🪧 Action, World AIDS Day Dec 1st in DC with remote option🎙️ Public comment on flawed data at NYC Council meeting 📝 Letter Campaign: Tell Congress: Protect Medicaid in end-of-year legislation
A group of Ontario parents is raising money to challenge the Ford government in court in an attempt to bring back COVID-19 protections. amid high case counts across the province.
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 - December 1, 2022 Action: Washington DC with remote option
Biden and Congress Must End Colliding Pandemic Nightmares
Join us virtually and on site outside the White House in Washington, D.C., on World AIDS Day, December 1, 2022, to demand President Biden and the U.S. Congress take urgent action to confront our global nightmare. We ask all participants in the onsite action to wear an N95 or KN95 mask, which will be provided. Interpretation will be provided in ASL.
Sign up here to take action virtually or onsite on December 1, or endorse this action as an organization.
USA Letter Campaign: Tell Congress: Prevent millions of people from losing health care coverage. Protect Medicaid coverage in end-of-year legislation
Over the last three years, as a result of rule changes made during the COVID-19 public health emergency, the uninsured rate in the United States has reached a record low as enrollment in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) increased. This was, in part, due to “continuous coverage requirements,” which will end when the public health emergency ends, unless Congress acts.
By Coalition On Human Needs
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-congress-prevent-millions-of-people-from-losing-health-care-coverage-protect-medicaid-coverage-in-end-of-year-legislation/
NEW YORK CITY, USA
Sign-on Letter: Calling on NYC to put in place a free N95 mask distribution program across the city!
Looking for organizations to sign-on to a sign-on letter calling for a free N95 mask distribution program in New York City. If you're part of an organization that is interested in signing on in support, please contact Mandate Masks NY.
By Mandate Masks NY
NEW YORK CITY COUNCIL, Public Hearing: "Oversight - COVID-19 in NYC: Evaluating the Present Challenges."
@PriscillaGrim gave excellent, important testimony and published it on Twitter 4:07 PM · Nov 7, 2022
I just testified at @NYCCouncil on the misdirection and misleading COVID numbers presented on https://www.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page.
Thank you for giving me time today. I am a digital strategist, a concerned New Yorker, and a mom.
I am here today because I have been following the COVID 19 data page on nyc.gov to inform myself and my household about the levels of risk of COVID infection in day-to-day life.
In visiting the page from week to week over the past few months, I noticed two things:
Historical data, week over week, month over month, is not present.
The numbers I remembered seeing the week prior did not match the descriptions of “decreasing” or “stable.”
In the following presentation, I will show you these examples from screenshots I have taken since September.
On slide 3, you will see that the daily average of deaths, at 8, is marked as “decreasing” from the week prior, which is incorrect, as the week prior daily average of deaths was 5.
On slide 9, you will see that the percent positive is 10.2, an increase from the week prior of 9.4, yet quantified as “stable.”
On slide 10, you will see that the hospitalizations are at 87, and on slide 11, the data from this week, we have 94 hospitalizations, yet the data is quantified as “decreasing.”
According to the city-reported data, since September 2022, we have had a 28% increase in the cases of COVID in NYC.
The NYC.gov reporting tool does not reflect this reality and is dangerous, intentionally misleading the public on the risk of becoming sick, again, from preventable pandemic exposure.
I ask you to use your power to do the following:
Fix this dashboard to reflect the actual reality of COVID in NYC
Reinstate the mask mandate in public transit and all public indoor spaces
Use city resources to provide free N95 masks to the public.
These three simple asks will help us work together to prevent further pandemic illness, prioritize public safety, and protect the most vulnerable of New York City with a culture of care grounded in the data of scientific observation.
🗞️ In the news
🇨🇦 Global News: Parents group looks to take Ford government to court over classroom COVID measures By Colin D'Mello (A group of Ontario parents is raising money to challenge the Ford government in court in an attempt to bring back COVID-19 protections amid high case counts across the province. The grassroots organization, which calls itself Ontario School Safety, launched a fundraiser in early September looking to raise $75,000 to fund a legal challenge against the Ontario government. “Most parents in our group have already tried going to various levels of government, administrators, MPPs sending in petitions, signing letters,” said Heather Hanwell, a spokesperson for the group. “We’ve exhausted all of our options to have evidence-based and data-driven protections (in schools.)”)
↩️ Truthout: Abled-Bodied Leftists Cannot Abandon Disabled Solidarity to “Move On” From COVID by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (By these terms, I mean the immense, on-purpose effort by the state to throw down the memory hole the fact that the last two years of the pandemic happened. The CDC switching its easiest-to-find map from the accurate community transmission map to one that shows the whole country in (fake) happy low-risk green. Biden saying offhandedly that “the pandemic is over” even as thousands of people die every week and groups like Long COVID Justice and #MEAction organize — from bed and in die ins in front of the White House — demanding that the U.S. declare long COVID a public health emergency. The state is acting like a bad boyfriend, a gaslighting partner telling you that nothing you remember is real. That’s not new, but the intensity level has reached a new high.)
🇺🇸 Military.com: Veterans Home COVID-19 Outbreak Results in $58M Settlement (The families of veterans who died will receive a minimum of $400,000 each, while veterans who contracted the disease and survived will receive a minimum of $10,000 under the settlement's terms. Aleo expects the settlement to be disbursed within four to eight weeks. The defendants in the case were four former leaders at the state-run home and the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the state agency that oversees the facility. With the approval of the settlement, which is being paid by the state, claims against all five were dropped. An investigation by a former federal prosecutor hired by Gov. Charlie Baker found that management at the home made several “utterly baffling” decisions that allowed the virus to spread almost unchecked.)
🔬 CNBC: People who caught mild Covid had increased risk of blood clots, British study finds by Spencer Kimball (Patients with mild Covid, defined as those not hospitalized, were 2.7 times more likely to develop blood clots, according to the study published in the British Medical Journal’s Heart on Monday. They were also 10 times more likely to die than people who did not have Covid.)
🇺🇸 16 WNDU-TV: South Bend High school cancels rest of football season due to lack of healthy players (Bellevue High School has joined other programs that have also recently canceled their football seasons. Last month, officials at Okemos High School in Michigan said they canceled their remaining games because of health concerns regarding players. A school district in Nebraska also made a similar decision at Lincoln Northwest High School in September.)
This is NOT fine
But despite having access to the dollars, school systems throughout the country reported spending less than 15 percent of the federal funding, known as ESSER III, the most recent installment of Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief, during the 2021-2022 school year, according to a Washington Post analysis of data collected by Edunomics, an education finance group at Georgetown University.
He(a)rd Scuttlebutt… pandemic grapevine 🍇🌱
Many times people in academia tell me something along the lines of how it’s not so easy to organize when you’re in academia, it’s not easy to speak out or engage in activism, because, they say, the whole system disincentivizes activism. Hullo. All systems disincentivize going against the system!! Yes, activism is all about going against status quo systems. It’s not easy for an Amazon warehouse worker or a Starbucks employee to union organize, and risk their living. They do it anyway because it must be done. The University of California academic workers went on strike. So yes, you can do activism in academia. It’s not easy, that’s the deal. You do it anyway because it’s the right thing to do. And, yes, it does often work.
"The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently."
— David Graeber