How has the Coronavirus impacted you directly, to this point?
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Disagreement Over Booster Shots Prompt Senior FDA Directors to Step Down
The duo decided upon their exit after the White House moved to start administering COVID-19 booster shots by the week of September 20, despite not having FDA approval.
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Unvaccinated players for Knicks, Nets and Warriors would have to miss home games under local rules
The NBA said unvaccinated players based in New York City and San Francisco would not be able to enter their home arenas under local rules.
- Unvaccinated NBA players for the New York Knicks, Brooklyn Nets and Golden State Warriors would have to sit out home games this season under local coronavirus rules, according to a league memo sent to teams and obtained by CNBC.
- Both New York City and San Francisco have put in place requirements that people entering a range of indoor venues including arenas and gyms must have received a Covid-19 vaccine.
- The requirements will not apply to visiting players in the two cities.
- The NBA has not mandated vaccines for players, but has done so for referees and team and arena personnel who interact with players.
Ivermectin is not authorized for treatment of COVID-19, according to the FDA
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not approved ivermectin to treat or prevent COVID-19 in humans. Some forms of ivermectin are used in animals to prevent heartworm disease and certain parasites. Using unapproved substances to attempt to treat COVID-19 can cause serious harm, according to the NIH and the FDA.
What you need to know
— Ivermectin is an antiparasitic drug that is used to treat several neglected tropical diseases, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH)
— A study by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found a 24-fold increase in the amount of ivermectin distributed from retail pharmacies as compared to the the pre-pandemic baseline
— The FDA warns that taking medication intended for animals can cause toxic reactions in humans because doses are highly concentrated
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not approved ivermectin to treat or prevent COVID-19 in humans. Some forms of ivermectin are used in animals to prevent heartworm disease and certain parasites. Using unapproved substances to attempt to treat COVID-19 can cause serious harm, according to the NIH and the FDA.
What you need to know
— Ivermectin is an antiparasitic drug that is used to treat several neglected tropical diseases, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH)
— A study by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found a 24-fold increase in the amount of ivermectin distributed from retail pharmacies as compared to the the pre-pandemic baseline
— The FDA warns that taking medication intended for animals can cause toxic reactions in humans because doses are highly concentrated
"Some of the side-effects that may be associated with ivermectin include skin rash, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, stomach pain, facial or limb swelling, neurologic adverse events (dizziness, seizures, confusion), sudden drop in blood pressure, severe skin rash potentially requiring hospitalization and liver injury (hepatitis)." - FDA
There has been an increase in inappropriate prescriptions, toxicity hospitalizations and people contacting poison control regarding ivermectin
"Since early July 2021, outpatient ivermectin dispensing has again begun to rapidly increase, reaching more than 88,000 prescriptions in the week ending August 13, 2021. This represents a 24-fold increase from the pre-pandemic baseline." - CDC
There has been an increase in inappropriate prescriptions, toxicity hospitalizations and people contacting poison control regarding ivermectin
"Since early July 2021, outpatient ivermectin dispensing has again begun to rapidly increase, reaching more than 88,000 prescriptions in the week ending August 13, 2021. This represents a 24-fold increase from the pre-pandemic baseline." - CDC
Tom Frieden is a former director of the CDC.
Joe Rogan, a podcasting giant who has been dismissive of vaccination, has Covid.
Joe Rogan performing in August 2019 at the Ice House Comedy Club in Pasadena, Calif.Credit...Michael S. Schwartz/Getty Images
By Alyssa Lukpat
Joe Rogan, the host of the hugely popular podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience,” said on Wednesday that he had tested positive for the coronavirus after he returned from a series of shows in Florida, where the virus is rampant.
Mr. Rogan, who was rebuked by federal officials last spring for suggesting on the podcast that young healthy people need not get Covid vaccinations, said that he started feeling sick on Saturday night after he returned from performing in Orlando, Tampa and Fort Lauderdale. He did not say whether he had been vaccinated.
“Throughout the night, I got fevers, sweats, and I knew what was going on,” he said in a video on Instagram, adding that he moved to a different part of his house away from his family. (In an episode of his podcast in April, he mentioned that his children had experienced mild Covid-19 symptoms earlier in the pandemic.)
He took a coronavirus test the next morning that came back positive, he said.
In his video on Wednesday, Mr. Rogan said he had been treated with a series of medications. “Sunday sucked,” he said, but by the time he made the video, he said he was feeling “pretty good,” using an expletive.
“A wonderful heartfelt thank you to modern medicine for pulling me out of this so quickly and easily,” he said.
The list of treatments he mentioned included monoclonal antibodies, which have been shown to protect Covid patients at risk of becoming gravely ill; and prednisone, a steroid widely accepted as a Covid treatment. When Donald J. Trump was stricken with Covid during his presidency, he was also treated with monoclonal antibodies.
Mr. Rogan also said he had received a “vitamin drip” as well as ivermectin, a drug primarily used as a veterinary deworming agent. The Food and Drug Administration has warned Covid-19 patients against taking the drug, which has repeatedly been shown as ineffective for them in clinical trials. However, it is a popular subject on Facebook, Reddit and among some conservative talk show hosts, and some toxicologists have warned of a surge of reports of overexposure to the drug by those who obtain it from livestock supply stores.
Mr. Rogan has been traveling nationally with a show called, “Joe Rogan: The Sacred Clown Tour.” He was scheduled to perform a show with the comedian Dave Chappelle in Nashville, Tenn., on Friday, but said in his video on Wednesday that it would be postponed to October.
His podcast is effectively a series of wandering conversations, often over whiskey and weed, on topics including but not limited to comedy, cage-fighting, psychedelics, quantum mechanics and the political excesses of the left. The show was licensed to Spotify last year in an estimated $100 million deal. His comments on the show in the spring undermining the value of vaccinations for young, healthy people drew condemnations from the Biden administration and Prince Harry, another Spotify podcaster.
Mr. Rogan has offered refunds to fans who bought tickets to an upcoming show scheduled for Madison Square Garden after New York City’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, required that attendees at major events show proof of vaccination.
Mr. Rogan said on his podcast last week that 13,000 tickets to the show had already been sold, but that because he opposes vaccine requirements, he would offer refunds.
“If someone has an ideological or physiological reason for not getting vaccinated, I don’t want to force them to get vaccinated to see” the show, he said on the podcast in late August, underscoring his comment with a profanity. “And now they say that everybody has to be vaccinated, and I want everybody to know that you can get your money back.”
Mr. Rogan returned from performing three shows last week in Florida, where the state is reckoning with its highest-ever surge in virus infections, according to a New York Times database. Even as cases continue to rise, with more than 15,600 people hospitalized with the virus across Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has held firm on banning vaccine and mask mandates. Florida’s deaths are considerably higher than those in any other state in the country.
Joe Rogan performing in August 2019 at the Ice House Comedy Club in Pasadena, Calif.Credit...Michael S. Schwartz/Getty Images
By Alyssa Lukpat
Joe Rogan, the host of the hugely popular podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience,” said on Wednesday that he had tested positive for the coronavirus after he returned from a series of shows in Florida, where the virus is rampant.
Mr. Rogan, who was rebuked by federal officials last spring for suggesting on the podcast that young healthy people need not get Covid vaccinations, said that he started feeling sick on Saturday night after he returned from performing in Orlando, Tampa and Fort Lauderdale. He did not say whether he had been vaccinated.
“Throughout the night, I got fevers, sweats, and I knew what was going on,” he said in a video on Instagram, adding that he moved to a different part of his house away from his family. (In an episode of his podcast in April, he mentioned that his children had experienced mild Covid-19 symptoms earlier in the pandemic.)
He took a coronavirus test the next morning that came back positive, he said.
In his video on Wednesday, Mr. Rogan said he had been treated with a series of medications. “Sunday sucked,” he said, but by the time he made the video, he said he was feeling “pretty good,” using an expletive.
“A wonderful heartfelt thank you to modern medicine for pulling me out of this so quickly and easily,” he said.
The list of treatments he mentioned included monoclonal antibodies, which have been shown to protect Covid patients at risk of becoming gravely ill; and prednisone, a steroid widely accepted as a Covid treatment. When Donald J. Trump was stricken with Covid during his presidency, he was also treated with monoclonal antibodies.
Mr. Rogan also said he had received a “vitamin drip” as well as ivermectin, a drug primarily used as a veterinary deworming agent. The Food and Drug Administration has warned Covid-19 patients against taking the drug, which has repeatedly been shown as ineffective for them in clinical trials. However, it is a popular subject on Facebook, Reddit and among some conservative talk show hosts, and some toxicologists have warned of a surge of reports of overexposure to the drug by those who obtain it from livestock supply stores.
Mr. Rogan has been traveling nationally with a show called, “Joe Rogan: The Sacred Clown Tour.” He was scheduled to perform a show with the comedian Dave Chappelle in Nashville, Tenn., on Friday, but said in his video on Wednesday that it would be postponed to October.
His podcast is effectively a series of wandering conversations, often over whiskey and weed, on topics including but not limited to comedy, cage-fighting, psychedelics, quantum mechanics and the political excesses of the left. The show was licensed to Spotify last year in an estimated $100 million deal. His comments on the show in the spring undermining the value of vaccinations for young, healthy people drew condemnations from the Biden administration and Prince Harry, another Spotify podcaster.
Mr. Rogan has offered refunds to fans who bought tickets to an upcoming show scheduled for Madison Square Garden after New York City’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, required that attendees at major events show proof of vaccination.
Mr. Rogan said on his podcast last week that 13,000 tickets to the show had already been sold, but that because he opposes vaccine requirements, he would offer refunds.
“If someone has an ideological or physiological reason for not getting vaccinated, I don’t want to force them to get vaccinated to see” the show, he said on the podcast in late August, underscoring his comment with a profanity. “And now they say that everybody has to be vaccinated, and I want everybody to know that you can get your money back.”
Mr. Rogan returned from performing three shows last week in Florida, where the state is reckoning with its highest-ever surge in virus infections, according to a New York Times database. Even as cases continue to rise, with more than 15,600 people hospitalized with the virus across Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has held firm on banning vaccine and mask mandates. Florida’s deaths are considerably higher than those in any other state in the country.
Source: Nats' Boone resigns over vaccine policy
Bob Boone, a vice president with the Nationals who has been with the team since 2005 and serves as a senior adviser to GM Mike Rizzo, has told the team that he'll resign over its vaccine requirement for non-uniformed employees, a source told ESPN.
Washington Nationals VP Bob Boone resigns over team's COVID-19 vaccine requirement, source says
5:49 PM ET
Boone, 73, has been with the organization since 2005 and serves as a senior adviser to general manager Mike Rizzo. Boone was assistant GM and vice president of player development from 2006 to 2013.
News of Boone's resignation was first reported by The Washington Post.
Aaron Boone announced in March that he was vaccinated against COVID-19.
In addition to the resignation of Boone, two scouts will not be with the Nationals organization next season due to the vaccine policy, according to a report by The Athletic.
The Nationals were one of the first teams in baseball to require vaccines for non-playing, full-time employees, including coaches, executives and staff. The policy went into effect Aug. 12 and employees needed to meet an Aug. 26 deadline to provide proof of first shot or apply for an exemption.
"As a company, we have a responsibility to do everything we can to keep one another safe and felt that mandating vaccines was the absolute right thing to do for our employees and our community," the Nationals said in a statement on Friday.
@easy_b @Quek9 @Camille
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'Is this my life now?': Clemson defensive end Justin Foster's -- and my -- struggle with long-haul COVID
FOR TWO WEEKS last summer, Justin Foster puttered around his Clemson apartment, working out as best he could, waiting for the 14 days of his COVID-19 quarantine to pass. He was one of more than 40 Clemson football players to test positive, and, like most of them, his symptoms were barely noticeable.
The 14 days passed, and he headed back to the field, officially recovered.
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Something wasn't right. From the first workout, he struggled for breath while he ran, and after practices he collapsed in bed. No amount of sleep was enough.
"Even when you feel your best day, you're still so tired," he says. "You can't really keep up. You can't do anything."
As it became harder to function, doubt seeped in. Maybe something was happening to him, or maybe it was something else. Despite a lifetime of evidence to the contrary, "it was almost to the point where I just felt lazy," he says.
What Foster did not know, and would not know for months, was that he was a part of the COVID-19 population that was only beginning to reveal itself. He was a long-hauler, someone whose symptoms persevere for more than four weeks after the initial infection, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
You feel like you're supposed to will your way out of it, show some gumption or get-up-and-go, and your body just ... won't. And like Foster, you start to think you're just lazy, and you worry that people don't believe you. Because often you don't believe yourself.
I didn't. I caught COVID-19 in March 2020, and by June I couldn't understand why I couldn't get myself together. I haven't felt like myself for a single day since.
He's a 22-year-old athlete from North Carolina who had aspirations for the NFL. I'm a 52-year-old journalist who lives in New Jersey and likes to run.
From our first conversation, we connected about what it was like to suddenly no longer be yourself, and the constant self-doubt that came with it. If we can't do the things we used to do, then who are we?
You spend your life running into limits and defining yourself by how you react to them. Then long-haul COVID hits you with limits that you don't know how to deal with, or didn't expect to deal with for years. And no one can tell you whether it will be one more week of this or the rest of your life.
Before the 2020 college football season, Clemson defensive end Justin Foster was a likely fourth- to seventh-round NFL draft pick. Then COVID-19 sidelined him. Jeff Silva/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
JUSTIN FOSTER IS a "yes, ma'am/yes, sir" sort of Southern kid who grew up in Shelby, North Carolina, a town of about 20,000 just west of Charlotte.
He was quiet, he says, like his parents. He's still pretty quiet. He wasn't a natural athlete, and he wasn't one of those kids driven to play sports.
"Most of the time I was forced to play, just because I was larger than everyone else. I was very clumsy, not coordinated at all," he says. "I was pretty good at football, just because they'd just tell me to tackle the person with the ball."
In high school he was a linebacker, gaining national attention as a junior when he had 67 tackles during Crest High School's perfect 2015 season. (He had 10 tackles in the state championship.) One day his coach, Mark Barnes, handed him a phone and said someone wanted to speak to him. It was Dabo Swinney, who offered him a scholarship.
Only one member of Foster's immediate family had gone to college, he says, and it hadn't occurred to him that football could make him the second. He had been thinking about trade school or the military, some arena where he could use his skill to take any machine, figure out what was wrong with it and then put it back together.
"Everyone else looked at me as a ballplayer, but for me personally it really hadn't set in that that was my identity and that's what I really wanted to do," he says.
Clemson moved him to defensive end, and for his first three seasons, Foster was mostly a role player on a stacked team, showing ability as a pass rusher. The possibility of the NFL was becoming real, though. In 2019 he was honorable mention All-ACC and made the All-ACC Academic Team. (In December 2020, he graduated with a degree in construction sciences with a 3.24 GPA.)
His teammates describe the two sides of Foster they've come to know. There's "Mater," named for the rusty tow truck in the animated movie "Cars." "Mater" Foster fixes their vehicles and changes flat tires and is, in their words, an easygoing country boy.
Then there's the Foster who takes his place on the edge of the defensive line.
"He's a straight power rusher," teammate Myles Murphy says. "Loves to go through the tackle, go through people. Very aggressive player. We like that on the edge."
Before the 2020 season, a number of scouting websites said Foster was a credible "Day 3" NFL draft pick, meaning somewhere between the fourth and seventh rounds. A solid season could push him up the list.
On June 25, 2020, Foster was at his home in Clemson when the text came from the team training staff saying he had tested positive for COVID-19. All he felt at the time was a runny nose that he assumed was allergies.
When he returned to practice two weeks later, the struggle began. He'd had asthma his whole life but felt like it was always under control -- he rarely used an inhaler. Now, he was short of breath all day long. And he felt like he had to do something that went against every part of his personality: ask for help.
"There's some guys that maybe have a little something that's wrong with them and they drag it out for a period of time," says Danny Poole, the team's director of sports medicine, and an athletic trainer for 40 years. "With Justin, he's one of those guys that if he comes and tells you there's something going on, you better believe it."
When Justin Foster returned to practice following his positive COVID-19 test, he wondered why he was the only one of his teammates who hadn't fully recuperated from the virus. Phyllis B. Dooney for ESPN
EVERY DISCUSSION OF long-haul COVID has to start with the caveat that no one fully understands it. Almost two years into the pandemic, experts still have multiple theories about what long-haul COVID is and how to define it.
When Foster and I realized more than a year ago we weren't recovering, there was no consensus that there even was such a thing as long-haul COVID. Some doctors thought their patients were still sick with the disease but that the virus was somehow avoiding detection; some doctors thought patients were suffering from PTSD.
Researchers from the University of Washington estimate that roughly 30% of people infected with COVID-19 develop long-haul syndrome. The severity and symptoms range wildly. Some people feel a little off, while others are unable to get out of bed for days at a time.
What experts have come to believe is that for some unknown reason, long-haulers' immune systems act as though they're still under attack from the virus. Physical or emotional stress, even good stress, disturbs the entire system like a hornet's nest. Doctors want their patients moving so they don't become completely sedentary. But if you have the driven personality of, say, a college football player, accustomed to ignoring pain and fatigue, that drive can make the symptoms worse.
How it all happens and how to treat it, however, are still the subject of widespread debate.
"We all would agree that something is wrong with the immune system," says Dr. Daniel Griffin, an infectious disease physician and researcher at Columbia University. "To this day I still don't think we've gotten to why the immune system hasn't reset itself."
When I was infected, I was never hospitalized, never had problems breathing or with my heart. I was sick for three weeks, the worst of it a four-day period when I slept about 18 hours a day. A couple of weeks after I had been sick, I assumed that as soon as I could get my running legs back, I'd feel like myself. On my first run, I felt out of shape, but no more than that. Then, about 36 hours later, my lungs began to ache as though I had been breathing smoke. I was exhausted. I spent the better part of the next couple of days in bed, wondering why I was so tired, wondering if I had grown too comfortable being in bed all day. I began a pattern of recovering, trying to run, then having the same delayed reaction that shut me down all over again. I tried going for walks, but the result was the same.
A friend who survived the virus after 35 days on a ventilator had returned to his pre-COVID strength, but I hadn't. It made no sense. I just need to get back into shape, I repeated. I need to push through it. And that's one of the first things that sets in with long-haul, the question of whether you're imagining everything, or if, mentally, you're too weak to cope.
Throughout doctors' visits, Justin Foster said he had to manage his expectations about whether his health would improve. Phyllis B. Dooney for ESPN
CLEMSON PLAYERS WHO had COVID-19 followed a series of steps before they returned to full workouts. They started with light jogging, then sprinting, then practicing in a green jersey, which signified no contact, always checking in with the trainer at the end of the day.
The main concern, Poole says, was making sure players hadn't contracted myocarditis, a rare but potentially fatal heart inflammation that doctors at the time were concerned was linked to COVID-19. Usually, players were back to full speed a month after being infected. Of the players who were infected, all reported complete recoveries. Except for Foster.
Teammates noticed that Foster was raising his hand during drills, asking coaches to rotate him out so he could catch his breath. They hadn't seen that before.
"If he takes the time to step out, that means something serious," teammate K.J. Henry says. "He has a great grasp on the difference between pain and injury."
Foster says the harder he drove himself, the worse it got.
"I didn't want to be the one that wasn't working out or the one that's always having a problem and having to go to the training room and deal with it," he says. "It was just a lot mentally, pretty much just being down all the time. And I didn't know what was going to happen."
Foster and Swinney shared a shorthand to monitor how he felt. Swinney would wave his thumb in three positions -- up, sideways, down -- and Foster would respond with his own thumb to reflect where he was. Too often it was sideways or down.
After a couple of weeks, he wasn't able to practice at all. Day after day, when his teammates came into the training room to get taped up or treated, they saw Foster sitting in the corner with a nebulizer strapped to his face.
"I just remember him coming to me and he just was kind of was broken down. He said, 'Coach, I can't do it,'" Swinney says. "As an athlete and especially as a football player, we're kind of all wired to go and [be] like, 'Hey, snap out of it.' But this was something you couldn't see. It's not like you got a torn ACL, or you got a broken bone or something like that."
Foster says he worried his teammates thought he was lazy. No, they say. Quite the opposite. The fact that it was Foster who was struggling unnerved them. "No one thought he was lazy at all. We knew that he does what he needs to do every day to prepare," Murphy says.
"The entire team had no idea what was happening: 'Am I going to be next? Why did he react like that to COVID? And if I get COVID, am I going to react the same way?'"
Foster got to the point at which walking up the stairs in the football facility was too much. "It was just a very dark place for a long time," Foster says.
One night during the summer of 2020, Foster went to lie down a little after 11 p.m., when he felt an asthma attack coming on. He did what he usually does during an episode and took a puff from his inhaler. It didn't work.
He didn't want to call 911 and go to an emergency room in the middle of a pandemic, so he called Poole, the trainer.
Poole says he was struck by the fear in Foster's voice and told him to get to the team facility. Poole and the team physician put Foster on a nebulizer and talked him through breathing drills until, finally, a few hours later, the attack subsided.
In the weeks that followed, the training staff took Foster to several local doctors, each of whom came to the same conclusion, that there was no medical problem they could identify.
"It's like, am I crazy?" Foster says. "Is something going on with me mentally that I just can't push through this?"
Clemson teammates and trainers say Justin Foster is not one to exaggerate injuries. Phyllis B. Dooney for ESPN
IT WASN'T JUST his body. Foster took summer classes, and when he sat at a computer or tried to read a book, his mind couldn't grasp what was in front of him. This from someone who was an All-ACC Academic Team selection.
"There was a time where I was probably three weeks behind in class. I'm never a person not to do my work," he says.
The mental fog can be more destabilizing for some people than the physical symptoms. You don't recognize yourself, but you look normal to everyone else. I had plenty of evenings with friends or family when I could rally for a few hours, but I knew I'd be wiped out for the next two days. In my lower moments, it became too difficult to read because simple words didn't make sense. When I wrote, I might forget what I was writing in the middle of a sentence.
Over and over, I went through the process of researching something for an article, writing that portion, polishing it and then discovering that I had already done all that hours earlier. I had no memory of writing the same material. I learned to use outlines and checklists to do what I'd relied on my mind to do for 30 years. I had to lean heavily on colleagues to make sure that my work was clean.
In conversation, I frequently lost thoughts in mid-sentence, and then worried people thought I was being melodramatic. There were times watching TV when my mind couldn't keep up with the dialogue and I had to hit pause. Twice I got lost driving near my home and had to use Waze to get back.
And many nights I hit that wall and had to leave the dinner table as my family watched knowingly, not saying anything because they knew I didn't want the attention. I'd be in bed the rest of the night.
Most of the time I felt like I was possessed by someone dumber and more irritable. The cuts to my sense of self were relentless, with the wild, vivid dreams I had every morning, my inability to smell or taste, the strange things I found myself saying, the words I couldn't come up with, the loss of desire for longtime passions, the difficulty of small talk. Experiencing the minutiae of the day and thinking, "This just isn't me," over and over for months.
When I shared that with Foster he nodded and said, "Exactly."
My low point might have come after a weekend in November visiting my daughter in Washington, D.C., the most active two days I'd had in months. When I got home that Monday night, I saw a story from my colleague Jeff Passan about Tony La Russa's DUI. Something was vaguely familiar about it, and it hit me that Jeff and I had spoken three days earlier. I called him and was blunt. "I need to know, did I f--- something up? Was there something you asked me to do?"
"Actually," he said, "there was."
It turned out to be inconsequential, and Jeff couldn't have been better about it, but I had no memory of the conversation. It was like being told about a drunken blackout. And then the thought hit me that I had no way of knowing how many times this had happened over the previous eight months.
I felt like a writer who couldn't write, a reader who couldn't read, a runner who couldn't go for a walk, a father and husband who disappeared into his own head every night. Lesser in every way I could measure. I kept repeating to myself, "Useless."
Justin Foster's search for answers ultimately led him to Duke University's post-COVID-19 clinic, one of several that had cropped up during the pandemic to study long-haulers. Phyllis B. Dooney for ESPN
THE FIRST TIME Foster heard the term "long haul" was in August 2020, from head trainer Poole. Foster then went to the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, where, finally, a doctor said his issues were indeed probably related to his COVID-19 infection, and they were real. No one could explain why his asthma attacks had become so intense, and no one could say when or if he would get better. But just hearing about "long haul" was a massive relief.
"Someone telling me that I'm not crazy and that there's actually something going on, that was the first time that I realized that I could relax," he says. "I knew that there was actually something going on that was causing me to be like this."
For the first two months after I'd been sick, convinced I had fallen into some rut of laziness that I couldn't break out of, I wondered if I'd even had COVID at all. In those early pandemic days in North Jersey, you couldn't get a test unless you needed to be hospitalized. I might be imagining this whole thing, I thought.
Ultimately, I took my sons with me to get antibody tests, and even as the nurse drew blood from my arm, I felt like I was on a path to being exposed as a fraud. A few days later the call came and someone read me results. Michael Quinn ... negative. Liam Quinn ... negative. Thomas Quinn ...
As I waited to hear my result my heart was pounding so violently my shirt was moving. "Positive," she said.
The wave of relief that went through me felt like anesthesia. I teared up. I wasn't crazy. I had no idea what would happen, but for the moment it was enough to know it was all real. She sent me a copy of the test result, and I pinned it to the wall next to my desk.
AS THE 2020 football season began, knowing he was fighting an illness and not his own mind, Foster still had hopes of rallying. But week by week, nothing changed, and his nights became lessons in terror.
"There were multiple nights where I would lay down and I would be choking in my sleep. And I would wake up in the middle of the night and I could barely breathe," he says. "That's when I was at my lowest point because I just didn't know what was going to happen. ... If I was going to go to sleep one day and not wake up."
Midway through the season, Foster and Swinney agreed that he needed to focus on his health. There was always next year. Foster went to practices and home games but didn't dress, speaking up when the defensive line gathered, maybe sharing a certain move that would work against an offensive tackle.
"At practice, even in games, he'd be right there, pretty much just coaching us up," Murphy says.
And when the defense was on the field, Foster found a spot on the sideline where he was unlikely to encounter players tumbling out of bounds. "I knew if something did happen I couldn't run fast enough to get out of the way, and I didn't want to cause a scene," he says.
But he says it was killing him not to participate or know whether he might play again. The idea began to sink in that he had to walk away from football altogether, just to be able to move on mentally and emotionally to the next part of his life. To become whatever he was going to be after football. There was always going to be an end to his career; maybe this was it.
He says he made the decision in December but didn't make it official for two months. "I couldn't really bring myself to do it, just because of all the work I'd put in," he says.
On Feb. 24 this year, Foster went to the Clemson football facility and sat outside Swinney's office for 90 minutes until the coach was free. Foster told him he needed to step away from football. Swinney said he understood and told Foster he would have a place on the team if he wanted to come back.
Foster told the rest of the world that day on social media.
"Today is a difficult day for me, but it is also a day of reflection and gratitude," he wrote. "With sadness but no regret, I have decided it is in my best interest to call it a career and hang up football."
A week later, Foster told me about the frustration he felt.
"The question I would ask when I went to the doctor is, 'You guys say you don't see anything; you guys say that things are getting better. I don't feel better. So is this a new life for me? Is this my life now?' And if it is, just tell me that. And I will be fine what that, and I'll just have to deal with it.
"I don't want to get my hopes up and keep hoping and hoping and hoping that I'm going to be back to normal."
We were experiencing something akin to sudden aging, leaping past what we saw as the coming vital years. You had to fight the urge to dwell on what had been lost or whether you could ever get it back. You had to learn that patience and acceptance weren't weaknesses, they were the only strengths you had left at times. This is what I can do today. Let's see what happens tomorrow.
Long-haul COVID-19 ended up jeopardizing Justin Foster's entire football career. Phyllis B. Dooney for ESPN
THE SAME DAY Foster announced his retirement, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, announced a new federal initiative to study long-haul COVID, and dubbed the syndrome with an official name: Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2.
By that point, several prominent hospitals had established post-COVID clinics to both treat patients and gather data. Foster attended one at Duke, and I went to the one at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Manhattan -- an appointment I had to make five months in advance.
I met with a "functional medicine" doctor, who said the goal was to get my body's inflammation down so my autonomic nervous system would switch back to its normal state. I later learned not all experts believe the nervous system is even involved, but I was advised to adopt an anti-inflammatory diet, take a number of supplements to boost the immune system and decrease inflammation, wear compression clothing to help circulation, get a lot of rest when I needed it. I couldn't tell you if any of it has helped, but I do it.
Before COVID, I was in obnoxiously good health. But like many long-haulers, my blood pressure and cholesterol hit inexplicably high levels after I got sick.
Part of the Mt. Sinai program is visiting with a cardiologist, and the day I saw her in March my blood pressure was 155/110, a fairly alarming number. I hadn't had any cardiac symptoms, but as she listened to my chest she said, "I think I hear a murmur."
An echocardiogram showed that she was right. The aortic valve in my heart was slightly dilated, allowing some blood flow back into the chamber. The good news was the condition is mild and completely manageable. It's possible it had been there for years but eluded detection. But it's possible, she said, that the elevated blood pressure I'd had for a year at that point caused it to dilate. However it got that way, I needed to get my blood pressure under control and will have to control it for the rest of my life to prevent more serious problems.
When Foster went to Duke's clinic for the first time, most of the focus was on his lungs. His pulmonologist there, Dr. Loretta Que, said during one test he was using only 49% of his lung capacity. She and the team there put him on a regimen of new medications.
"Prior to COVID, he hardly ever had to use an inhaler, and now he's on a chronic medication," she says. "I can't predict whether or not he's going to be able to come off of those in the future, but that's something that we're going to need to evaluate for."
THERE WAS A ray of hope out there for both of us in early 2021. At first the results were anecdotal, but long-haulers around the country were reporting dramatic recoveries after getting vaccinated. As data began to roll in, Columbia's Griffin estimated that 40% of long-haulers were seeing improvement.
I got my first shot in March and didn't notice any difference. A couple of weeks later, Foster got his. When I was headed to get my second injection, I texted him to see how he was doing. He wrote back, "1.5 mile jog this morning."
I woke up the day after my second shot feeling the sickest I'd ever felt in my life. The worst of it passed after two days, and over the course of the next two weeks I realized I might be feeling worse overall than I had before the shot.
But something had changed for Foster. Maybe it was the vaccine and maybe it was the progress he had felt since changing medications. Maybe it was just the passage of time. But suddenly a comeback seemed possible.
He began to push himself. His runs got a little longer, and he started to lift weights again. In April, he went back to Duke and got more good news. That 49% lung output was now 102%. Dr. Que put him on a new inhaler and said he was ready to attempt a comeback.
"She was telling me, what do I have to lose? She's like, 'You go back, you try to play again, and if you can't play, you just can't play.' And I was like, 'It's not a bad option,'" he says.
As Foster walked out of the appointment, his phone rang. It was Swinney, just checking on him. That was the moment, Foster says, when he decided he was ready to try, although he didn't share that on the phone call. He wanted to take some time to be sure.
A few days later, he called Swinney. He was ready, he said. Swinney beamed and told Foster he could go at his own pace, and if he's able to play only 10 snaps a game, so be it. Foster had a place on the team.
He started out doing drills at half speed, then continued to build until he was able to complete full workouts. Sometimes he has to take long naps when he finishes, but he's able to do the work. Occasionally during a sprint, he says, his throat will start to close up, but he keeps his inhaler handy and knows to drop out if he needs to.
"You break it down to almost every hour of the day: This is what I do now, this is what I do in an hour. It takes a lot of the mental stress out of it," he says. "When you look at goals that are maybe a year down the line, and you look at your situation, it puts a lot of mental stress on you."
He says he's ready to play, and his coach agrees, without hesitation. "He's back," Swinney says.
But Foster is still a long-hauler, still missing a sense of smell, still struck by occasional shortness of breath or pains in his chest, still prone to brain fog when he's tired. Since COVID-19, he has intense reactions to any bug bites. Last week during practice, he started to feel lightheaded and his throat started to close. He used an EpiPen -- one he's carried since a pre-COVID allergy to bees -- to make it stop. He and the medical staff couldn't figure out if it was related to food or a bug bite, but Foster chalks it up to "the new normal."
"When I get setbacks I stay positive about them," he says. "It could be worse: I could not be playing. I could be struggling a lot worse than I am, but I keep getting better."
And he still has a full season ahead of him, with another chance at the NFL.
"It's almost like it's not real," he says. "I mean, most of the time you get one shot, one chance, and once it's done, it's done."
Yet on Saturday night, 436 days after he was diagnosed with COVID-19, Foster will take the field with his teammates to play the University of Georgia.
Justin Foster will return to the field for the 2021 college football season, and he still has his sights set on the NFL. AP Photo/David J. Phillip
IN MID-JULY, I was feeling out of options. The vaccine hadn't done the trick, and I didn't know what else to try. I remembered I had a methylprednisolone prescription that a doctor had written for me nine months earlier, but for whatever reason I hadn't taken it. I decided to give it a try, a medical Hail Mary, thinking another assault on my body's inflammation couldn't hurt.
I discussed it briefly with my cardiologist, and she agreed it was worth trying. I began the six-day steroid pack, and for the next six days I had a migraine every day. When it was over, something had changed.
I drove to North Carolina to meet with Foster in person for the first time. The trip from New Jersey should've laid me out for days. It didn't. I still hit the wall in the evenings, but later and not as badly. Maybe it was the methylprednisolone, maybe it was the supplements, maybe it was the meditation or the acupuncture, maybe it was time. On the Saturday after I met Foster in person, I went for a run.
On July 19, I texted him and said I had completed my fifth run in eight days. They were slow and short and ugly and I was fatigued and sore at night, but I was doing it. He wrote back, "That's what's up."
I took a chapter from the same book he did: Let go of expectations. Do what you can right now. Don't get ahead of yourself. Walk a quarter mile, run a quarter mile, repeat until you can do more. Keep going.
When I went back to my cardiologist with the news, she beamed. "I think I'm more excited than you are," she said. I told her I was just trying to keep an even keel after 16 months of hope and setbacks.
"You're going to get there," she said. "It might take you another year, but you're going to get there."
A year and a half after the long haul began, after wondering if this is what the rest of my life will be, "one more year" sounds like early parole. There are no promises. I still have days when I feel like hell, and I don't know what to make of them. But I get up each day and check my blood pressure, I take my supplements, I eat my heart-healthy diet, I exercise when I can and I'm starting another course of steroids.
Today, I finished this story. Tomorrow, I'll do something else. On Saturday, I'll watch Justin. And then we'll both see what's next.
ESPN feature producer Damien Esparza and researcher John Mastroberardino contributed to this report.
'Is this my life now?': Clemson defensive end Justin Foster's -- and my -- struggle with long-haul COVID
When Clemson defensive end Justin Foster returned to the field following a COVID-19 diagnosis last year, he wasn't himself. He'd become a COVID long-hauler, and the symptoms would test his physical and mental limits. It's a struggle I can relate with.
'Is this my life now?': Clemson defensive end Justin Foster's -- and my -- struggle with long-haul COVID
FOR TWO WEEKS last summer, Justin Foster puttered around his Clemson apartment, working out as best he could, waiting for the 14 days of his COVID-19 quarantine to pass. He was one of more than 40 Clemson football players to test positive, and, like most of them, his symptoms were barely noticeable.
The 14 days passed, and he headed back to the field, officially recovered.
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Something wasn't right. From the first workout, he struggled for breath while he ran, and after practices he collapsed in bed. No amount of sleep was enough.
"Even when you feel your best day, you're still so tired," he says. "You can't really keep up. You can't do anything."
As it became harder to function, doubt seeped in. Maybe something was happening to him, or maybe it was something else. Despite a lifetime of evidence to the contrary, "it was almost to the point where I just felt lazy," he says.
What Foster did not know, and would not know for months, was that he was a part of the COVID-19 population that was only beginning to reveal itself. He was a long-hauler, someone whose symptoms persevere for more than four weeks after the initial infection, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
You feel like you're supposed to will your way out of it, show some gumption or get-up-and-go, and your body just ... won't. And like Foster, you start to think you're just lazy, and you worry that people don't believe you. Because often you don't believe yourself.
I didn't. I caught COVID-19 in March 2020, and by June I couldn't understand why I couldn't get myself together. I haven't felt like myself for a single day since.
He's a 22-year-old athlete from North Carolina who had aspirations for the NFL. I'm a 52-year-old journalist who lives in New Jersey and likes to run.
From our first conversation, we connected about what it was like to suddenly no longer be yourself, and the constant self-doubt that came with it. If we can't do the things we used to do, then who are we?
You spend your life running into limits and defining yourself by how you react to them. Then long-haul COVID hits you with limits that you don't know how to deal with, or didn't expect to deal with for years. And no one can tell you whether it will be one more week of this or the rest of your life.
Before the 2020 college football season, Clemson defensive end Justin Foster was a likely fourth- to seventh-round NFL draft pick. Then COVID-19 sidelined him. Jeff Silva/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
JUSTIN FOSTER IS a "yes, ma'am/yes, sir" sort of Southern kid who grew up in Shelby, North Carolina, a town of about 20,000 just west of Charlotte.
He was quiet, he says, like his parents. He's still pretty quiet. He wasn't a natural athlete, and he wasn't one of those kids driven to play sports.
"Most of the time I was forced to play, just because I was larger than everyone else. I was very clumsy, not coordinated at all," he says. "I was pretty good at football, just because they'd just tell me to tackle the person with the ball."
In high school he was a linebacker, gaining national attention as a junior when he had 67 tackles during Crest High School's perfect 2015 season. (He had 10 tackles in the state championship.) One day his coach, Mark Barnes, handed him a phone and said someone wanted to speak to him. It was Dabo Swinney, who offered him a scholarship.
Only one member of Foster's immediate family had gone to college, he says, and it hadn't occurred to him that football could make him the second. He had been thinking about trade school or the military, some arena where he could use his skill to take any machine, figure out what was wrong with it and then put it back together.
"Everyone else looked at me as a ballplayer, but for me personally it really hadn't set in that that was my identity and that's what I really wanted to do," he says.
Clemson moved him to defensive end, and for his first three seasons, Foster was mostly a role player on a stacked team, showing ability as a pass rusher. The possibility of the NFL was becoming real, though. In 2019 he was honorable mention All-ACC and made the All-ACC Academic Team. (In December 2020, he graduated with a degree in construction sciences with a 3.24 GPA.)
His teammates describe the two sides of Foster they've come to know. There's "Mater," named for the rusty tow truck in the animated movie "Cars." "Mater" Foster fixes their vehicles and changes flat tires and is, in their words, an easygoing country boy.
Then there's the Foster who takes his place on the edge of the defensive line.
"He's a straight power rusher," teammate Myles Murphy says. "Loves to go through the tackle, go through people. Very aggressive player. We like that on the edge."
Before the 2020 season, a number of scouting websites said Foster was a credible "Day 3" NFL draft pick, meaning somewhere between the fourth and seventh rounds. A solid season could push him up the list.
On June 25, 2020, Foster was at his home in Clemson when the text came from the team training staff saying he had tested positive for COVID-19. All he felt at the time was a runny nose that he assumed was allergies.
When he returned to practice two weeks later, the struggle began. He'd had asthma his whole life but felt like it was always under control -- he rarely used an inhaler. Now, he was short of breath all day long. And he felt like he had to do something that went against every part of his personality: ask for help.
"There's some guys that maybe have a little something that's wrong with them and they drag it out for a period of time," says Danny Poole, the team's director of sports medicine, and an athletic trainer for 40 years. "With Justin, he's one of those guys that if he comes and tells you there's something going on, you better believe it."
When Justin Foster returned to practice following his positive COVID-19 test, he wondered why he was the only one of his teammates who hadn't fully recuperated from the virus. Phyllis B. Dooney for ESPN
EVERY DISCUSSION OF long-haul COVID has to start with the caveat that no one fully understands it. Almost two years into the pandemic, experts still have multiple theories about what long-haul COVID is and how to define it.
When Foster and I realized more than a year ago we weren't recovering, there was no consensus that there even was such a thing as long-haul COVID. Some doctors thought their patients were still sick with the disease but that the virus was somehow avoiding detection; some doctors thought patients were suffering from PTSD.
Researchers from the University of Washington estimate that roughly 30% of people infected with COVID-19 develop long-haul syndrome. The severity and symptoms range wildly. Some people feel a little off, while others are unable to get out of bed for days at a time.
What experts have come to believe is that for some unknown reason, long-haulers' immune systems act as though they're still under attack from the virus. Physical or emotional stress, even good stress, disturbs the entire system like a hornet's nest. Doctors want their patients moving so they don't become completely sedentary. But if you have the driven personality of, say, a college football player, accustomed to ignoring pain and fatigue, that drive can make the symptoms worse.
How it all happens and how to treat it, however, are still the subject of widespread debate.
"We all would agree that something is wrong with the immune system," says Dr. Daniel Griffin, an infectious disease physician and researcher at Columbia University. "To this day I still don't think we've gotten to why the immune system hasn't reset itself."
When I was infected, I was never hospitalized, never had problems breathing or with my heart. I was sick for three weeks, the worst of it a four-day period when I slept about 18 hours a day. A couple of weeks after I had been sick, I assumed that as soon as I could get my running legs back, I'd feel like myself. On my first run, I felt out of shape, but no more than that. Then, about 36 hours later, my lungs began to ache as though I had been breathing smoke. I was exhausted. I spent the better part of the next couple of days in bed, wondering why I was so tired, wondering if I had grown too comfortable being in bed all day. I began a pattern of recovering, trying to run, then having the same delayed reaction that shut me down all over again. I tried going for walks, but the result was the same.
A friend who survived the virus after 35 days on a ventilator had returned to his pre-COVID strength, but I hadn't. It made no sense. I just need to get back into shape, I repeated. I need to push through it. And that's one of the first things that sets in with long-haul, the question of whether you're imagining everything, or if, mentally, you're too weak to cope.
Throughout doctors' visits, Justin Foster said he had to manage his expectations about whether his health would improve. Phyllis B. Dooney for ESPN
CLEMSON PLAYERS WHO had COVID-19 followed a series of steps before they returned to full workouts. They started with light jogging, then sprinting, then practicing in a green jersey, which signified no contact, always checking in with the trainer at the end of the day.
The main concern, Poole says, was making sure players hadn't contracted myocarditis, a rare but potentially fatal heart inflammation that doctors at the time were concerned was linked to COVID-19. Usually, players were back to full speed a month after being infected. Of the players who were infected, all reported complete recoveries. Except for Foster.
Teammates noticed that Foster was raising his hand during drills, asking coaches to rotate him out so he could catch his breath. They hadn't seen that before.
"If he takes the time to step out, that means something serious," teammate K.J. Henry says. "He has a great grasp on the difference between pain and injury."
Foster says the harder he drove himself, the worse it got.
"I didn't want to be the one that wasn't working out or the one that's always having a problem and having to go to the training room and deal with it," he says. "It was just a lot mentally, pretty much just being down all the time. And I didn't know what was going to happen."
Foster and Swinney shared a shorthand to monitor how he felt. Swinney would wave his thumb in three positions -- up, sideways, down -- and Foster would respond with his own thumb to reflect where he was. Too often it was sideways or down.
After a couple of weeks, he wasn't able to practice at all. Day after day, when his teammates came into the training room to get taped up or treated, they saw Foster sitting in the corner with a nebulizer strapped to his face.
"I just remember him coming to me and he just was kind of was broken down. He said, 'Coach, I can't do it,'" Swinney says. "As an athlete and especially as a football player, we're kind of all wired to go and [be] like, 'Hey, snap out of it.' But this was something you couldn't see. It's not like you got a torn ACL, or you got a broken bone or something like that."
Foster says he worried his teammates thought he was lazy. No, they say. Quite the opposite. The fact that it was Foster who was struggling unnerved them. "No one thought he was lazy at all. We knew that he does what he needs to do every day to prepare," Murphy says.
"The entire team had no idea what was happening: 'Am I going to be next? Why did he react like that to COVID? And if I get COVID, am I going to react the same way?'"
Foster got to the point at which walking up the stairs in the football facility was too much. "It was just a very dark place for a long time," Foster says.
One night during the summer of 2020, Foster went to lie down a little after 11 p.m., when he felt an asthma attack coming on. He did what he usually does during an episode and took a puff from his inhaler. It didn't work.
He didn't want to call 911 and go to an emergency room in the middle of a pandemic, so he called Poole, the trainer.
Poole says he was struck by the fear in Foster's voice and told him to get to the team facility. Poole and the team physician put Foster on a nebulizer and talked him through breathing drills until, finally, a few hours later, the attack subsided.
In the weeks that followed, the training staff took Foster to several local doctors, each of whom came to the same conclusion, that there was no medical problem they could identify.
"It's like, am I crazy?" Foster says. "Is something going on with me mentally that I just can't push through this?"
Clemson teammates and trainers say Justin Foster is not one to exaggerate injuries. Phyllis B. Dooney for ESPN
IT WASN'T JUST his body. Foster took summer classes, and when he sat at a computer or tried to read a book, his mind couldn't grasp what was in front of him. This from someone who was an All-ACC Academic Team selection.
"There was a time where I was probably three weeks behind in class. I'm never a person not to do my work," he says.
The mental fog can be more destabilizing for some people than the physical symptoms. You don't recognize yourself, but you look normal to everyone else. I had plenty of evenings with friends or family when I could rally for a few hours, but I knew I'd be wiped out for the next two days. In my lower moments, it became too difficult to read because simple words didn't make sense. When I wrote, I might forget what I was writing in the middle of a sentence.
Over and over, I went through the process of researching something for an article, writing that portion, polishing it and then discovering that I had already done all that hours earlier. I had no memory of writing the same material. I learned to use outlines and checklists to do what I'd relied on my mind to do for 30 years. I had to lean heavily on colleagues to make sure that my work was clean.
In conversation, I frequently lost thoughts in mid-sentence, and then worried people thought I was being melodramatic. There were times watching TV when my mind couldn't keep up with the dialogue and I had to hit pause. Twice I got lost driving near my home and had to use Waze to get back.
And many nights I hit that wall and had to leave the dinner table as my family watched knowingly, not saying anything because they knew I didn't want the attention. I'd be in bed the rest of the night.
Most of the time I felt like I was possessed by someone dumber and more irritable. The cuts to my sense of self were relentless, with the wild, vivid dreams I had every morning, my inability to smell or taste, the strange things I found myself saying, the words I couldn't come up with, the loss of desire for longtime passions, the difficulty of small talk. Experiencing the minutiae of the day and thinking, "This just isn't me," over and over for months.
When I shared that with Foster he nodded and said, "Exactly."
My low point might have come after a weekend in November visiting my daughter in Washington, D.C., the most active two days I'd had in months. When I got home that Monday night, I saw a story from my colleague Jeff Passan about Tony La Russa's DUI. Something was vaguely familiar about it, and it hit me that Jeff and I had spoken three days earlier. I called him and was blunt. "I need to know, did I f--- something up? Was there something you asked me to do?"
"Actually," he said, "there was."
It turned out to be inconsequential, and Jeff couldn't have been better about it, but I had no memory of the conversation. It was like being told about a drunken blackout. And then the thought hit me that I had no way of knowing how many times this had happened over the previous eight months.
I felt like a writer who couldn't write, a reader who couldn't read, a runner who couldn't go for a walk, a father and husband who disappeared into his own head every night. Lesser in every way I could measure. I kept repeating to myself, "Useless."
Justin Foster's search for answers ultimately led him to Duke University's post-COVID-19 clinic, one of several that had cropped up during the pandemic to study long-haulers. Phyllis B. Dooney for ESPN
THE FIRST TIME Foster heard the term "long haul" was in August 2020, from head trainer Poole. Foster then went to the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, where, finally, a doctor said his issues were indeed probably related to his COVID-19 infection, and they were real. No one could explain why his asthma attacks had become so intense, and no one could say when or if he would get better. But just hearing about "long haul" was a massive relief.
"Someone telling me that I'm not crazy and that there's actually something going on, that was the first time that I realized that I could relax," he says. "I knew that there was actually something going on that was causing me to be like this."
For the first two months after I'd been sick, convinced I had fallen into some rut of laziness that I couldn't break out of, I wondered if I'd even had COVID at all. In those early pandemic days in North Jersey, you couldn't get a test unless you needed to be hospitalized. I might be imagining this whole thing, I thought.
Ultimately, I took my sons with me to get antibody tests, and even as the nurse drew blood from my arm, I felt like I was on a path to being exposed as a fraud. A few days later the call came and someone read me results. Michael Quinn ... negative. Liam Quinn ... negative. Thomas Quinn ...
As I waited to hear my result my heart was pounding so violently my shirt was moving. "Positive," she said.
The wave of relief that went through me felt like anesthesia. I teared up. I wasn't crazy. I had no idea what would happen, but for the moment it was enough to know it was all real. She sent me a copy of the test result, and I pinned it to the wall next to my desk.
AS THE 2020 football season began, knowing he was fighting an illness and not his own mind, Foster still had hopes of rallying. But week by week, nothing changed, and his nights became lessons in terror.
"There were multiple nights where I would lay down and I would be choking in my sleep. And I would wake up in the middle of the night and I could barely breathe," he says. "That's when I was at my lowest point because I just didn't know what was going to happen. ... If I was going to go to sleep one day and not wake up."
Midway through the season, Foster and Swinney agreed that he needed to focus on his health. There was always next year. Foster went to practices and home games but didn't dress, speaking up when the defensive line gathered, maybe sharing a certain move that would work against an offensive tackle.
"At practice, even in games, he'd be right there, pretty much just coaching us up," Murphy says.
And when the defense was on the field, Foster found a spot on the sideline where he was unlikely to encounter players tumbling out of bounds. "I knew if something did happen I couldn't run fast enough to get out of the way, and I didn't want to cause a scene," he says.
But he says it was killing him not to participate or know whether he might play again. The idea began to sink in that he had to walk away from football altogether, just to be able to move on mentally and emotionally to the next part of his life. To become whatever he was going to be after football. There was always going to be an end to his career; maybe this was it.
He says he made the decision in December but didn't make it official for two months. "I couldn't really bring myself to do it, just because of all the work I'd put in," he says.
On Feb. 24 this year, Foster went to the Clemson football facility and sat outside Swinney's office for 90 minutes until the coach was free. Foster told him he needed to step away from football. Swinney said he understood and told Foster he would have a place on the team if he wanted to come back.
Foster told the rest of the world that day on social media.
"Today is a difficult day for me, but it is also a day of reflection and gratitude," he wrote. "With sadness but no regret, I have decided it is in my best interest to call it a career and hang up football."
A week later, Foster told me about the frustration he felt.
"The question I would ask when I went to the doctor is, 'You guys say you don't see anything; you guys say that things are getting better. I don't feel better. So is this a new life for me? Is this my life now?' And if it is, just tell me that. And I will be fine what that, and I'll just have to deal with it.
"I don't want to get my hopes up and keep hoping and hoping and hoping that I'm going to be back to normal."
We were experiencing something akin to sudden aging, leaping past what we saw as the coming vital years. You had to fight the urge to dwell on what had been lost or whether you could ever get it back. You had to learn that patience and acceptance weren't weaknesses, they were the only strengths you had left at times. This is what I can do today. Let's see what happens tomorrow.
Long-haul COVID-19 ended up jeopardizing Justin Foster's entire football career. Phyllis B. Dooney for ESPN
THE SAME DAY Foster announced his retirement, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, announced a new federal initiative to study long-haul COVID, and dubbed the syndrome with an official name: Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2.
By that point, several prominent hospitals had established post-COVID clinics to both treat patients and gather data. Foster attended one at Duke, and I went to the one at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Manhattan -- an appointment I had to make five months in advance.
I met with a "functional medicine" doctor, who said the goal was to get my body's inflammation down so my autonomic nervous system would switch back to its normal state. I later learned not all experts believe the nervous system is even involved, but I was advised to adopt an anti-inflammatory diet, take a number of supplements to boost the immune system and decrease inflammation, wear compression clothing to help circulation, get a lot of rest when I needed it. I couldn't tell you if any of it has helped, but I do it.
Before COVID, I was in obnoxiously good health. But like many long-haulers, my blood pressure and cholesterol hit inexplicably high levels after I got sick.
Part of the Mt. Sinai program is visiting with a cardiologist, and the day I saw her in March my blood pressure was 155/110, a fairly alarming number. I hadn't had any cardiac symptoms, but as she listened to my chest she said, "I think I hear a murmur."
An echocardiogram showed that she was right. The aortic valve in my heart was slightly dilated, allowing some blood flow back into the chamber. The good news was the condition is mild and completely manageable. It's possible it had been there for years but eluded detection. But it's possible, she said, that the elevated blood pressure I'd had for a year at that point caused it to dilate. However it got that way, I needed to get my blood pressure under control and will have to control it for the rest of my life to prevent more serious problems.
When Foster went to Duke's clinic for the first time, most of the focus was on his lungs. His pulmonologist there, Dr. Loretta Que, said during one test he was using only 49% of his lung capacity. She and the team there put him on a regimen of new medications.
"Prior to COVID, he hardly ever had to use an inhaler, and now he's on a chronic medication," she says. "I can't predict whether or not he's going to be able to come off of those in the future, but that's something that we're going to need to evaluate for."
THERE WAS A ray of hope out there for both of us in early 2021. At first the results were anecdotal, but long-haulers around the country were reporting dramatic recoveries after getting vaccinated. As data began to roll in, Columbia's Griffin estimated that 40% of long-haulers were seeing improvement.
I got my first shot in March and didn't notice any difference. A couple of weeks later, Foster got his. When I was headed to get my second injection, I texted him to see how he was doing. He wrote back, "1.5 mile jog this morning."
I woke up the day after my second shot feeling the sickest I'd ever felt in my life. The worst of it passed after two days, and over the course of the next two weeks I realized I might be feeling worse overall than I had before the shot.
But something had changed for Foster. Maybe it was the vaccine and maybe it was the progress he had felt since changing medications. Maybe it was just the passage of time. But suddenly a comeback seemed possible.
He began to push himself. His runs got a little longer, and he started to lift weights again. In April, he went back to Duke and got more good news. That 49% lung output was now 102%. Dr. Que put him on a new inhaler and said he was ready to attempt a comeback.
"She was telling me, what do I have to lose? She's like, 'You go back, you try to play again, and if you can't play, you just can't play.' And I was like, 'It's not a bad option,'" he says.
As Foster walked out of the appointment, his phone rang. It was Swinney, just checking on him. That was the moment, Foster says, when he decided he was ready to try, although he didn't share that on the phone call. He wanted to take some time to be sure.
A few days later, he called Swinney. He was ready, he said. Swinney beamed and told Foster he could go at his own pace, and if he's able to play only 10 snaps a game, so be it. Foster had a place on the team.
He started out doing drills at half speed, then continued to build until he was able to complete full workouts. Sometimes he has to take long naps when he finishes, but he's able to do the work. Occasionally during a sprint, he says, his throat will start to close up, but he keeps his inhaler handy and knows to drop out if he needs to.
"You break it down to almost every hour of the day: This is what I do now, this is what I do in an hour. It takes a lot of the mental stress out of it," he says. "When you look at goals that are maybe a year down the line, and you look at your situation, it puts a lot of mental stress on you."
He says he's ready to play, and his coach agrees, without hesitation. "He's back," Swinney says.
But Foster is still a long-hauler, still missing a sense of smell, still struck by occasional shortness of breath or pains in his chest, still prone to brain fog when he's tired. Since COVID-19, he has intense reactions to any bug bites. Last week during practice, he started to feel lightheaded and his throat started to close. He used an EpiPen -- one he's carried since a pre-COVID allergy to bees -- to make it stop. He and the medical staff couldn't figure out if it was related to food or a bug bite, but Foster chalks it up to "the new normal."
"When I get setbacks I stay positive about them," he says. "It could be worse: I could not be playing. I could be struggling a lot worse than I am, but I keep getting better."
And he still has a full season ahead of him, with another chance at the NFL.
"It's almost like it's not real," he says. "I mean, most of the time you get one shot, one chance, and once it's done, it's done."
Yet on Saturday night, 436 days after he was diagnosed with COVID-19, Foster will take the field with his teammates to play the University of Georgia.
Justin Foster will return to the field for the 2021 college football season, and he still has his sights set on the NFL. AP Photo/David J. Phillip
IN MID-JULY, I was feeling out of options. The vaccine hadn't done the trick, and I didn't know what else to try. I remembered I had a methylprednisolone prescription that a doctor had written for me nine months earlier, but for whatever reason I hadn't taken it. I decided to give it a try, a medical Hail Mary, thinking another assault on my body's inflammation couldn't hurt.
I discussed it briefly with my cardiologist, and she agreed it was worth trying. I began the six-day steroid pack, and for the next six days I had a migraine every day. When it was over, something had changed.
I drove to North Carolina to meet with Foster in person for the first time. The trip from New Jersey should've laid me out for days. It didn't. I still hit the wall in the evenings, but later and not as badly. Maybe it was the methylprednisolone, maybe it was the supplements, maybe it was the meditation or the acupuncture, maybe it was time. On the Saturday after I met Foster in person, I went for a run.
On July 19, I texted him and said I had completed my fifth run in eight days. They were slow and short and ugly and I was fatigued and sore at night, but I was doing it. He wrote back, "That's what's up."
I took a chapter from the same book he did: Let go of expectations. Do what you can right now. Don't get ahead of yourself. Walk a quarter mile, run a quarter mile, repeat until you can do more. Keep going.
When I went back to my cardiologist with the news, she beamed. "I think I'm more excited than you are," she said. I told her I was just trying to keep an even keel after 16 months of hope and setbacks.
"You're going to get there," she said. "It might take you another year, but you're going to get there."
A year and a half after the long haul began, after wondering if this is what the rest of my life will be, "one more year" sounds like early parole. There are no promises. I still have days when I feel like hell, and I don't know what to make of them. But I get up each day and check my blood pressure, I take my supplements, I eat my heart-healthy diet, I exercise when I can and I'm starting another course of steroids.
Today, I finished this story. Tomorrow, I'll do something else. On Saturday, I'll watch Justin. And then we'll both see what's next.
ESPN feature producer Damien Esparza and researcher John Mastroberardino contributed to this report.
Mom dukes got it last week.
Thankfully she was vaccinated and all she has is fatigue and a cough
Thankfully she was vaccinated and all she has is fatigue and a cough
Prayers go out to mom.
Just found out a childhood friend
Mother
Younger than me
Just died from covid
People hear these stories every day and still refuse to do right.
I'm done with there are two sides and being sympathetic.
At this point if you ain't following protocols?
it's deliberate
You actively trying to do something hurtful and detrimental
One of my moms coworkers that caught it a few days before her just passed. Around the same age too. It was going around her job. He was a trumper that was anti vax. Moms is good though. Got her negative test earlier in the week and was right back to work.
Now I know where you get that strength and work ethic from.
She was calling me complaining about having to sit home. I'm telling her enjoy it. You're not really that sick so just enjoy the time. She can't sit still. Shes crazy lol.
Fully vaccinated people run into Excelsior Pass problems
Some claim they can't access the program.
spectrumlocalnews.com
Fully vaccinated residents having trouble with Excelsior Pass Program
BY MELISSA STEININGER NEW YORK STATE
PUBLISHED 1:38 PM ET APR. 30, 2021
Like many New Yorkers last year, Nancy Mattice of Troy did her part of staying home. She stayed away from doing the things she enjoys and being around the people she loves.
"The hard part was not being able to see family and friends," said Mattice.
That’s why when she qualified to get the COVID-19 vaccine, she did whatever necessary to get it, including a drive that took hours for both doses.
"I actually drove to Johnson City for my first and Endicott for my second, because I wanted it as soon as I possibly could," she said.
What You Need To Know
- Fully vaccinated users are claiming to not have access to, and are experiencing problems with, the Excelsior Vaccine Passport
- Nancy Mattice of Troy said she went through a month and a half of frustrations before getting her issue with the program fixed
- The state Department of Health claims there are no issues or glitches that should cause any problems for fully vaccinated New Yorkers accessing their passes
Like all of us, Mattice put her life on pause. Her favorite things, like traveling and attending concerts, all came to a halt. Even her husband’s career as a musician with a local band was postponed, and to this day looks different.
"I think it’s very frustrating for him because he loves to play; it’s a big part of his life," Mattice said.
She also missed out on major life moments like the birth of her granddaughter, who was born in October.
"I feel like I never had a change to bond with her like I did my grandson," she explained the moment of meeting her granddaughter, with a mask on, months after she was born.
Anxious to get back to her lifestyle of traveling and concerts, Nancy wanted to make sure she had access to the Excelsior Pass. The pass is New York’s vaccine passport program.
"It asks you these challenge questions and one of the challenge questions was the date of the vaccine. One of them was the date of my last vaccine, and nothing even near it," she explained about the pass.
The Department of Health says the pass is available 14 days after your second vaccination. But Nancy’s second shot was on March 8. More than a month and half later, she still couldn’t access it.
"I was terribly concerned about it. I really felt like I was going to be under house arrest," she said. "That I did exactly what I was supposed to do, got both vaccinations, but now, because of this, I would be shut out."
She says after weeks of unanswered emails and phone calls from local leaders, state health departments and Walgreens, she found that the information from her second shot information wasn’t even in the system.
"I called Walgreens, and they swore up and down they entered it," Mattice said. "They tried entering it again and they were unable."
Nancy says she kept pressing for answers and sent more and more emails, and continued her search for answers. But she was not the only one with issues with the program. We spoke to a handful of others who have had similar problems to Nancy.
While they did not agree to an interview on camera, they still sent Spectrum News background information and documents to verify their claims. They said they were unable to access their pass, ranging from weeks to months, after getting both shots at both pharmacies and state-run sites.
"I started getting all these responses saying, ‘this happened to me too. This happened to me too,’ " she says about the dozens of others who backed up her claims.
Nancy says a woman at the New York State Immunization Information System (NYSIIS) was eventually able to fix her problem and grant her access to the pass. However, Mattice says the worker didn’t tell her exactly what was wrong or how it was fixed.
Spectrum News reached out to the New York State Department of Health on the claims of the issues with the system. The department responded, "There are no technical issues or glitches. Excelsior Pass is a new, innovative, first-in-the-nation program, and as such, user questions are expected."
The Department of Health declined multiple requests for an interview. However, it sent a press release listing the following instructions for those having issues with the passport program:
• We encourage New Yorkers to visit the Excelsior Pass website and FAQ to learn more about Excelsior Pass and how to get started.
• If users are still having trouble, they can fill out the Excelsior Pass support form or reach out to the Excelsior Help Desk at 844-699-7277 from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily. Note that the support team does not have access to any personal health records and therefore will not be able to provide specific details about personal eligibility for a Pass.
• As stated in my initial response, if you are not able to retrieve your COVID-19 Vaccination Pass 14 days after your final vaccine dose, please ensure that the information you are entering matches your name and data on your vaccine documentation and try again later.
• For issues pertaining to personal health records, New Yorkers are encouraged to reach out to their vaccine administrators or testing sites directly. For those vaccinated at a state-operated vaccination site, that would be via the NYS COVID-19 Vaccination Hotline at 1-833-NYS-4-VAX (1-833-697-4829).
U.S. Nears 600,000 Virus Deaths Despite Progress From Vaccines (Published 2021)
Daily deaths have dropped considerably since their January peak, with about 44 percent of the population now fully vaccinated.
COVID-19 Has Now Killed About As Many Americans As The 1918-19 Flu
Before COVID-19, the 1918-19 flu was universally considered the worst pandemic disease in human history. Whether the current scourge ultimately proves deadlier is unclear.
www.npr.org
President Biden holds summit on ending COVID-19 pandemic with several world leaders
The White House is hosting a virtual summit on Wednesday to discuss how best the world can end the COVID-19 pandemic. Biden also announced the US will buy and ship 500 million Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine doses to low- and middle-income countries. This is in addition to the 500 million doses he pledged the US would buy and purchase in July at the G7 summit. Several leaders are participating including United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and several World Health Organization and other public health officials.
The White House is hosting a virtual summit on Wednesday to discuss how best the world can end the COVID-19 pandemic. Biden also announced the US will buy and ship 500 million Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine doses to low- and middle-income countries. This is in addition to the 500 million doses he pledged the US would buy and purchase in July at the G7 summit. Several leaders are participating including United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and several World Health Organization and other public health officials.
Garth Brooks Is Only Playing to Vaccinated Friends in Low Places
Dive bars are in because “dive bars are vaccinated.”
www.vulture.com
Garth Brooks Is Only Playing to Vaccinated Friends in Low Places
By Bethy Squires
Photo: Kevin Mazur/BBMA2020/Getty Images for dcp
Garth Brooks, the country legend who can still sell out stadiums decades after his 90’s career peak, will be sticking to dive bar shows for the foreseeable future. According to Billboard, Brooks and team feel COVID safety and vaccination protocols will be easier to follow in smaller venues. On Brooks’ Facebook show Inside Studio G, Brooks said “Stadiums are officially out for this year.” Dive bars are in, because in Brooks’ words, “dive bars are vaccinated.” His first dive show will be October 11 in Oklahoma City, and tickets can only be won on OKC’s own radio station 93.3 Jake FM.
Brooks had been in the middle of his 2019 stadium tour when COVID shut everything down. He was able to fulfill some of those dates in 2021, before deciding it was time to pull the plug yet again. The news comes shortly after Eric Clapton did a take-backsies on his vow to never play shows where there are vaccine mandates. Meanwhile Brooks joins comedian Patton Oswalt as artists who will only perform at venues that require vaccination or proof of a negative COVID test.
Biden's vaccine mandate for workers is supported by legal precedents, experts say
On September 9, US President Joe Biden announced a plan to require all private businesses with 100 or more employees to ensure that their workers are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, or get tested weekly. The mandate will be implemented through an Emergency Temporary Standard to be issued by the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Experts predict legal challenges to be launched, but they say OSHA has the authority to protect workers' safety by requiring vaccinations, Bloomberg reports. The 1905 Supreme Court decision in Jacobson v. Massachusetts has also been widely cited, in which the court upheld the Cambridge, Massachusetts Board of Health’s authority to require vaccination against smallpox during an epidemic.
What you need to know
- The White House says the requirement will impact over 80 million workers in private sector businesses with more than 100 employees.
- The mandate will be issued by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
- Under the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, OSHA has the authority to adopt an Emergency Temporary Standard if such measure "is necessary to protect employees from such danger."
On September 9, US President Joe Biden announced a plan to require all private businesses with 100 or more employees to ensure that their workers are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, or get tested weekly. The mandate will be implemented through an Emergency Temporary Standard to be issued by the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Experts predict legal challenges to be launched, but they say OSHA has the authority to protect workers' safety by requiring vaccinations, Bloomberg reports. The 1905 Supreme Court decision in Jacobson v. Massachusetts has also been widely cited, in which the court upheld the Cambridge, Massachusetts Board of Health’s authority to require vaccination against smallpox during an epidemic.
What you need to know
- The White House says the requirement will impact over 80 million workers in private sector businesses with more than 100 employees.
- The mandate will be issued by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
- Under the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, OSHA has the authority to adopt an Emergency Temporary Standard if such measure "is necessary to protect employees from such danger."
NBA Says Unvaccinated Players Who Can't Play in Games Won't Get Paid
NBA players who do not comply with local vaccination requirements will not be paid for the games that they miss due to their status, NBA spokesperson Mike Bass said Wednesday.
Such a policy could impact players with the Warriors, Nets and Knicks, as all three teams play in areas in which local jurisdictions are requiring people to be fully vaccinated to be allowed indoors for entertainment.
Last week, Knicks general manager Scott Perry said the entire New York roster is vaccinated. The policy outlined Wednesday could, however, still impact the Warriors and Nets.
Brooklyn guard Kyrie Irving did not attend Nets media day in person Monday due to New York City's health and safety protocols. Irving would not comment on his specific vaccination status, saying, Monday via Zoom, that he "prefers to keep that stuff private."
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"Living in this public sphere, there's a lot of questions about what's going on in the world of Kyrie, and I would love to just keep that private and handle that the right way with my team and go forward with a plan," Irving said.
Golden State forward Andrew Wiggins was similarly asked to clarify his vaccination status on Monday but declined, saying, "it's none of your business."
"I'm just going to keep fighting for what I believe and for what I believe is right," Wiggins said. "What's right to one person, isn't right to the other and vice versa."
The executive orders creating vaccine requirements only apply to the players who play in those markets, meaning out-of-market players are exempted from them.
On Tuesday, the league informed teams that it was close to finalizing an agreement with the National Basketball Players Association on health and safety protocols for the upcoming season. On Tuesday, the league informed teams that it was close to finalizing an agreement with the National Basketball Players Association on health and safety protocols for the upcoming season.
NBPA executive director Michele Roberts said Tuesday that more than 90% of the league's players are fully vaccinated.
NBA players who do not comply with local vaccination requirements will not be paid for the games that they miss due to their status, NBA spokesperson Mike Bass said Wednesday.
Such a policy could impact players with the Warriors, Nets and Knicks, as all three teams play in areas in which local jurisdictions are requiring people to be fully vaccinated to be allowed indoors for entertainment.
Last week, Knicks general manager Scott Perry said the entire New York roster is vaccinated. The policy outlined Wednesday could, however, still impact the Warriors and Nets.
Brooklyn guard Kyrie Irving did not attend Nets media day in person Monday due to New York City's health and safety protocols. Irving would not comment on his specific vaccination status, saying, Monday via Zoom, that he "prefers to keep that stuff private."
Get SPORTS ILLUSTRATED's best stories every weekday. Sign up now.
"Living in this public sphere, there's a lot of questions about what's going on in the world of Kyrie, and I would love to just keep that private and handle that the right way with my team and go forward with a plan," Irving said.
Golden State forward Andrew Wiggins was similarly asked to clarify his vaccination status on Monday but declined, saying, "it's none of your business."
"I'm just going to keep fighting for what I believe and for what I believe is right," Wiggins said. "What's right to one person, isn't right to the other and vice versa."
The executive orders creating vaccine requirements only apply to the players who play in those markets, meaning out-of-market players are exempted from them.
On Tuesday, the league informed teams that it was close to finalizing an agreement with the National Basketball Players Association on health and safety protocols for the upcoming season. On Tuesday, the league informed teams that it was close to finalizing an agreement with the National Basketball Players Association on health and safety protocols for the upcoming season.
NBPA executive director Michele Roberts said Tuesday that more than 90% of the league's players are fully vaccinated.
Unvaccinated Americans Blame Everyone But Themselves—Children, Vaccines And Not Wearing Masks—For Covid Surge, Poll Finds
Vaccinated Americans overwhelmingly blamed the unvaccinated for sky-high Covid-19 cases, a new Kaiser poll found, while the unvaccinated ranked the holdouts last out of all reasons for the surge polled.
www.forbes.com
Unvaccinated Americans Blame Everyone But Themselves—Children, Vaccines And Not Wearing Masks—For Covid Surge, Poll Finds
Robert Hart
Forbes Staff
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While most Americans blame vaccine holdouts for surging coronavirus cases, rationed medicines and overwhelmed hospitals, few unvaccinated people feel any responsibility, according to new polling by the Kaiser Family Foundation, underscoring the tough barriers officials must overcome as they seemingly hold anyone and anything other than themselves responsible for the dire outbreak.
The unvaccinated do not view themselves as responsible for U.S. Covid surge, poll finds.
ANADOLU AGENCY VIA GETTY IMAGES
KEY FACTS
Nearly 8 in 10 (77%) vaccinated Americans blame the high number of Covid-19 cases on people refusing to get vaccinated, according to the poll conducted September 13-22 among 1,519 U.S. adults.
Vaccinated adults also pinpointed people not taking enough precautions like mask wearing and social distancing (73%), the infectiousness of the delta variant (67%), and local and state governments lifting restrictions too soon (59%) as key reasons for the rise in cases, the poll found.
PROMOTED
Just 12% of unvaccinated adults believe people refusing the vaccine is a major factor behind the high case numbers, the poll found, with the majority (58%) thinking the surge is driven by vaccines being less effective at preventing the spread of Covid-19 than scientists initially thought.
Unvaccinated people even cited vaccine holdouts last among all reasons driving the high case numbers polled by Kaiser, including children who aren’t eligible for vaccination (15%), governments lifting restrictions too soon (27%), the infectiousness of the delta variant (35%), people not taking enough precautions (37%) and immigrants and tourists bringing Covid-19 into the country (40%).
Divergent beliefs in what is driving the wave of coronavirus highlight the wider differences in opinion between the vaccinated and unvaccinated, with a majority of holdouts thinking that breakthrough infections (66%) and the potential need for booster shots (71%) show the vaccines don’t work.
Just 11% of vaccinated people thought breakthrough cases indicate the vaccines aren’t working, Kaiser found, and 19% thought the same of booster shots.
TANGENT
Throughout the pandemic, vaccination has been an intensely partisan issue. Consistently, Republicans have been less likely to accept the vaccine and more likely to question the public health measures put in place to end the pandemic. This latest Kaiser poll is no different: Republicans (32%) were the least likely to cite people refusing the vaccine as a major reason for high cases when compared to Democrats (87%) and Independents (54%) and the most likely to blame immigrants and tourists bringing Covid-19 into the country (55% of Republicans versus 21% of Democrats and 34% of Independents).
SURPRISING FACT
Despite 77% of vaccinated people holding the unvaccinated responsible for the rise in cases, just over half (51%) said they were angry with them. Unsurprisingly, only 3% of the unvaccinated said they were angry with people who hadn’t gotten a Covid-19 vaccine. As with other opinions on vaccination, the anger is partisan: 65% of Democrats said they were angry with the unvaccinated, while just 16% of Republicans felt the same. Instead, a majority of Republicans (59%) and the unvaccinated (56%) said they were angry with the federal government for the state of the pandemic, compared to 30% of the unvaccinated and 20% of Democrats.
KEY BACKGROUND
Safe and highly effective Covid-19 vaccines have been freely available to all adults, and many children, for months. While they cannot provide complete protection against Covid-19, they effectively prevent serious illness, hospitalization and death and slash the risks of developing long Covid. The vast majority of hospitalizations and nearly all deaths from Covid-19 are in unvaccinated people, who have cost the healthcare system at least $5.7 billion in the last three months alone. The huge surge in demand for what few medicines are licensed to treat Covid-19 in the U.S. has triggered nationwide shortages and rationing of scarce supplies, with some areas prioritizing scarce supplies for unvaccinated patients.
One Day After Broadway Return, Aladdin Shuts Down Due to COVID
By Bethy Squires
Don’t let the CBS special fool you. Broadway’s back — but only with big, big provisos. Disney Theatrical Productions has halted performances of Aladdin on Broadway after unnamed cast/crew tested positive for COVID-19. The announcement was made through the show’s Twitter, with a statement that concluded “We will continue to provide support to the affected ‘Aladdin’ company members as they recover.” At least one upcoming show will be cancelled due to this breakthrough case. It is only recently that Broadway shows have been open to full capacity. Masks and proof of vaccination are still required. Per the New York Post, at least 30 shows will be reopening this year.
By Bethy Squires
Don’t let the CBS special fool you. Broadway’s back — but only with big, big provisos. Disney Theatrical Productions has halted performances of Aladdin on Broadway after unnamed cast/crew tested positive for COVID-19. The announcement was made through the show’s Twitter, with a statement that concluded “We will continue to provide support to the affected ‘Aladdin’ company members as they recover.” At least one upcoming show will be cancelled due to this breakthrough case. It is only recently that Broadway shows have been open to full capacity. Masks and proof of vaccination are still required. Per the New York Post, at least 30 shows will be reopening this year.
