😷Naming the anti-Asian racism of covid policy🙌⚕️Patients beware: covid+ docs on the job🩺🤢We've been transported to a gaslit fantasy green zone🟩🟥
Public failures are a wakeup call to organize.
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)
- Herd Scuttlebutt (did you hear about this?)
📃✊ Open Letter: Cities Must Use COVID-19 Funding on COVID, Not Cops
📝✋ Petition: Urgently requesting President Biden and Director Walensky to recommend Indoor Mask Requirement
With any new report of a public health failure, it seems many people who care become despaired that any change is possible. Meanwhile, the opposition is busy repeatedly seizing power in any vacuum left available. We must ask ourselves - why is change possible for the opposition but not for us? Only because we’re not doing the things they’re doing - at least not as much or loudly enough. Repeating sense more than the nonsense. Repeating reason. Repeating what we need and what we want. Repetition is not redundant, it’s essential. Must we be moved in the wrong direction? No, this is not inevitable. Let’s not despair, let’s organize. Thank you for attending my pep talk. ✌️✊
🗞️ In the news
😷❤️ KevinMD.com: Naming the anti-Asian racism of U.S. COVID-19 policy by Michelle Ko, MD, PhD (“Xenophobia ensures that we continue to blame others rather than take responsibility for our caring for our own. Our community, including our local experts in medicine and public health, needs to recognize that internalized anti-Asian racism manifests in violent action and the violence of neglect.”)
💊⚠️ The Boston Globe: People who rebound with COVID-19 after Paxlovid may be highly contagious, new studies suggest (archive link) (“The scientists also found that, in some rebound patients, viral levels were likely high enough to be contagious. Additionally, one study found that two patients who relapsed inadvertently infected family members.”)
🟥🟩 Yahoo Finance: The U.S. is in a sixth COVID wave—but it doesn’t look like it on a new CDC map ("Millions of Americans "were instantly transported to a green zone in late February, when the agency unveiled its new metrics and map," NPR recently reported. The public health agency didn't merely swap color palettes on its community levels map—it swapped data sets. Under its new guidance, now based on hospital capacity…”)
This is NOT fine
The CDC gave us a gaslight map turned green and told us only to react if the hospitals are full, and that transmission levels are only for healthcare facility use. People need actionable information. Most people don’t actually want to volunteer to get a disease just because there’s still room at the hospital, or room at CHOP for their kids. 🤦♀️
But it’s worse than they even recommend because governments, businesses, and even healthcare systems are not even reacting to the hospitals getting full. Will we act when we run out of room in the freezer truck morgue capacity? 😱
Herd Scuttlebutt
⚕️😥 👎 I’ve heard of medical offices, including specialists who treat the high risk, who are having doctors work while positive, sick, or probably still contagious with covid & some not even wearing N95s, if any masks. And I’m hearing more people reporting being treated rudely at medical appointments because of wanting to wear masks. Many of these facilities do not necessarily care about the safety of patients, they only care about keeping the patient revenue assembly line going with doctors on the job sick or not. Buyer beware, patients be aware.
🎶🦠😯 Seeing reports about the kids going on end of school year field trips that seem almost specifically designed to be super spreader events. One story on twitter reported that 60 kids were going to go sing indoors at a luncheon for seniors.
🙉🙈🙊 In Quebec Canada, leaders decided to NOT isolate cases of monkeypox, nor the classrooms exposed. Too many leaders the world over have ceased doing things that we knew to be best practices even a thousand years ago.
✈️🧐🛩️ Is it just a coincidence Delta Airlines expects “disruptions” now that the masks are off? Greg C (Cable News Sufferer) says “CNN going the extra mile to not say the word “Covid” in this tweet” (CNN tweet: “Delta Air Lines has announced it will cut about 100 flights a day from its schedule this summer to "minimize disruptions and bounce back faster when challenges occur.") At least half of the Flight Attendants Union are anti-maskers and refuse to protect themselves or even grandmas & the immunocompromised, so expect many “disruptions” if you’re rolling the dice on air travel. Who knows what dangers airlines will welcome onboard next.
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“A true patriotism urges us to build an even more substantial America where the good things of life may be shared by more of us, where the social injustices will not be encouraged to flourish.”
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1936