🧪 Wastewater says surge 🚽 Beware long covid stem grifters ⚠️ Americans, get free tests 📫
🧪 Wastewater says surge 🚽 Beware long covid stem grifters ⚠️ Americans, get free tests 📫
Sweden officials just won't stop doubling down on the eugenics friendly rhetoric.
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)
USA government programs
Free At-Home COVID-19 Tests
As of November 20, 2023, residential households in the U.S. are eligible for another order of 4 free at-home tests from USPS.com. If an order has not been placed for your address since the program reopened on September 25, 2023, you can place 2 orders now. Orders will ship free
Home Test to Treat is a program that offers free tests and free treatment (if eligible) for COVID-19 and Flu at home 24/7. No insurance or appointments needed!
This program is funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to better understand how technologies such as at-home tests and telemedicine can improve healthcare access for individuals across the country. Findings will be used to inform future public health programs for the American people. Any data shared with researchers will be limited to what is necessary to evaluate the program and will not include information which can identify you.
Maryland USA - Covid Safe Maryland - This guide has a Sample Script for a phone call or email urging healthcare providers to implement the Maryland Department of Health’s universal mask requirements guidance
The wastewater says surge.
I check the wastewater levels on the CDC website or Biobot here and there and it’s not looking good for the holidays. I’m not a variant watcher. I’m not a scientist, and refreshing a page for new data doesn’t seem like a very good use of my time as it won’t change anything for me. Whatever variant is out there, I’m still going to avoid it. N95 masks are variant-proof, and I get whatever vaccine update that is distributed. Things look relatively better for Pennsylvania (where I am), but I have known of local cases anyhow.
But wastewater monitoring is absolutely critical information for public health & medical science, and has a variety of public health uses. So please join me in writing elected representatives to ask that wastewater monitoring be funded and promoted, you can use the action network letter form or just copypasta my template letter.
🗞️ In the news
Hospitals Should Enforce Universal Masking Among Patients And Staff, Advocates Say Most Chicago hospitals recommend masks for all patients and staff, but that doesn’t go far enough in preventing the spread of COVID, RSV and flu, protesters at UI Health said. by Monique Mulima Dec 21 2023 Care Not COVID Chicagoland, the People’s Response Network and the Chicago chapter of the National Black Nurses Association organized the protest, handing out free N95 masks while calling on officials to implement universal masking. The protest came after the state health department on Dec. 8 announced it is encouraging “all health care settings to consider masking in patient care areas especially if caring for those with weakened immune systems as both RSV [respiratory syncytial virus] and COVID-19 are rising.” That recommendation is a step in the right direction, but hospitals need to do more to prevent a surge in COVID-19, RSV and flu cases, demonstrators said Wednesday.
MedPod Today: Long COVID and Stem Cells; An Unusual Pregnancy; New Cannabinoids — by MedPage Today Staff December 22, 2023 So they went back and looked at some 1,500 clinics that they've been following to see if any of those had been using COVID to their advantage. And sure enough, they were. Turner told me that this is a very vulnerable population that's suffering a lot. And these companies know that these patients may try anything to try to feel better. Robertson: What are the risks here? What can go wrong for these patients if they try these unproven therapies? Fiore: Turner says that a lot can go wrong. These treatments are experimental, so there's no evidence that they actually work in long COVID. Patients may not be helped at all. Then there are examples of stem cell and exosome products causing infections that can be severe, leading people to go to the hospital. There is even one report of people going blind after intravitreal stem cell injections. And on top of that, there's an "obvious possibility for financial scams," Turner told me. The average price for these treatments was $11,000. "It's not like going to the drugstore and buying some dietary supplements," Turner said. Robertson: That is so expensive. Are regulators going after these companies? Fiore: Yes, both the FDA and the FTC have gone after stem cell companies in the past, and they've mostly issued warning letters.
KFF - Rift Over When to Use N95s Puts Health Workers at Risk Again By Amy Maxmen December 14, 2023 Eric Berg, deputy chief of health at Cal/OSHA, warned the CDC in November that, if it accepted its committee’s recommendations, the guidelines would “create confusion and result in workers being not adequately protected.” Also called respirators, N95 masks filter out far more particles than looser-fitting surgical masks but cost roughly 10 times as much, and were in short supply in 2020. Black, Hispanic, and Asian health workers more often went without N95 masks than white staffers, which helped explain why members of racial and ethnic minorities tested positive for covid nearly five times as often as the general population in the early months of the pandemic. (Hispanic people can be of any race or combination of races.) Cal/OSHA issued dozens of citations to health care facilities that failed to provide N95 masks and take other measures to protect workers in 2020 and 2021. Many appealed, and some cases are ongoing.
AP - States are trashing troves of masks and pandemic gear as huge, costly stockpiles linger and expire BY JENNIFER PELTZ AND DAVID A. LIEB - Updated 11:44 AM EST, December 20, 2023 “What a real waste. That’s what happens when you don’t prepare, when you have a bust-and-boom public health system,” where a lack of planning leads to panicked over-purchasing in emergencies, said Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association. “It shows that we really have to do a better job of managing our stockpiles.”
This is NOT fine
Sweden, adding insult to injury.
Officials now suggesting covid is a way to “help” the elderly into the afterlife. Not a good look coming from a government that plotted to make kids sick on purpose and indeed helped the elderly in long term care homes over the threshold from life to death by withholding effective and available treatment.
He(a)rd Scuttlebutt… pandemic grapevine 🍇🌱
It disturbs me that an NPR blogger might think their readers need to be cajoled and convinced not to act like jackass right-wing qanon pilled anti-maskers out in public to strangers they don’t know — because if they did know them they’d know they have a baby for example. Everyone ought to mask in public spaces to protect other people’s babies and seniors, and everyone else, and. yourself as it happens.
Try not to judge people who aren’t masking. They’re rude, possibly jerks, but they’ve most likely just been scammed by the overwhelming PR campaign to cajole them into think it’s safe because, like a false angry god, The Economy demands full participation, herd debt paid on an altar of lies. I don’t judge people who won’t mask — I just feel bad for them, and scared for them that they may discover the truth the hard way about the dangers.
“We should not let cybercrime and cyberattacks becomes the new acceptable tax of the internet. I remember an internet when there was no publicity, it was very nice, it disappeared. And there was an internet without spam. It was nice, it disappeared. And now there's an internet with a lot of cyberattacks, a lot of cybercrime, and we have the tendency to become, okay, so what, that's just the way it's. We cannot accept this because the price that we're going to pay is way too high. And then if we think about new steps to get outta this, they're quite simple. This is three simple steps. It's about accountability, accountability and accountability. At the end of the day, you know, government, and we talked about this quite a lot, are responsible to put regulations in place, framework to limit the space of criminal groups or of whatever rogue actors is out there. That's what about policy making is.”
Stéphane Duguin, CEO of the Cyber Peace Institute during panel discussion: The devastating impact of cyberattacks and how to protect against them | GZERO Media Nov 12, 2023