⚕️ CARE NOT COVID Public Comment Campaign to CMS to stop Hospital Acquired Covid 🏥 Content warning: Callous comments about elderly & disabled 💔 EMERGENCY was a label and only the label has changed
Please stay home if you’re sick. Please demand a sick leave guarantee for all.
Contents:
- Events, Actions, & Campaigns
- Pandemic field notes & “Living with the virus”
- In the News (virus & adjacent media, science, news, and op-eds)
- This is NOT Fine section (gaslighting & other outrages)
- He(a)rd Scuttlebutt (the pandemic grapevine)
USA Public Comment Campaign to CMS - Hospitals should protect us from Hospital-Acquired COVID
By People’s CDC: We have until June 9, 2023 to tell the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) that hospitals should give us care, not COVID. CMS has a huge influence on hospitals. 94% of hospitals have at least half of their admissions paid for by Medicare or Medicaid. CMS already penalizes hospitals which fail to keep patients safe from other hospital-acquired infections and could push hospitals to protect patients from catching COVID when in their care.
peoplescdc.substack.com/p/tell-cms-care-not-covid
USA Letter Campaign: to the U.S. Senate, Medicare should track Healthcare Acquired Covid and require masks to prevent it
By People’s CDC: Please join us in sending a clear message to your Senator that you demand them to call on the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid to require protections and universal masking in healthcare settings, continued reporting of healthcare acquired COVID infections, and to count COVID as one of several other conditions in reducing payments to hospital for healthcare services.
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/track-healthcare-acquired-covid-and-require-masks/
🗞️ In the news
🇺🇸 Washington Post - Tally of covid-19 cases after CDC conference climbs to 181. By Lena H. Sun, May 26, 2023 The outbreak of covid-19 cases at the conference underscores the persistence of an evolving and highly infectious virus.Another CDC global health meeting is scheduled for the same hotel in early June; about 300 to 400 people are expected to attend in person, said one CDC employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak. In a “Know Before You Go” document shared with The Washington Post, CDC organizers encourage attendees at the June conference to wear their “own high-quality masks and, if possible, also carry covid-19 rapid tests with them.” Organizers of the second conference were informed about the covid outbreak at the earlier event, CDC spokeswoman Kristen Nordlund said. The agency will have masks available if employees want to wear one, she said.
🇺🇸 COVID Data Dispatch newsletter: How wastewater surveillance is funded, and concerns for its future. April 2, 2023. More permanent funding could go a long way in convincing more state health agencies to invest in wastewater surveillance programs, rather than relying on outside assistance from companies like Biobot or academic partners. More data and guidance on how to actually use wastewater data to inform public health decisions would help, too, since many agencies are still figuring this out. Such investment at the state level would help make the country’s wastewater infrastructure more comprehensive, and more capable of responding to new health threats. Instead, right now, we have an uneven system. Some places are regularly monitoring for COVID-19 and easily able to expand to new testing targets, while others might lose this valuable data source in the next year or two. For any local reporters reading this, I highly recommend digging into your community’s wastewater surveillance system, and figuring out whether it’s set up for the long term.
🇺🇸 Medscape - COVID Emergency Over, but Hundreds Are Still Dying Weekly, by Claire Sibonney, May 17, 2023 The prevailing attitude that we need to learn to live with the current level of risk feels like a "slap in the face," for COVID grievers who have already paid the price," said Sabila Khan, who co-founded a Facebook group for COVID loss support, which now has more than 14,000 members. It also minimizes the continuing loss of life and that so many people are still dying traumatic and unnecessary deaths, she said. "It feels like it's been brushed aside," she said. "Like, 'It's business as usual. It's over. Take off your mask.' My family and I are still masked, and we're probably the only ones masked in any given room." The abandoning of protective measures also fails to recognize the ongoing and catastrophic risks of long COVID and the experiences of an estimated 26 million people in the U.S. living with long COVID. "It's been drummed into us that death is the only serious outcome [of the virus] and we still haven't made enough space for the idea that long COVID is a very serious outcome," said David Putrino, PhD, director of rehabilitation innovation for the Mount Sinai Health System in New York City, who has helped care for thousands of patients with long COVID.
📌 The Nation: Want to Fix Public Health? Stop Thinking Like a Doctor. Public health requires seeing the world from a collective perspective, but US agencies are still dominated by doctors trained to work on an individual level. By Eric Reinhart February 22, 2023 Public health doesn’t meet people where they are at; it enables them to move freely by altering their environment to facilitate risk-reducing behaviors, such as staying home from work when sick without fear of lost income. It’s not about individual risk tolerance, but about government making use of population-level tools—such as infrastructural investments in clean air and water—to lower the level of risk to which individuals are exposed by living in society. To do this effectively, public health prioritizes protections for those whose freedom is most obstructed by the current state of affairs: those who are immunocompromised, elderly, or incarcerated; migrant agricultural workers; people of color; and others especially exposed to harm. Public health should do this not simply out of altruism but because it recognizes that allowing harm to fall on vulnerable groups will ultimately return as multiplying harm for society. Public health thus requires seeing the world “from below,” rather than through the eyes of bankers, economists, or opinion writers at national newspapers.
🇨🇦 CTV News: Previous COVID infection linked to lower brain oxygen levels, cognitive problems: study. By Alexandra Mae Jones. March 7, 2023 In a new Canadian study, researchers found that not only did participants who previously had COVID-19perform worse on two specific cognitive tasks, but brain imaging showed that during these tasks, there was a lack of oxygen reaching the sections of the brain that would normally be fully engaged.
This is NOT fine
Some doctors think if you’re over 50 you’re lucky to be alive at all, so don’t expect more?
LA Times - What you need to know to stay safe from COVID after the public health emergency ends, By Melissa Healy, May 11, 2023 But COVID-19 hasn’t stopped killing people No, it hasn’t. So let’s look at who continues to be at greatest risk, and what you can do about it. If you have the good fortune to have lived well into retirement age, then you have the bad luck of being most vulnerable to dying of COVID-19. Since mid-April, virtually all Americans who have succumbed to the disease have been at least 50, and the overwhelming majority have been over 75.
Holy cow, medical professionals should not be in major media asserting the concept that you’re lucky to make it this far so too bad about your risk.
Mirror - 'Brits are dying in their tens of thousands - and we don't really have any idea why' - Tens of thousands more Brits died than usual from May to December 2022, excluding Covid as a cause of death, raising serious questions as to why so many died. Ever since the Covid pandemic, excess deaths have fluctuated wildly month on month, tumbling well below the five-year average or spiking far above it. By Kieren Williams, 11 May 2023 Professor David Coleman, Emeritus Professor of Demography at Oxford University, told the Mirror that no one knew for certain what had caused so many deaths throughout last year. He pointed out that, post Covid, the UK’s population had been changed through the deaths of a significant proportion of elderly due to the virus. He explained: “Once those poor people have been packed off, the remaining population should be healthier, there should be a period afterwards where deaths are lower than usual but that hasn’t happened.”
Packed off? They were hoping that it would just cull the weak and “leave the healthier” eh? No, that hasn’t happened because eugenics is junk pseudoscience with no basis in reality.
Eugenics is merely a sick fantasy worldview for racists and people who, through wishful thinking, like to believe themselves to be superior to other people in some way that makes them more suited for survival and therefore more deserving. My father, my step-father, and my uncle, all fought in a war against this ideology.
He(a)rd Scuttlebutt… pandemic grapevine 🍇🌱
I saw someone post on social media, in all earnestness describing how they have a coworker getting chemo who they know is high risk, and that they don’t want harm them. But they said if they get sick they’ll mask at work for that coworker. They are not even considering staying home when sick. And not even considering masking now when they could be pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic. This person also mentioned having several kids in school so their chances of bringing death to a coworker with cancer is fairly high. But they think they’re very virtuous because they were responding to someone who was mocking someone with a mask on at an airport. So comparatively they’re centrist on the matter since they’ll capitulate and not actually cough directly on their coworker with cancer and they don’t actually jeer at photos of masked Asian strangers in an airport. It is a supreme public health and leadership failure that this person believes they are quite moral and righteous and reasonable.
Please stay home if you’re sick. Please demand a sick leave guarantee for all.
There’s actually ample evidence that masks work. It’s not confusing, and it’s not rocket science, and PPE isn’t a new concept. And if it works one on one, then it stands to reason that it would slow spread of disease at the population level. But, let’s say it made no difference at the population level. Let’s say that it made no difference in “the course of the pandemic” whether I live or die, personally, as an individual. I still want to stay alive. I DO NOT WANT MY DENTIST OR ENT DOCTOR BREATHING VIRUS DIRECTLY INTO MY MOUTH WHILE I'M HAVING DENTAL WORK OR AN ENDOSCOPY. What part of this is beyond Monica Gandhi's understanding? And can we finally have media stop inviting back professional wrong people? And why wouldn’t doctors understand why patients don’t want to get sick? It’s pretty simple. Don’t infect me, I don’t want to get sick. I don’t want to get covid at the doctor’s office or hospital. Having my doctor mask not about me saving the world, it’s about my wanting to avoid illness.
“This minimalist position, now often denialist in nature, has been gaining steam since early in the pandemic.”
Rob Wallace, evolutionary epidemiologist, on People’s CDC Covid This Week, Apr 30, 2023