednesday, beginning with a stop in Tulsa, Oklahoma this Saturday. Biden has done a majority of his campaigning by holding virtual town halls and fundraisers. In a Tuesday statement, Trump's campaign called Biden's online campaign events an example of Biden's "timidity." "This is obviously a tactic to help [Biden] avoid errors and...

Check out the chain link fence (topped with razor wire) compound near Tacoma, Washington that has been prepared to isolate/quarantine individuals who are deemed unable to quarantine at home. Watch the video at the link.

Blessing In Disguise. It’s Evil Social distancing is not something to celebrate. It is, according to the experts, what we must do right now. But it’s a necessary evil, not a societal good. As the U.S. government’s “30 days to slow the spread” order expires, with no indication that President Trump plans to extend it, it’s time to start asking whether it was worth it. Have the extreme social distancing and economic measures to which we have subjected ourselves accomplished the desired result? Was any of it even necessary to begin with? It’s a question we’ll be debating for years....

OZARK COUNTY, Mo. -- In a Facebook post Thursday, Ozark County Sheriff Darrin Reed asked community members to check on their elderly neighbors and family members from a distance. The Ozark County Sheriff's Office tells KY3 that four elderly residents were found deceased over the past ten days. Ozark County Deputy Cpl. Curtis Dobbs says none of the deaths were suspicious nor related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Deputies say all four residents died from natural causes. It's unclear when the residents died, but Reed says they were deceased for awhile.