😷Campaigns in San Fran & NYC to require masks💊Covid+ picking up pills maskless at the drug store is bad policy🤦♀️Elite vacations are not equivalent to psychiatric treatment🤨
Justifications for reckless behaviour are becoming both more common and more absurd.
Contents:
- Events, Actions, & Campaigns
- Pandemic field notes & “Living with the virus”
- In the News (virus & adjacent news)
- This is NOT Fine section (gaslighting & other wrongs)
- He(a)rd Scuttlebutt (did you miss this?)
😷📣 San Francisco - Keep Masks on BART! Require Masks on Muni!
Wednesday, July 13, 4pm-5:30pm US Pacific Daylight Time in San Francisco
A call for masks on transit!
Contact info@sdaction.org for info
😷📱 A call for the Governor of New York to reinstate the indoor mask mandate
“Call on NY Governor Kathy Hochul and Health Commissioner Dr Mary Bassett to reinstate the mask mandate in all public indoor spaces and schools”
🔗➡️ MandateMasksNY.org
Online Group watch of the 2016 documentary “HyperNormalisation” with discussion about how this concept relates to the pandemic.
The watch is split into 4 online meetups of 1 hour at least, July 9, 16, 30, & Aug 6. The film is available on Youtube with closed captioning, the group watch will have a text chat but does not have transcription. This will be hosted in the World Health Network ohyay platform via web, you’re welcome to join WHN using this form.
Next up, Watch 2, Saturday July 16 @ 2pm US EDT
In 2016 while on vacation in Ontario, my appendix ruptured in a crowded ER waiting room and I nearly died of sepsis because of delayed care at an overwhelmed rural hospital in a vacation town during harvest season and a holiday week. When the pandemic hit my worst fears of overcrowded hospitals became commonplace in surges. I have PTSD.
The other day a guy in Ontario was tweeting out that he was waiting 18 hours with an appendicitis in the ER. Luckily he got surgery before it ruptured.
Simultaneously people are complaining about their flights being delayed in Toronto.
Credentialed people on social media publicly using "mental health" as a justification for risky leisure activities clearly have no idea about actual mental illness.
Stop it. It's not ok to drink and drive just because you needed a pick me up.
🗞️ In the news
🇮🇪🏥 Irish Examiner: Over 600 waiting for hospital beds amid Covid surge (“Patients are once again facing significant delays in hospitals around the country, with 608 people waiting on trolleys for beds as Covid numbers surge. Nurses have now called for the cancellation of elective operations and procedures to divert resources to tackle overcrowding.”)
💰🤯 KHN: How Pfizer Won the Pandemic, Reaping Outsize Profit and Influence (As societies abandon other efforts to control covid’s spread, such as mask mandates and physical distancing, Pfizer’s prospects look even brighter, especially now that the company has brought out the first oral covid treatment, Paxlovid. “People are going to get out there,” Angela Hwang, president of Pfizer Biopharmaceuticals Group, told investors May 3. “We know with all of that, infections are going to increase, and that’s the role that Paxlovid can play.”)
🚨🦠 Fortune: The omicron subvariant now dominating the U.S. is ‘the worst version of the virus that we’ve seen’ (“It takes immune escape, already extensive, to the next level, and, as a function of that, enhanced transmissibility,” well beyond what has been seen before...)
🛒🚚 ConsumerAffairs: Some retailers are telling customers they don’t have to return their unwanted purchases (“But as the COVID-19 pandemic continued, supply chains fell apart, and the price of fuel kept going up, other retailers have joined in on letting customers keep their unwanted items instead of returning them.”)
🌐🦠 Washington Post: Opinion Let’s call monkeypox what it is: A pandemic (archive link) (“We must enlist the full spectrum of prevention and diagnostics to curb the spread, preclude the development of local disease reservoirs in rodents, and prevent suffering and possible death, especially in the immunocompromised, pregnant people and young children.”)
🧠😔 CBS: Long Covid sufferers may develop psychosis (Dr. Thant says delusions and hallucinations in people after getting Covid are part of this apparent psychosis. "Essentially like paranoid ones, people are 'after you' or exaggerated self importance.")
🔥📣 The Tyee: ‘Forever Plague’: Nikiforuk Responds to Critics (“COVID has, for some reason, created a situation where any deviation from the official public health view brings a response that seems intended to silence those advocating for appropriate health protections.”)
This is NOT fine
Having people sick with active infection or even already tested positive show up to the pharmacy maskless seems like a really really absurdly bad policy, but that’s what’s happening.
He(a)rd Scuttlebutt
@itshullabalulu on twitter reported that they heard people claim to be the heroes for “going out and keeping the economy going, presumably by going to concerts and spending money” — and I guess this is meant as a defense of spreading the virus in leisure activities? What do people even think the economy is for?
A lot of sensible & gobsmacked people float the question of whether SARSCOV2 might have an effect like toxoplasmosis causing rodents to become careless in front of cats. But that doesn’t explain why people are reckless before they get sick. Leadership has been remiss, and there are monied interests pummeling the population with covid denial and minimization, and it may be as simple as that.
From Justin Feldman: “I have sat in meetings where people who work for state and local health departments have explained that they wanted to implement mask mandates but were overruled by mayors or governors in overwhelmingly liberal jurisdictions.”
“People would never vote for a deteriorating quality of life and risk, but that’s where public policy is now taking us.”
Andrew Nikiforuk