🥾COVID March to Remember🕯️Open Letter to Disability Organizations🙌Supporting Public Health Departments, a teach in webinar📣Tell us about the pandemic groups you love!
Oregon goes a step further with next level gaslit green map - just remove all other colors altogether!
Contents:
- Events, Actions, & Campaigns
- Pandemic field notes & “Living with the virus”
- In the News (virus & adjacent media)
- This is NOT Fine section (gaslighting & other outrages)
- He(a)rd Scuttlebutt (the pandemic grapevine)
COVID March to Remember Sat August 6, 2022 (register link)
Locations around the country and a virtual event hosted by Covid Survivors For Change
“Together, we will take more than 1 million collective steps to remember those who died from COVID, honor all Long Haulers, and raise awareness about the ongoing needs of the COVID survivor community.”
Online Event, August 2nd, 9am US Pacific Daylight Time, Noon US EDT (register link)
Collective Action for Healthy Communities: Supporting Public Health Departments, hosted by Marked By COVID
"Hear from public health practitioners to learn more about the challenges to their communities, what it’s like to lead, and strategies for individuals and communities to be in partnership with local health department leaders…"
Open Letter to Disability Organizations
“To all organizations serving people with disabilities, chronically ill individuals, and other vulnerable populations: As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to sweep the world and our country, people with pre-existing conditions are being left behind. This doesn’t need to happen.”
Online Group watch of the 2016 documentary “HyperNormalisation” with discussion about how this concept relates to the pandemic.
The watch will be split into 4 online meetups of 1 hour at least, first 40 minutes of watching the documentary., 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 platform accessible via the web, and a corresponding discussion will take place in the WHN slack. It’s not necessary to join WHN to attend the group watch but you are very welcome to join WHN using this form.
Last quarter of the documentary, Watch 4, Saturday Aug 6 @ 2pm US EDT
Because we need all of us
I subscribe to the mailing lists and join every pandemic related group doing advocacy or activism so I’m in a position to promote the causes I feel are important— in hopes to let others know. Unfortunately any organization with “covid” in the name immediately gets delisted, and deprioritized by the algorithms of all major social media platforms & search engines under the heading “misinformation control" measures. So it’s an uphill battle to even find groups & orgs.
So I’m planning on posting a list of all the pandemic related groups and organizations I know about, to keep handy and hopefully add to later!
Please let me know of the ones you know about to make sure they’re included because it’s possible I don’t know about every group.
name of group
region, if specific
a tagline description, or purpose
membership criteria, if any
web site & socials
member testimonial, if applicable
The requirement is that it’s pandemic related or adjacent, and the organization is on the side of the humans and against the virus!
🗞️ In the news
Revolving Door Project: Advocates to President Biden: Don’t Give Away New Publicly-Owned Coronavirus Vaccine Technology to Corporations (If successful, the vaccine under development at U.S. Army’s Walter Reed Institute of Research could fight not only the virus that causes Covid-19 but new coronaviruses. The letter cites how private, monopoly control over previous coronavirus vaccines funded with public money contributed to shortages, rationing, and excessive prices.)
People’s CDC COVID-19 Weather Report: July 25, 2022 (“We remain in a sustained COVID surge: every week since early June, 99% of US population lives in high or substantial transmission. In fact we’ve updated our transmission map (h/t @JasonSalemi) to show how high transmission is, 73% living in the highest two levels!)
This is NOT fine
And now we’ve entered a next level gaslit fantasy green zone in Oregon. Why not just remove all the other colors!
The CDC had gone with a map that shows hospitalizations rather than transmissions, in order to make the map look more green than red. But Oregon went one better and just changed ALL transmission levels possible to shades of only green. 🤯
Meanwhile even the CDC’s gaslit hospitalizations map is looking pretty dicey now.
He(a)rd Scuttlebutt, what are we hearing?
Senior and Disability Action lobbied the BART transit authority in the Bay Area for masks on transit, and now face masks are once again required on BART. Speaking up and speaking out is important! We all need to let the people running this stuff know we want safety measures. I happened to notice Abraar Karan “liked” the BART tweet announcement, along with a couple thousand other people.
So what thing did Bob Wachter say this week? After he said he would be avoiding indoor dining at restaurants because it wasn’t safe… Now he relates that even though his wife isn’t fully recovered from her Long Covid from last time, they travelled across the country to a reunion gathering, and spent time indoors in a crowd, and then after returning home were having symptoms. Bob Wachter’s twitter feed is like some kind of reality tv horror movie depicted in text blocks of 280 characters a piece.
Someone told me this week that their family member traveled to Florida to visit a family member on their death bed because of advanced age with cancer and a history of various tropical diseases in their many years of living in various parts of the world, but as it happens, never having had covid. (Most likely because they were social distancing throughout.) The family member who visited came down with covid a few days after their flight home.
Though I continuously hear of people catching the virus in the midst of air travel & hotels stays, someone told me they recently traveled between 2 countries in Europe which are currently a pandemic mess, and did not get the virus on their trip. They used high quality respirator masks, never removed them except lifting briefly at security, avoided public lavatories, and avoided people, especially crowds, as much as possible. Another person said they traveled between 2 other countries and took similar precautions and were virus free. World Health Network has a “Travel Guide” for mitigating risks when traveling. But even this starts with the caution, “Flying in a pandemic is high-risk, avoid it unless necessary.”
“If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.”
— C.S. Lewis