🏥 CDC is warning of strain on hospitals 🧪 Petition to keep Long Beach PCR test site 🐑 who’s the sheep now?
Elected representatives and government officials should never try to do sick burns about voters that innuendo that they have Long Covid.
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)
Long Beach California USA Petition to the Long Beach Health Department & City Council, Keep Long Beach's LAST Free PCR Testing Site Open!
By Mask Bloc Long Beach: “Long Beach City is at risk of losing its LAST FREE testing site after December, which is extremely concerning for our city’s health as many people rely on it to keep themselves, their loved ones, and others safe.”
USA Letter to Biden: Federal agency rulemaking needs to include pandemic mitigation
By Chloe Humbert - The Biden administration is boasting about boosting trust in government by including more public input into agency rulemaking. Yet when it comes to pandemic mitigation, patient safety, and worker safety, those most affected are being ignored, and our interests dismissed.
COVID spreads by aerosol transmission — why isn’t CDC better communicating this?
I’m a big believer in handwashing and anyone coming out against handwashing can just be ignored like Marty Makary, because handwashing is good. But if more people had it forefront of their minds that covid spreads through the air, including at a distance in a room, people might be more mindful of their choices.
CDC - Peak Season for Respiratory Diseases Is Near: There Is Still Time to Get Vaccinated - December 14, 2023, 5:00 PM EDT COVID-19 hospitalizations are rising quickly. Since the summer, public health officials have been tracking a rise in multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C), which is caused by COVID-19. Influenza activity is growing in most parts of the country. RSV activity remains high in many areas. In some parts of the country, hospital beds for children are already nearly as full as they were this time last year. If these trends continue, the situation at the end of this month could again strain emergency departments and hospitals. Strain on the healthcare system could mean that patients with other serious health conditions may face delays in receiving care.
Mandy Cohen has apparently been concerned with respiratory virus spread, and a report said — “some staff don’t view as necessary” Mandy Cohen’s attention to infectious respiratory diseases. One wonders if part of the problem with the CDC is that the upper staff is too stacked burrowed in Trumpers like the committees are stacked with corporate friendly executives who believe covid is a hoax or have some kind of other incentives to promote that view.
🗞️ In the news
Fortune - COVID-19 v. Flu: A ‘much more serious threat,’ new study into long-term risks concludes - BY Carolyn Barber - December 14, 2023 We trivialize COVID infections at our peril’ Clearly, long COVID remains a looming threat. Moreover, research shows that with each successive COVID-19 infection, we roll the dice. One can be young, healthy, and vaccinated, having experienced only mild symptoms during initial infections–then, almost inexplicably, develop long COVID on the next infection. Considering that long COVID can include conditions like memory loss, new diabetes, stroke, etc, and we have no proven treatments, the best strategy is to avoid it altogether.
The New York Times - ‘We Are All Sick’: Infectious Diseases Spread Across Gaza. A lack of clean water, toilets and food have fueled a spike in illnesses, and increasingly dire conditions are making it hard for the sick to recover, health officials say. By Hiba Yazbek, Ameera Harouda and Gaya Gupta Dec. 11, 2023 Although the collapse of Gaza’s health system has made it challenging to track exact case numbers, the W.H.O. has reported at least 369,000 cases of infectious diseases since the war began, using data collected from the Gaza Health Ministry and UNRWA. These numbers are likely underreported, Ms. Barkley said, as they don’t include cases reported in northern Gaza.
San Francisco Chronicle - ‘Highly pathogenic’ avian flu confirmed in North Bay — 250,000 birds reported euthanized By Cynthia Dizikes Dec 2, 2023 The two Sonoma County farms were the focus of the animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere, or DxE, whose members were criminally charged after they went into Sunrise and Reichardt farms in 2018 and 2019, respectively, and removed birds, alleging abusive conditions. The farms’ owners have denied those allegations.
This is NOT fine
Elected representatives and government officials should never try to do sick burns about voters that innuendo that they have Long Covid. This is highly inappropriate.
Josh Shapiro isn’t yet worried about President Joe Biden’s standing. Rather, the governor of Pennsylvania attributes Biden’s recent polling slide behind former President Donald Trump to voter “brain fog” that he thinks will clear once the general election cycle kicks into gear. “I’m not sure folks remember just how chaotic it was, how divisive it was, how he was just in your face in your living room every day,” Shapiro said, referring to Trump. “I don’t think people want to go back to that.”
“Brain fog” is specifically known to be potentially serious disabling condition associated with Long Covid.
Many disabled, high risk, and people with long covid are very well aware of the Trump view of anyone not super duper right-wing, that the right-wing elites plan to attempt to overthrow the government again by sabotaging the administration of our institutions, that conservatives claim civil rights and DEI is a foreign attack because they can’t understand why disabled people might want a say in our own lives, we know very well about the anti-vaxxers and those conservatives who embrace eugenics, as well as the internet trolls who post horrendous lies and harmful assertions in the twitter threads of former surgeon general Jerome Adams.
We see all this and we want the opposition to actually oppose these things.
Zients was put in charge in the Biden administration and is leading a pressure campaign to deny federal workers telework. Josh Shapiro has continued the anti-telework policies for state workers, and is pushing for yet more butts in seats downtown for The Economy, despite WFH benefits to wellbeing and the environment, and despite knowing that the threats of the pandemic, and failure to mitigate it, has driven disabled and older workers into retirement, creating complex staffing shortages. The CDC is weakening guidelines for all infection control in healthcare settings — a step backward in medical science and patient & worker safety — under the Biden administration. And where is the vaccine drive? Uptake on the updated vaccine is deplorable — even in nursing homes!
He(a)rd Scuttlebutt… pandemic grapevine 🍇🌱
If people spent ½ the energy actually campaigning for political pressure and promoting public health messaging and inclusive social ideas to normalize masks and HEPA purifiers, as people spend making potentially harmful social media and websites promoting pseudoscience grift products, we’d maybe be in a better situation. It’s bad enough that people online are being paid, sometimes indirectly, to promote grifty products that could be harmful or are at best a waste of money, but perhaps otherwise well-meaning people are being used to promote products.
The term “maskhole” had originally come about to refer to people who were refusing to mask, especially back when there were more broad mask requirements. Nowadays though I’ve seen anti-maskers use it to refer to people who do wear a mask. And it just makes me think -- who’s the sheep now?
It’s really too bad that dishonest actors use covid as a wedge issue which leads people to put their health at risk. From dissuading seniors from taking Paxlovid, to convincing people covid isn’t real or not to get vaccinated. I’ve imagined the “rumours” of a pandemic since I started reading about pandemics in the 1990s, and never did I imagine the ridiculous yet dangerous social rifts I see today, including the bizarre anger toward people just trying to avoid getting sick urged on by manipulative propaganda.
“My friends, we are on the way to becoming a two-tiered society composed of a few winners and a larger group of Americans left behind, whose anger and disillusionment are easily manipulated. Once unbottled, mass resentment can poison the very fabric of society — the moral integrity of society — replacing ambition with envy, replacing tolerance with hate. Today the targets of that rage are immigrants and welfare mothers and government officials and gays, and an ill-defined counterculture. But as the middle class continues to erode, who will be the targets tomorrow?” — Robert Reich, Labor Secretary, November 22, 1994