š„ Call for Medicare to prevent Hospital Acquired Covid š· Controlling the pandemic because all the vulnerable have died is not public health š§¦ Beware social media sock puppets
Pandemic asks #3: Be a compassionate public health role model.
Contents:
- Events, Actions, & Campaigns
- Pandemic field notes & āLiving with the virusā
- 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 Peopleās 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.
USA Letter Campaign: to the U.S. Senate, Medicare should track Healthcare Acquired Covid and require masks to prevent it
By Peopleās 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.
USA Letter Campaign: Free PCR tests and CDC Data Collection
By Peopleās CDC: Join us in writing Congress, the CDC and the ICATT and ask them to make Free PCR tests available for all through ICATT. They can do this by maintaining and expanding the pharmacy and stand-alone testing sites through Color Health, eTruthNorth, Quest and others at libraries, retail locations and independent pharmacies, and to expand this program to require community health centers to test residents for free.
Pandemic Asks - What do you wish the experts would do? Reader Suggestions #3 - Be a Compassionate Public Health Role Model
This is from reader submissions to the query form, What do you wish the experts would do in regards to the pandemic?
Reader advice submitted urging public health voices and doctors in the public eye speaking out about pandemic issues and those at risk:
To public health professionals, scientists, and doctors:
āIf someone wants to take a picture of you, resist requests to remove your mask. It doesnāt matter if youāre inside or outside. It doesnāt matter if youāre showing your negative covid tests in the picture. It doesnāt matter if you just came out of a month long quarantine, took several types of tests every day during that time, and every single one came out negative. It doesnāt matter if you hold your breath, and stand outside āfor just a secondā - Wear a damn mask when you take a selfie! Canāt manage that? Donāt post it on social media. Donāt use it in interviews. Donāt use it in promotional materials. Donāt be a hypocrite and donāt show your privilege.ā
I would like to think that at least some would take to heart the voices of the most hurt in the pandemic. There simply must be people who mean well and are simply dropping the ball because of social ineptitude. On the other hand, I do think we need to stop following influencers on social media and stop expecting them to act like anything other than cult of personality celebrities who enjoy their exceptional position and that their followers have to play by different rules.
When I get annoyed at what yet another so-called advocate, or doctor, celebrity or scientist has done, that shouldnāt be happening, I write my representatives to complain ā I make my pitch to the people who can make some regulations to materially improve the problem. Iām currently 1/3 the way through 100 postcards to Biden. Not because I think heās some great guy, but because itās my right to be heard by my representative in the White House. I will not let this moment pass into history without registering my objections.
šļø In the news
āļø Wisconsin Public Radio - A call to return to masking in health care facilities. Air Date: Thursday, June 1, 2023 Host: Kate Archer Kent Guest(s): Dr. Kaitlin Sundling Producer(s): Joe Tarr Technical Director(s): A. Emily Ralph In recent months, hospitals have stopped requiring people to wear masks in their facilities. We speak with a pathologist who is among many health care workers calling for universal masking in medical facilities because of the risks facing workers and patients.
šŗšø Payday Report - 1,900 Amazon Seattle Office Workers Walkout ā 10,000 Florida Healthcare Workers Refusing Overtime ā Alabama College Football Coach Calls for Unionizing. By: Mike Elk June 1, 2023 For the next five days, over 10,000 Florida healthcare workers, members of SEIU, employed at HCA, are refusing to work voluntary overtime at 19 hospitals owned by HCA. The workers say they are doing it to protest understaffing at the hospital chain.
š¬ USA Today - What does long COVID do to kids? What we've learned after a year of research. āMany of these kids were completely healthy kids prior to the diagnosis and it can completely disrupt their life and their ability to participate in sports and school,ā one researcher said. By Adrianna Rodriguez, April 5, 2023Ā When Monika Kalra Varmaās son started getting chronic headaches, long COVID was the last thing on her mind. But when the 9-year-old contracted COVID-19 in December 2021, Akshay Varma developed asthma, chronic headaches, heart palpitations and other symptoms that lasted for months. āWe had been reading about (long COVID) for adults, we didnāt know it was really a thing for children,ā said Kalra Varma, who lives in Alexandria, Virginia. If it werenāt for the pediatrician, āwe may not have connected that it was long COVID.ā
š² Who What Why - Big Mystery Donors Fund COVID Conspiracy Nonprofit. By WALKER BRAGMAN 03/21/23 The COVID-19 vaccines have saved millions of lives. While breakthrough infections are not rare, studies have found that vaccination reduces transmission. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend the jabs, including the bivalent dose, for everyone ages six months and older. Major medical groups like the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Family Physicians, and the American Academy of Pediatrics backed the recommendation. As Mother Jones noted, Brownstone has promoted quack COVID-19 cures like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin and celebrated anti-vaccine demonstrations. The group has tacitly encouraged radicalism from its supporters. Tucker himself authored an article that ran with an image of a guillotine about holding public health officials and policymakers āaccountableā for trying to save lives from a deadly, airborne pathogen. Tucker suggested that āconsequencesā would āset a fabulous precedent for the future.ā Brownstone fellow Paul Alexander, a former Trump administration HHS science adviser who famously advocated for mass infection, published an error-ridden, semi-coherent tirade on his blog calling for violent retribution against public health officials who sought to limit the spread of COVID-19.
For instance, he said, anti-vaccine groups that are already skeptical of the U.S. government are now primed to disbelieve the official U.S. government narrative around Ukraine. Russian āinfluence operationsā relying on disinformation āexist at a steady state,ā and have for years, added Brookie, but the ramp-up to war in Ukraine has brought āa massive surge.ā Jennifer Granston, head of insights at the social media analytics firm Zignal Labs, said the conspiracy theory that the Ukraine conflict is a government-manufactured distraction from supposed harms of COVID-19 vaccines is one of the disinformation narratives her company has monitored in recent days, along with the claim, embraced by a Russian state media outlet, that the invasion is a mere āpeacekeeping mission.ā
š§ Scientific American: Long COVID Now Looks like a Neurological Disease, Helping Doctors to Focus Treatments. The causes of long COVID, which disables millions, may come together in the brain and nervous system. By Stephani Sutherland on March 1, 2023 The most common, persistent and disabling symptoms of long COVID are neurological. Some are easily recognized as brain- or nerve-related: many people experience cognitive dysfunction in the form of difficulty with memory, attention, sleep and mood. Others may seem rooted more in the body than the brain, such as pain and postexertional malaise (PEM), a kind of āenergy crashā that people experience after even mild exercise. But those, too, result from nerve dysfunction, often in the autonomic nervous system, which directs our bodies to breathe and digest food and generally runs our organs on autopilot. This so-called dysautonomia can lead to dizziness, a racing heart, high or low blood pressure, and gut disturbances, sometimes leaving people unable to work or even function independently. The SARS-CoV-2 virus is new, but postviral syndromes are not.
This is NOT fine
Bob Wachter on twitter, 9:26 PM Ā· May 22, 2023
The headline news is this: With~100% of the US now having some immunity (vax, infection, or both), today's virus has more trouble finding susceptible hosts & is far less likely to kill them when it does. It's not quite herd immunity, but itās far less scary than 2020-22.Ā
Iām thoroughly disgusted by the embrace of dooming the last high risk holdouts when the virus āfinds themā because everyone is helping the virus find them now - including doctors who donāt mask in healthcare settings. This is in line with eugenics.Ā
Deborah Birx, on the other hand, has spoken out to criticize the eugenics strategy.Ā
āRight now, weāre just accepting that 270,000 Americans died last year,ā she said. āTwo hundred and seventy thousand. Weāre going to easily lose over 100,000 this year. That, to me, is not success.ā Birx continued: āYou donāt want to back yourself into controlling the pandemic because all the vulnerable Americans have died. Thatās not how you win in public health.ā
He(a)rd Scuttlebuttā¦ pandemic grapevine šš±
I hope everyone knows about the agent provocateur straw man sock puppet technique. There are accounts that exist to deceptively emulate someone from a group. Then they post inflammatory or extreme or violent provocative stuff to try and represent that group and make them seem bad.
I've seen an uptick in what appear to be paid troll accounts that do nothing but go around on social media accusing people of faking illnesses - any kind of illness. This seems to be adjunct to the media articles attacking social insurance programs in the US and the UK recently. This could be part of a coordinated PR campaign lobbying against funding social programs for disabled people, as more people suffer the effects of the pandemic.
I know people who work in offices where they have continual short staffing issues because a lot of people are out sick a lot more, at least it seems that way. On the whole, itās probably the pandemic. We know that the virus has caused an increased risk for all sorts of medical problems. But on an individual basis, somebody could just get a hernia or migraines without a pandemic. Itās going to be impossible to know on a local level if youāre perceiving a trend or if itās just frequency illusion. This is why we need data to be collected, not a rollback of tracking disease spread.
In some social media dispute where some popular anonymous covid twitter influencer account was revealed to be rude, people were actually comparing a superspreader event held by scientists who should know better, to āshamingā consensual group sex, when one thing has nothing to do with the other. Shaming putting others at risk involuntarily has nothing to do with āshaming sexā generally and nothing to do with consensual informed decisions. Also, itās 2023 and everyone should know by now that HIV is not spread by casual contact. A tweet thread of a journalist spiraled to the point of people arguing falsely that cigarette smoke is not harmful and should never have been banned. Things really get garbled on social media, and, beware, that is sometimes by design. Currently there are no laws I know of against knowingly spreading covid and flaunting it. But thereās also no rule that says you wonāt be criticized if you do that on social media. And there is a sex positive covid cautious group I heard about called āMasks On, Pants Offā - so none of these things are mutually exclusive.
In a cognitive attack the whole point is that the target shouldnāt know theyāre being attacked in order for it to be really effective. So thatās whole trick to keep the target unaware because if the target becomes aware that theyāre being attacked in this way, just by them becoming aware it significantly reduces the effect of the attack.Ā
ā Rand Waltzman, on Steve Hassanās podcast December 2022