Celebrity fitness trainer Craig Ramsay With so many people doing the stay at home thing, we’ve seen a lot of YouTube and Instagram guys offering home workouts to keep us fit both mentally and physically. But one of the things we’ve noticed is they can get to be a little boring after a while, and we need a new twist on things. Woofy fitness guru and Bravo star Craig Ramsay is pairing his passion for exercise and online social gaming together to break up the monotony and bring some fun to home fitness. Well-known as the co-host of Bravo’s “Thintervention” with Jackie Warner, Ramsay was also half of the fan-favorite gay couple on Bravo’s “Newlyweds The First Year.” SciPlay, one of the world’s leading social gaming companies, reached out to Ramsay to help launch the Fitness & Slots YouTube channel. A fan of SciPlay games for years, Ramsay has developed exercise programs that match-up with the games. For example, if you get a bonus on the game, you get a bonus exercise as well.
“Exercising is always important, but recent events and restrictions have made our society even more stressed than before, and people all around the world have difficulty maintaining a normal daily routine that includes movement,” says Ramsay. “That stress has a negative effect on us, and physical movement has the power to make us feel de-stressed and calm.” Ramsay says the combination of exercises and gaming has helped motivate clients to move their bodies, feel physically and mentally great, and positively impact their health and wellness while walking, stretching, performing bodyweight exercises, and more. The YouTube channel features workouts based on SciPlay’s gaming hits. Viewers will learn all about Ramsay’s fitness philosophy, participate in weekly challenges, and get inspired to ‘gamify’ their workouts.
Ramsay also mixes it up by doing Instagram Live sessions focusing on stretching with a nice pour of wine called “Stretch – A Reason to Wine.” Check out some of his recent Instagram posts from Palm Springs where he’s currently sheltering in place.
A new medical study published in the New England Journal of Medicine indicates that hydroxychloroquine, the malaria drug often touted by Donald Trump as a treatment for COVID-19, is not effective in treating patients with the disease. From CNBC:
The study, funded by the National Institutes of Health and conducted by researchers at New York-Presbyterian Hospital and Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City, looked at 1,376 consecutive patients who showed up at the emergency room with symptoms of coronavirus.
Nearly 60%, or 811 of the patients, received the drug within 48 hours and were found, on average, to be more severely ill than those who didn’t receive the drug, the researchers said. They said the study’s findings didn’t find any potential benefit or harm from the drug, adding a rigorous, randomized clinical trial is needed.
The new findings come two weeks after the Food and Drug Administration warned consumers against chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19 outside a hospital or formal clinical trial setting.
Researchers in multiple studies looking at the drug have noted serious heart rhythm issues in those treated with the medication. Two weeks ago a study conducted at Veterans Administration hospitals found patients on the drug fared worse than those who received just standard care. And, a study in Brazil ended abruptly after COVID-19 patients being given chloroquine, a medication used to create hydroxychloroquine, developed unusual heart rhythms, which led to death in some patients. As I recently reported, Gilead Sciences’ experimental drug remdesivir seems to be the front-runner in terms of a drug that may actually help COVID-19 patients.
As May is Mental Health Awareness Month AND we continue to face the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, it becomes more and more apparent that our well-being is closely tied to our mental health. For men, whose natural instinct is to take action, these times present unique challenges as most of us follow stay-at-home guidelines. With our regular routines interrupted and normal channels for processing stress – like heading to the gym or going out with friends – unavailable to us, thoughts and feelings can turn into anxiety and angst. In a new article for Healthline.com, Dan Doty, co-founder of EVRYMAN, offers some practical steps on how to help men’s mental health while coping with the stresses of isolation during the coronavirus pandemic. EVRYMAN is an online community that focuses on helping men act more productively on their emotions instead of burying or redirecting them thereby helping to build a more fulfilling life. Dan shares these four tips: • Feel Your Feelings – Taking proactive action for your mental health not only gets you the support you need, but it also helps break down the cultural stigma that can be a barrier to other men getting help. • Reach out to Connect – A call with your parents, a video chat with your co-workers, or a text message to a sibling can be invaluable right now. In order to make the best of these moments of connection, you can make them count by being more vulnerable and transparent. • Go Inside (yourself) – You don’t have to become a great meditator or world-class yogi to benefit from the amazing meditation apps that are out there. Don’t overthink it – try an exercise of setting a timer and writing for 10 minutes without stopping. Let go and write anything and everything that wants to come out. • Take Action – It might feel very tricky to take action right now, but a helpful strategy is to slow down and find small, manageable ways to move forward and orient ourselves to simple, practical actions. What may seem small and mundane at first glance can bring an air of progress and forward momentum. Click over to Healthline to read Dan’s full article. Note: EVRYMAN is currently offering free support to men all over the world via community calls and daily drop-in groups as a way for men from all walks of life to band together in support.
(screen captures) I’m just sharing, folks. Twitter user Phillip Henry posted these videos on his account a few hours ago that seems to be from an Instagram account with the handle ‘IanFrostok.’ They appear to be a lengthy series of videos shared on his InstaStory (since deleted or expired) that Henry says were “full-on house parties on a Monday night in NYC.”
People are fucking dying left and right and the gays are having full on house parties on a Monday night in NYC. JAIL pic.twitter.com/6f8Q2YzAJf
I don’t know if that’s true but I can tell you the Instagram account has disappeared. Some in the Twitterverse are curious about the shindig (coronavirus don’t you know) and identifying attendees has proven easy enough it seems since they were tagging each other with their Insta-handles. If – cause it could be wrong – but if it’s the same person, it seems an IanFrostok was profiled by DNA Magazine six days ago on how he’s “coping” with the lockdown. I guess now we know. Needless to say, the idea that a group of people partying this close together in a NYC apartment is NOT what the doctor ordered. According to the New York City Health Department, to date there have been 171,723 confirmed COVID-19 cases in the city; 43,383 hospitalized, 13,724 confirmed deaths and another 5,383 probable deaths. Twitter had some shade to throw, though.
Had the NERVE to post this right after this interview about how he’s “coping” with the lockdown 6 days ago. pic.twitter.com/5v0xoQw5Av
and look how many of them are standing by themselves on their phones. they have the chance, the opportunity to TALK to CONVERSE with real life OTHER PEOPLE and they’re like nah gotta check the gram. they’re risking so much and not even taking full advantage of that risk. 🤬
— act like you own the place (@obrienjohnjack) May 5, 2020
(stock image via Pixabay) A new investigation by The Guardian shows over 100,000 crew members of cruise ships are still stuck onboard as ports refuse to allow the vessels to dock. Additionally, air travel restrictions are keeping them from returning to their home countries. The Guardian reports:
Many of these crew are quarantined in tiny cabins, and some have had their pay cut off. They have in effect become a nation of floating castaways, marooned on boats from the Galapagos Islands to Dubai port.
Many of the crew have only minimal communication with the outside world, making their situations hard to scrutinise. But at least 17 cruise ship workers are confirmed to have died from suspected Covid-19, and dozens more have had to be evacuated from ships and taken to hospital, the Guardian found.
“We all have family, we all want to go home,” said one crew member who has been isolating in his cabin onboard the MSC Seaview off South America for nearly a month, but is no longer being paid.
One crew member, who spoke anonymously for fear of losing his job, said those on his ship were initially allowed to move about freely, but have since been told to remain in their cabins after a co-worker (who had already left the ship) tested positive for the novel coronavirus. The Guardian’s reporting adds that at the beginning of April the U.S. Coast Guard estimated there were approximately 93,000 crew members still onboard ships in and around U.S. waters alone. In other parts of the world, its believed there are tens of thousands more crew members stuck on their ships. The article quotes John Hickey, a maritime lawyer, who said crew members “did not have access to the rights afforded by their nations of citizenship, yet they were often outside the jurisdiction of the countries where their ships were sailing.”
Donald Trump has famously been promoting the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a potential cure for COVID-19 but a new study at Veterans Health Administration medical centers shows the drug had “no benefit” for those diagnosed with the virus. In fact, there were more deaths among those who received the drug versus standard care. While not a huge experiment, researchers looked at the use of the drug on 368 male veterans who were hospitalized with confirmed coronavirus infection and were either discharged or died by April 11. According to the Associated Press, 28 percent who were treated with hydroxychloroquine plus usual care died, versus 11 percent of those provided with just standard care. Among a group of patients given hydroxychloroquine plus azithromycin, 22 percent died although the researchers indicate the group wasn’t large enough to rule out other factors. Additionally, the study found the drug didn’t seem to make any difference in regard to patients needing a ventilator. Although side effects were not tracked specifically throughout the study, researchers did note the drug might have caused damage to other organs. This doesn’t come as a surprise as hydroxychloroquine has long been known to have side effects like causing blindness or affecting heartbeats. Scientists in Brazil who were studying an older version of the drug, chloroquine, ended part of their research after a quarter of those being given a higher dose developed heart rhythm issues. Interestingly, POLITICO recently reported that Trump and his buddies at Fox News have all suddenly fallen silent regarding the medication. Trump’s last mention of the drug came on April 14 just days after the study ended. As I recently reported, Gilead Sciences’ experimental drug remdesivir seems to be the front-runner in terms of a drug that may actually help COVID-19 patients.
L-R David Furnish, Elton John (via Facebook) David Furnish, husband to international pop star Elton John, shared on Facebook some misinformation about President Obama’s handling of the Ebola outbreak in 2014 as well as some fact-checking of Trump’s bumbling handling of the ongoing COVID-19 threat. Furnish says while he didn’t write the original post, he wanted people to have the facts. Well worth the reading.
For those complaining about Trump being blamed for the coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic numbers in America: a little history lesson for everyone on both sides of the political divide. I think it’s important that we understand the truth, especially come November when it’s time to vote. Forgive the length, but it’s really important to understand all the facts.
In December 2013, an 18-month-old boy in Guinea was bitten by a bat and died a brutal death a day later. After that, there were five more fatal cases. When Ebola spread out of the Guinea borders into neighboring Liberia and Sierra Leone in July 2014, President Obama activated the Emergency Operations Center at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. The CDC immediately deployed CDC personnel to West Africa to coordinate a response that included vector tracing, testing, education, logistics, and communication.
Altogether, the CDC, under President Obama, trained 24,655 medical workers in West Africa, educating them on how to prevent and control the disease before a single case left Africa or reached the U.S.
Working with the U.N. and the World Health Organization President Obama ordered the re-routing of travelers heading to the U.S. through certain specific airports equipped to handle mass testing.
Back home in America, more than 6,500 people were trained through mock outbreaks and practice scenarios. That was done before a single case hit America.
Three months after President Obama activated this unprecedented response, on September 30, 2014, we detected our first case in the U.S.A. A man had traveled from West Africa to Dallas and somehow slipped through the testing protocol. He was immediately detected and isolated. He died a week later. Two nurses who tended to him contracted Ebola but later recovered. All the protocols had worked. It was contained.
The Ebola epidemic could have easily become a pandemic, but thanks to the actions of our government under President Obama, it never did. Those THREE EBOLA CONFIRMED CASES were the ONLY cases of Ebola in the U.S.A. because Obama did what needed to be done THREE MONTHS PRIOR TO THE FIRST CASE.
Ebola is even more contagious than COVID-19. Had Obama not acted swiftly, millions of Americans would have died horrible, painful, deaths like something out of a horror movie (if you’ve never seen how Ebola kills, it’s horrific).
It is ironic because since President Obama acted decisively we forget about his actions since the disease never reached our shores.
Now the story of COVID-19 and Trump’s response that we know about thus far:
Before anyone even knew about the disease (even in China) Trump disbanded the pandemic response team that Obama had put in place. He cut funding to the CDC, and he cut our contribution to the World Health Organization (WHO).
Trump fired Rear Admiral Timothy Ziemer, the person on the National Security Council in charge of stopping the spread of infectious diseases before they reach our country – a position created by the Obama administration.
When the outbreak started in China, Trump assumed it was China’s problem and sent no research, supplies or help of any kind. We were in a trade war, why should he help them?
In January he received a briefing from our intelligence organizations that the outbreak was much worse than China was admitting and that it would definitely hit our country if something wasn’t done to prevent it. He ignored the report, not trusting our own intelligence.
When the disease spread to Europe, the World Health Organization offered a plethora of tests to the United States. Trump turned them down, saying private companies here would make the tests “better” if we needed them. However, he never ordered U.S. companies to make tests and they had no profit motive to do so on their own.
According to scientists at Yale and several public university medical schools, when they asked for permission to start working on our own testing protocol and potential treatments or vaccines, they were denied by Trump’s FDA.
When Trump knew about the first case in the United States he did nothing. It was just one case and the patient was isolated. When doctors and scientists started screaming in the media that this was a mistake, Trump claimed it was a “liberal hoax” conjured up to try to make him “look bad after impeachment failed.”
The next time Trump spoke of COVID-19, we had SIXTY-FOUR CONFIRMED CASES but Trump went before microphones and told the American public that we only had FIFTEEN cases “and pretty soon that number will be close to zero.” All while the disease was spreading, he took no action to get more tests.
What Trump did was to stop flights from China from coming here. This was too late and accomplished nothing according to scientists and doctors. By then the disease was worldwide and was already spreading exponentially in the U.S. by Americans, not Chinese people as Trump would like you to believe.
As of the moment, I am posting this, the evening of April 17, 2020, we have 706,309 COVID-19 CONFIRMED CASES and 37,000 COVID-19 DEATHS in the U.S.A. The actual number is undoubtedly more than triple that amount given ongoing limited availability of testing.
If you are as outraged as I am by all of this, the most important thing my friends in America can do is get out and vote in November.
p.s. The photo above was taken as Elton recorded his performance of “I’m Still Standing” for Global Citizen’s One World: Together at Home 8-hour talent livestream marathon which helped raise $127 million and pay tribute to frontline healthcare workers in the fight against coronavirus.
Sam Cushing’s 8-minute workout I know I’ve seen lots of workouts on the interwebs during the stay-at-home quarantining, but I wanted to share this one from fitness guy Sam Cushing. One, no equipment needed! It’s under 8 minutes and includes core, legs, abs, chest, and a bit of arms. Two, easy on the eyes 🙂
(image via Depositphotos) For some weeks now, Donald Trump has heralded malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as showing “tremendous promise” to combat COVID-19 but no study has yielded any sufficient data (yet) that bears out Trump’s “feeling” that it would be the salvation folks are hoping for. But drugmaker Gilead may have some good news soon about its experimental drug Remdesivir. From StatNews:
Remdesivir was one of the first medicines identified as having the potential to impact SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, in lab tests. The entire world has been waiting for results from Gilead’s clinical trials, and positive results would likely lead to fast approvals by the Food and Drug Administration and other regulatory agencies.
If safe and effective, it could become the first approved treatment against the disease.
The University of Chicago Medicine recruited 125 people with COVID-19 into Gilead’s two Phase 3 clinical trials. Of those people, 113 had severe disease. All the patients have been treated with daily infusions of remdesivir.
“The best news is that most of our patients have already been discharged, which is great. We’ve only had two patients perish,” said Kathleen Mullane, the University of Chicago infectious disease specialist overseeing the remdesivir studies for the hospital.
It’s important to note that a group of 125 patients in Chicago isn’t large enough to give researchers the depth of information they need. Gilead is currently overseeing 152 separate clinical trials around the world involving 2,400 severe patients. There are an additional 169 trials following 1,600 moderate COVID-19 patients. Until the trials are closed and the numbers crunched we won’t have a clear idea as to how useful the drug might be against coronavirus. That said, one man’s story definitely shows promise. Slawomir Michalak, a 57-year-old factory worker from a suburb west of Chicago, told StatNews he went to the University of Chicago Medicine hospital on Friday, April 3, when he spiked a 104 fever and found it difficult to breathe. He was put on oxygen and given the option to join the severe coronavirus trial. On Saturday, April 4, he received his first infusion of the drug. “My fever dropped almost immediately and I started to feel better,” he said. The next day, he received a second dose and was able to breathe without supplemental oxygen. After two more daily treatments of remdesivir, he was well enough to be discharged on Tuesday, April 7. It’s only one man’s experience with the drug, but let’s keep our fingers crossed.
Donald Trump took to Twitter to troll New York state Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Tuesday claiming the governor was “begging” for federal government assistance to combat the COVID-19 threat. “Cuomo’s been calling daily, even hourly, begging for everything, most of which should have been the state’s responsibility, such as new hospitals, beds, ventilators, etc,” Trump tweeted. “I got it all done for him, and everyone else, and now he seems to want Independence! That won’t happen!” This follows Cuomo’s repeated statements denying Trump’s claim to have “total authority” on when U.S. states will cease their COVID-19 lockdowns. On Monday, Trump told reporters he has “total authority” to run the country, which he believes, re-opening the country’s businesses at any given time. But legal experts point to the fact that Trump never issued a national disaster proclamation. And so, there’s no ban from his office to lift. Cuomo told reporters that he would sue Trump if he attempted to re-open the Empire state too early. Cuomo also said, “there’s no value” in the president’s coronavirus press conferences.
Cuomo’s been calling daily, even hourly, begging for everything, most of which should have been the state’s responsibility, such as new hospitals, beds, ventilators, etc. I got it all done for him, and everyone else, and now he seems to want Independence! That won’t happen!
Tell the Democrat Governors that “Mutiny On The Bounty” was one of my all time favorite movies. A good old fashioned mutiny every now and then is an exciting and invigorating thing to watch, especially when the mutineers need so much from the Captain. Too easy!
