Help Me With Sign New Jersey Banking PPT

Help me with industry sign banking new jersey ppt later

it's been one year since the first recorded case of covid19 in new jersey it really seems like it was so long ago in our newsroom it was the top story that day but we also had stories about a ban on plastic bags and a team of high school swimmers getting ready for a competition but within two weeks our world was flipped on its head like dominoes offices restaurants malls theaters and eventually schools all closed down while emergency rooms and hospital beds filled with patients and administrators struggled to find the basics face masks gowns and gloves let alone ventilators we had a second wave and a third wave peaks and valleys of infection rates that have taken us up to today over 23 000 new jersey residents dead and scores still dying every week let's bring in our panel to help assess where we are in this fight right now siraj sugar is chief of infectious disease at holy name medical center stephanie silvera is epidemiologist and professor of public health at montclair state university and bob atkins is director of new jersey health initiatives with the robert wood johnson foundation panel good to see you all can we just start with a quick word from each of you on on what the past year has been like siraj sugar holy name was the epicenter of this crisis for a while there can you talk about how quickly things accelerated in april and may of last year and what the biggest challenges were sure so thanks for having me uh i'm part of such an impressive panel i tell you it was incredible and you know early on we described it as a war zone um it was incredible to see patients coming in into the er they were coming in as we used to say hot and fast meaning they were coming in very sick oftentimes at home suffering for many days and what we were amazed and really humbled by was how quickly this virus attacked uh the immune system attacked the lungs these patients oftentimes were being intubated in the hallways uh of course this is very early on we didn't understand all the different mechanisms and treatment options and the clinical scenarios so given just the great unknown and the sheer amount of patience and the sheer acuity of patients it was a very troublesome time indeed stephanie do you remember what your workload and focus were a year ago it was very different so most of my work was on health disparities but as they largely related to cancer outcomes and looking at you know individual behaviors in terms of accessing health care and so i got thrown into to working on covid pretty much non-stop sometime around march third or fifth of last year um and it's been what i've been doing ever since bob atkins you do a lot of work in camden among communities where health challenges were intense before the pandemic when the virus began to spread were there immediate signs that this was going to hit poor black and brown and immigrant communities especially hard yeah i i think they were unfortunately i mean you're aware that there are a lot of um conversations prior to to this around zip code and how important zip code was to health outcomes and so i think a lot of what we expected was that uh the places that with the least amount of resources in places like camden and trenton and irvington and newark uh and bridgeton new jersey we're going to feel the brunt of this and that's what turned out happening unfortunately siraj i feel like every day brings mixed messages uh are we at the beginning of the end of this pandemic what's the good news and what's the bad news so there is a lot to be optimistic about you know and i'll backtrack and if we look back in the spring of 2020 we were really blind in terms of our information we had no randomized clinical trials we had no research uh we had no experience so we're certainly in a different place clinically uh the research has caught up we know what works what doesn't work we're still looking at things you know we're a holy name we're involved with multiple clinical trials monoclonal antibodies other interventions but the sheer you know knowledge and the sheer amount of data that's being shared globally has been very reassuring so i think that's a source of great optimism the vaccines and now a third option uh certainly is a great source of optimism but at the same time i would caution that we have been and remain humbled by this disease and i'm amazed at how much we don't know and how much we still need to uh to figure out so if i were to make a prediction you know it would be with much trepidation i think we're clearly seeing a third uh national uh surge coming down what we call the post holiday surge we're seeing levels leveling off and plateauing but still at levels that are unexceptionally high and what the future holds that's the question i guess that asked every day you know by patients certainly the prediction and the hope is that if we can escape before surge this month with the new variants that are circulating that spring and summer may see some semblance of going back to normal but what will happen in the fall and the winter and then the years to come really depends upon a lot of things it depends upon our ability to reach herd immunity and depends on our ability uh to continue to vaccinate and then we have to see how durable that is how long the vaccine effect lasts and then we finally have to see what effects if any of these variants may have in immunity will it become less severe disease and more transmissible will become something that we just deal with like the common cold and many other coronary viruses so those things are remain to be seen and i think you know how humble we've been thus far i would be very cautious to make any definitive predictions stephanie we still have terribly low vaccination rates among minority populations we hear always about the mistrust of the medical establishment and now these variants that may render some vaccines less effective is there any sign that opinions are changing about the vaccines and that assuming supply increases in the weeks ahead we're going to start seeing an increase in vaccination rates in these communities i certainly hope so because these are the communities that have been hardest hit and we know that they're being harder hit at earlier ages so before the age of 65 due to higher rates of exposure as well as the number of pre-existing conditions that often circulate in those populations i think right now one of the biggest issues is our demand is far outstripping supply in general and so we need to do a better job of reaching out to communities that have been left out of these vaccine programs and i think jnj is going to help with that by being able to bring that vaccine to those communities and not having some of the barriers in terms of transportation for example bob atkins uh stephanie just mentioned the johnson and johnson vaccine it's getting some mixed reactions though right i mean officials say it's a game changer but others say yeah the less effective vaccine is the one that officials want to use in minority communities have you heard this and and what's your message to those communities as it pertains to that well i think the message that we're hearing from public health is the one that we really have to continue to transmit and get out there is that get the shot that you can get whether it be the fisa the modern and the j j they're all effective at what we really care about what we care about is making sure that people don't die and people don't end up in the hospital and the j and j and the moderna and the visor are all um really effective at that and of course there are a lot of mixed conversations around the j but there's um it's it's complicated in terms of maybe that um when the jnj was tested uh the disease is a little more severe so so it's hard to compare it's almost like apples to oranges so uh we are really trying to convey to all these hard-to-reach communities that stephanie pointed out that yeah we really want to make sure to get the shot that you can get as soon as you can get it because that's how we're going to get out of this any shot any shot siraj uh what have we learned you talked a little bit about this but what have we learned about this virus about identifying it treating it controlling its spread what's what have we learned over the past year i think what we learned is certainly we are at a much better place than you have been in the past using you know sharing of knowledge randomized clinical trials remember this virus supported by the chinese the who only on december 31 2019 by the middle of january 2020 this was already sequenced and that's incredible right so we already had the sequence of this virus and already targets were being looked at for potential vaccines and of course we fast forward uh to december we have two messenger rna vaccines approved and now uh now in february a third uh adenovirus type vaccine approved so that is you know very just reflective of all the and building upon all the information and research has been done before i think a lot of times i get asked as g doc you know these vaccines seem to be rushed and i always tell people no this is a reflection of the incredible research and science and development that's been occurring for the last two decades and people sometimes are telling me i want to wait for one vaccine not the other you know when you look at the efficacy as was alluded to before the jnj was brought out when the variants were circulating that was a different than when the the moderna and pfizer so again i just want to reiterate to everyone listening that you should get the first vaccine that you can get that's available to you here's a viewer question for you suraj uh brenda asks what's the emotional toll been on um the front line hospital workers who've been dealing with this for a year now what what has that impact been you know uh of course it's our job it's our duty you know it's a privilege to work with patients but you know i have to admit that it is very disheartening um it has you know we've seen a lot of highs when we get patients out that we thought weren't going to make it and we clap them out you know two three four months later but we've seen some incredible uh strategies that's been well documented in the media and i think that's so important you know whether it's seeing people die alone people dying saying goodbye to families while we hold up an ipad so they can face time with them i mean that that has been you know these things have have really affected us and really will stay with us forever yes there is had been a lot of emotional trauma of course for everyone out there but certainly those on the front lines uh and it's been unlike anything you know i've ever uh and my colleagues have ever experienced in our careers all right siraj sugger stephanie silvera and bob atkins good to see all of you thank you for coming on with us thank you