📱Keep Remote Access to San Fran public meetings 🎙️ Listen to today’s sanitarians 😷 Inclusive practices in the time of COVID, a guide 📝 Open Letter to Massachusetts DPH
What do you wish the experts would do? Doctors? Scientists? Public Health Experts?
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)
San Francisco California USA
== TODAY == Monday February 27 at 10am Pacific Time
Call campaign: Keep Remote Access to ensure that people can continue to give public comment by phone at San Francisco government meetings.
Remote Participation Infosheet: bit.ly/KeepRemoteAccess
Senior and Disability Action (SDA)
Strategies for High Impact (S4HI) and the What Would a Doula Do collective has launched Inclusive practices in the time of COVID: A brief guide for gatherings and call for disability solidarity.
https://www.strategiesforhighimpact.org/covid-inclusion
Massachusetts USA
Open Letter to Massachusetts DPH and Healthcare Organizations to Keep Masks in Healthcare
By MASSACHUSETTS COALITION FOR HEALTH EQUITY: Without universal masking precautions in healthcare, vulnerable people face substantial risk of being exposed in waiting rooms or clinical settings against their will, violating their autonomy, and deterring many from seeking much-needed care.
https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/open-letter-to-massachusetts-dph-and-healthcare-organizations-for-continued-masking-in-healthcare-settings
What do you wish the experts would do? Doctors? Scientists? Public Health Experts?
Fill out this form and myself, and scientists and doctors I know, will try to get your questions and suggestions recognized and considered. I can’t make any promises but at least it’ll be documented that we asked! At a minimum I will try to publish & highlight some suggestions in this newsletter.
📝 Pandemic Asks - Concerned about the pandemic? What do you wish the experts would do?
Tell us what you wish scientists, doctors, healthcare workers, and public health professionals would do to help you, and the general public, in the context of the pandemic. Suggestions and ideas will be published or communicated to interested scientists, doctors, healthcare workers, and public health professionals.
Submissions will be kept anonymous by default. If you want to be publicly credited you need to specify that you would like that, although we can't make promises.
🗞️ In the news
📣 People's CDC: Preserve and Expand the Public Health Resources Under the COVID State of Emergency - Feb 14 (The US has suffered more from Covid-19 than other high-income nations. The state of emergency increased access to Medicaid, and assured free access to vaccines, tests, masks, and treatments for all US residents, including more than 30 million uninsured Americans. Even with these additional resources, the poor US government response has led to a nearly 3-year decline in average life expectancy, and larger declines in low-income and communities of color. Removing resources such as tests and care during the ongoing pandemic will cause a deadly disaster and worsen these intolerable inequities.)
🥕 Spotlight PA: Shapiro admin can do more as rollbacks to food and health benefits loom in Pa., experts say. by Katie Meyer | Feb. 24, 2023 (Hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians could lose their health insurance and nearly two million could face more food insecurity in the coming months due to two sweeping rollbacks to pandemic-era federal policies. Advocates see the sudden reduction of benefits as a looming health and welfare crisis.)
🧪 NPR: COVID test kits, treatments and vaccines won't be free to many consumers much longer February 8, 2023 by JULIE APPLEBY (Starting in May, though, beneficiaries in original Medicare and many people with private, job-based insurance will have to start paying out-of-pocket for the rapid antigen test kits.)
This is NOT fine
There are no guarantees. Even sometimes young healthy people are harmed or even killed by covid. And even young healthy children have been burdened by Long Covid. Yet unbelievably some economics pundit made an innuendo, incorrectly and offensively, that the kids today won’t die getting covid because most of the vulnerable ones died already in the biggest surge anyway. There are so many problems with this assertion. But while it’s not the most disgusting one, the most obvious is the ignorance of history.
“The myth that children will just be fine is largely a product of the comfort we have been afforded by the past 100 years of public health progress. Historically, almost half of all children died before adulthood. Even in 1950 child mortality rates were five times as high as today. Along with clean water and hygiene, one big part of progress has been the near eradication of many infectious diseases by vaccines.”
The Sanitarians know
Forcing Normal in the Roaring 2020s. (The Sanitarians knew.)
The roaring 20s were a time when many people were not roaring but instead hobbled with infections and wailing over the untimely passing of loved ones. Deaths from infection were not uncommon, nor was disturbing and disruptive infectious disease. Not just in 1918 from flu, but through additional surges of flu through the 1920s, and other types of infections or infections undiagnosed or misdiagnosed. And while the fancy people were whooping it up, there were also people arguing and pushing for public health measures: the Sanitarians. They had their arguments published, and called upon professionals, advocates, and supporters to write their U.S. Senators and Representatives.
How about listen to today’s sanitarians?
He(a)rd Scuttlebutt… pandemic grapevine 🍇🌱
California Nurses report relief that California will be keeping mask requirements in place in healthcare settings. It’s the right call.
A recent Conspirituality Podcast episode describes the intersection of hot yoga and pandemic denial. I thought I heard everything by now about the segments of society railing against public health, but this is one angle I hadn’t heard explained before. The bizarre tangle of wellness pseudoscience combined with a passionate religious reliance on sweat soaked yoga in overheated studios felt deprived of their spiritual health source during the brief shutdowns of early 2020, and led later to affiliation with convoy truckers, anti-vax groups and, white supremacists.
I keep seeing media and social media influencers in the U.S. and Canada harping and handwringing characterizing civic engagement as time consuming and difficult. Parents advocating for air filters in schools being called struggling nerds. University students distributing masks on campus characterized as having their free time sucked up. Civic engagement isn’t that hard and doesn’t have to take a lot of time. So why is activism being characterized this way?
“The job of the skeptic is to abuse you and the job of the pundit is to normalize it.” — umair haque