👍 New Boosters approved in US & Canada for 6 months & up 💉 PA campaign calling for booster ad drive ✏️ The only people panicking are the people in charge. 🙄
CDC's guidance for education recommends mask requirements in classrooms to provide integrated access to education for disabled and immunocompromised students.
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)
Pennsylvania USA Letter Campaign: Tell Governor Josh Shapiro Run the boost vaccine ads!
By Chloe Humbert: Please join me in writing to Governor Josh Shapiro to do a vaccine drive using the wonderful ad campaign the state already had made and can be rolled out again to save lives.
🇺🇸 Oregon USA Letter Campaign : Tell OHA to keep COVID-19 as a restrictable disease and reinstate a five-day isolation period!
By Pan End It: This school year, Oregon is no longer asking all students and teachers with COVID-19 to stay home. Instead, COVID-positive people only have to stay home if they have symptoms; under current school guidance, asymptomatic and presymptomatic people with COVID are allowed to attend school, even though they can also transmit COVID-19.
Accessible education?
CDC - COVID-19 - Operational Guidance for K-12 Schools and Early Care and Education Programs to Support Safe In-Person Learning - Updated May 11, 2023 Schools with students at risk for getting very sick with COVID-19 must make reasonable modifications or accommodations when necessary to ensure that all students, including those with disabilities, are able to access in-person learning. Schools might need to require masking in settings such as classrooms or during activities to protect students with immunocompromising conditions or other conditions that increase their risk for getting very sick with COVID-19 in accordance with applicable federal, state, or local laws and policies. For more information and support, visit the U.S. Department of Education’s Disability Rights webpage. Students with immunocompromising conditions or other conditions or disabilities that increase risk for getting very sick with COVID-19 should not be placed into separate classrooms or otherwise segregated from other students.
With schools demanding that students attend while sick or covid positive in order to get funding, I see a conflict here.
LA Times - Got a cold, runny nose, the sniffles? No worries! Come to school, LAUSD says. By Howard Blume Aug. 12, 2023 His listed the mental-health harms of being out of school that have been cited by authorities, including U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy: “Anxiety, depression, social-emotional stressors, suicidal ideation.” The superintendent also noted a financial impact. If the current 90% daily attendance rate rose to 95% — which it was pre-pandemic — the result, he said, would be $300 million more in state funding, which is largely based on attendance.
Universal masks is an equity, inclusion, and integration issue.
Insider - "I'm immunocompromised, so COVID-19 is still a big risk for me. When I got into grad school, I had to choose between my health and my education." Billy Lezra Aug 25, 2023, 2:35 PM EDT I had a choice: either decline to enroll in the graduate program and continue working remotely or embark on an opportunity that would facilitate future professional endeavors. Ultimately, I decided to pursue my education — with caution and fear. When I arrived on campus I noticed signs plastered everywhere that read, "Masks are recommended, but not required."
🗞️ In the news
CBC - Health Canada approves Moderna's updated COVID-19 vaccine - The mRNA-based shot is monovalent, targets Omicron XBB.1.5 subvariant - Lauren Pelley · CBC News · Posted: Sep 12, 2023 11:09 AM EDT Health Canada has approved Moderna's updated COVID-19 vaccine for all Canadians who are six months of age and older — while two other options for fall shots remain in the regulatory pipeline. Federal officials announced the approval on Tuesday morning, more than two months after Moderna submitted its new formulation.
FDA and CDC say yes to updated COVID boosters. Here's what to know about the new vaccine shots for fall 2023. By Alexander Tin, Sara Moniuszko Updated on: September 12, 2023 / 6:38 PM / CBS News "CDC is now recommending updated COVID-19 vaccination for everyone 6 months and older to better protect you and your loved ones," CDC Director Dr. Mandy Cohen said in a release after signing off on the panel's recommendations. The CDC committee voted in favor of "universal" recommendations for the shots to all Americans who are eligible, after weighing data and modeling backing the need for the new shots. "The public can be assured that these updated vaccines have met the agency's rigorous scientific standards for safety, effectiveness, and manufacturing quality.
National Nurses United - Press Release - UCMC nurses highlight dangerous staffing conditions as contract negotiations begin - September 12, 2023 With negotiations for their new contract set to begin Thursday, September 14, University of Chicago Medical Center (UCMC) nurses are urgently calling on management to reverse the endemic short-staffing at the hospital.
The Times-Tribune - Despite teacher shortage, area schools staffed this fall BY SARAH HOFIUS HALL STAFF WRITER Sep 11, 2023 With classes in session in the region’s schools, a teacher should be in every classroom. That wasn’t always the case a year ago. While local school districts continue to struggle to find applicants for many positions, leaders credit greater recruitment efforts and in Scranton, a new teacher’s contract, with helping find teachers.
The Philadelphia Inquirer - The White House proposed staffing requirements for nursing home. What would that mean for Pennsylvania? SEIU Pennsylvania, a union representing nursing home workers, applauded Joe Biden as the first president to focus on the issue in decades. by Abraham Gutman Published Sep. 11, 2023 The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted how the low staffing levels in nursing homes played a role in the high numbers of COVID-19 deaths within many facilities. At the same time, profit-driven private equity firms have been purchasing nursing homes, a trend that caught the ire of the White House. “And as Wall Street firms take over more nursing homes, quality in those homes has gone down and costs have gone up,” Biden said in his 2022 State of the Union remarks. The proposed staffing requirement is the flagship item in a list of actions the White House announced Sept. 1. Others include more robust enforcement of existing standards and increased transparency of nursing home ownership.
Miami Herald - Federal jury convicts 4 Florida men for selling bleach solution as ‘miracle’ cure for diseases BY JAY WEAVER UPDATED JULY 20, 2023 2:56 PM During the trial and closing arguments, prosecutors had a lot to say about the four defendants from Bradenton, portraying them as con men who used a phony religious front on a website, the Genesis II Church of Health and Healing, to sell $1 million worth of their “Miracle Mineral Solution” in video pitches as a cure for 95% of the world’s known diseases, from AIDS to the coronavirus. “This whole Miracle Mineral Solution scheme was built on deception and dishonesty,” prosecutor John Shipley said during his closing argument, telling jurors that the Grenons “created a fake church to make it harder for the Food and Drug Administration and government to stop them from selling snake oil.” But, “this was no church,” he argued. “This was a scam for money — an old-fashioned scam.”
Insider - I've worked at Amazon for years, but now I'm looking for a new job because our RTO mandate would force me to uproot my life. Sarah Jackson. Sep 4, 2023 After about a year of working elsewhere, I returned to Amazon last year for a role advertised as remote, and up until the last six months, I was happily working here in my city. But then Amazon made an announcement about returning to the office, and now I'm being told I need to move to Seattle or switch teams, or I'm out of a job. It wasn't even a year ago when Andy Jassy was saying there were no plans for an RTO. So that already was just a huge slap in the face. Every update since has gotten worse and worse. This whole time, I've been kind of fatalistic; I assumed I'd be out of my job at some point because they'd make me move to Seattle. It's been a stressful six months. My partner has told me I've become more angry and depressed this whole time. No one in my local management chain has any power to help with this. It's 100% a top-down mandate. I'm angry, I'm frustrated. I came back specifically to work remotely; to have this taken away is just a huge breach of trust.
This is NOT fine
B.C. hospital sees fast spread of COVID-19, but no outbreak declared due to 'negative connotations' Health authority instead using 'enhanced measures' for infection control such as masking and extra cleaning Brishti Basu · CBC News · Posted: Sep 07, 2023 Health-care workers at a hospital on Vancouver Island are sounding the alarm about the fast spread of COVID-19 at the facility in the last few weeks, after public health officials said they would not declare it an outbreak because of "negative connotations."
Somebody needs to send Vancouver Island Health this article like I sent it to a local official. Give us a break.
Foreign Policy Magazine - The Only People Panicking Are the People in Charge. The public can handle disasters better than lying leaders can. By Malka Older - September 16, 2020, 6:16 PM It’s a staple trope of movies and TV shows. But there are more than 50 years of disaster studies demonstrating that people don’t do that in real life. As early as 1954, E.L. Quarantelli, who later founded the Disaster Research Center, had enough data to suggest that panic after a disaster was “uncommon.” Studies of disasters—from hurricanes to snowstorms isolating people in highway rest stops to the collapse of the World Trade Center on 9/11—show that the public does not panic, does not run screaming, and typically reacts in a reasonably rational way. In fact, studies show that people tend to react in highly social ways after a catastrophe...
He(a)rd Scuttlebutt… pandemic grapevine 🍇🌱
JENN DIZE dished some deets about funding behind some of the anti-vax disinformation in journalism on “the left” and this includes reference to a Canadian figure named Donald Best — in this youtube stream: Jimmy Dore, Sketchy Funding, Peter Allard, Anti-Vax Rhetoric, and Me - Courage News - September 15, 2023.
The anti-vax stuff and all the opposition to public health is a well funded deliberate operation and there is plenty of proof of exactly how it all works.
The more people know about how this works the wind is taken out of their sails and the cognitive attack is nerfed. These people are not in the majority, and the polio elimination campaign had its horrendous and ridiculous detractors too, and they were overcome.
I have been hearing reports that schools in the USA are threatening truancy for children who don’t report to school covid positive, and that the schools are requiring 100F+ fever to excuse absence. I have no idea how you’re meant to verify a fever that wouldn’t be weird. And I don’t know what kind of school wants contagious children to show up and infect the staff, teachers, and other students, but here we go again. I wrote about this over a year ago. People should consult the DOCTORS about how children should convalesce with any medical condition. A child’s health should not be trusted to some rando down at the school making rules for mixed up reasons. If you’re concerned about consequences, ask the school specifically what they actually intend to do (maybe nothing) or what they need documented to excuse absence, maybe contact a lawyer, or consider calling your state representative’s office who may have resources to help dealing with egregious headache bureaucracy like this.
“Healthcare workers who attend patients with a respiratory tract infection transmissible by inhalation need to be provided at a minimum with N95 filtering facepiece respirators. For pandemic type pathogens causing high morbidity and mortality a powered air purifying respirator with high efficiency filters is preferred. Surgical masks and medical masks are not sufficient nor are barrier face coverings.”
— Mark Nicas PhD MPH CIH
public comment at the CDC HICPAC Meeting on June 8th 2023
I submitted my letter directly via the Gov.'s site since the Action Now link wasn't generating a recipient address, "Sorry, no recipients were found. Please enter an address to try again."
I urged sharing the campaign collateral immediately, heavily, and widely as an investment in the commonwealth that will return over generations.
Likewise, ignoring the simple and immediate public protections, including the tool of information, will be deeply damaging for generations to come, dramatically impacting the prosperity of the commonwealth and it's constituents.