🏥 Letter campaign calls for Medicare to track & prevent nosocomial covid 😷 Wisconsin petition Keep Masks in UW Health ☎️ California phone bank for universal masking in high risk settings
Long Covid study knowingly exposes Long Covid research subjects to reinfection.
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 Letter Campaign: to the U.S. Senate, Medicare should track Healthcare Acquired Covid and require masks to prevent it
By People’s CDC: Please join us in sending a clear message to your Senator that you demand them to call on the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid to require protections and universal masking in healthcare settings, continued reporting of healthcare acquired COVID infections, and to count COVID as one of several other conditions in reducing payments to hospital for healthcare services.
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/track-healthcare-acquired-covid-and-require-masks/
Wisconsin & Illinois USA Petition: Keep healthcare masking at UW Health in Wisconsin and Illinois
By UW Workers’ COVID Response Working Group: Join fellow concerned community members in supporting continued universal masking in all healthcare settings at UW Health to safeguard patients and healthcare workers from COVID. All patients deserve safe access to care.
https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/keep-healthcare-masking-at-uw-health-in-wisconsin-and-illinois
California USA - Online phone bank to bring back universal masking in high risk settings.
May 17, 2023 12:30 PM US Pacific Time
By Senior and Disability Action
http://bit.ly/SDAPhoneBank
The pandemic is not over and we need to deal with that, honestly, with better leadership and more sense.
Many of the things people are complaining about are manifestations of an ongoing pandemic, and pretending it’s not true doesn’t make it stop.
Are your students awful, or is there an ongoing pandemic? – Rebecca Barrett-Fox, March 18, 2023
But what if the pandemic isn’t over? What would we expect to see if the pandemic isn’t over?
We’d see high rates of absenteeism as students and faculty are sick or caring for others who are.
We’d see exhaustion as people tried to “push through” their work when their bodies need rest after infection or after caregiving.
We’d see mistakes in student (and our own) work due to that exhaustion.
We’d see people prioritizing, even if unconsciously, relationships with people who care for them over relationships–including their relationship to work–over those that risk their health. We’d see them choosing activities that protect their health, including sleep or skip assignments, over activities that don’t.
As Jim Lertola said in Washington Post Letters to the Editor, “The pandemic is not over, and our leaders need to say so.” This is the way it becomes socially ok to speak of it, acknowledge it, and to deal with it humanely and sensibly.
Making clear rules, policies, laws, regulations, makes it easy and comfortable to do what needs to be done to make things go more safely. As cybersecurity expert Josh Bressers describes on the Open Source Security Podcast, about security protocols and regulations: “There's nothing to be ashamed of to say: I'm only doing this for compliance. That's the whole point right, when I'm writing up security features for products I'm quite clear of like look we're doing this for compliance, there's no other reason. This isn't about good will, this isn't about because it's the right thing to do, blah blah - no, compliance. We're doing it because: compliance. And then people relate to that though too. They're like alright, we have to do this cuz if we don't, people can't buy our product. And that makes sense. Whereas it's like ok, this is hard to do, and I don't want to do it, and it's really just for the good of humanity so.... let's put that down farther on the list, right. Yeah I mean that's what happens.”
Security and safety make sense. But this doesn’t happen by accident. It happens as a community. If we insist that it does.
🗞️ In the news
🇺🇸 Cision PR Newswire - New Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade Reveals Significant Increase in Healthcare-Associated Infections and Worsening Patient Experience During COVID-19 Pandemic, May 03, 2023 "The dramatic spike in HAIs reported in this Safety Grade cycle should stop hospitals in their tracks—infections like these can be life or death for some patients," said Leah Binder, president and CEO of The Leapfrog Group. "We recognize the tremendous strain the pandemic put on hospitals and their workforce, but alarming findings like these indicate hospitals must recommit to patient safety and build more resilience."
🇮🇪 Irish Examiner: Mask wearing in hospitals should remain as covid 'hasn't gone away' - by Imasha Costa and Vivienne Clarke, 13 Apr, 2023 Ms Ní Sheaghda explained that in a statement from the HSE, it said patients in multi-bed wards should be offered masks if others are symptomatic. She said: “So in other words they're saying it's up to the patient. No patient in hospital is going to know whether somebody else is symptomatic. "That is the responsibility of the health care provider in our view. And we don't want nurses put in a position where they're saying to one patient, well, look, that patient over there has a cough, so you should be really wearing a mask. It's absolutely nonsensical. “We believe that we've always been critical of the information that the HSE have provided in respect of infection control and cross-infection in hospitals.
🇺🇸 Health groups call on Mass. to keep mask mandates in health care settings. Some expressed concern for those with compromised immune systems and other conditions. By Kay Lazar, April 5, 2023 Elaine Hagopian, a 90-year-old Greater Boston resident who has chronic heart and breathing problems, said she would also think twice about going to the hospital. She said she still severely restricts social engagements and wears a mask in the elevator of her building. “I would be concerned about having to go to the hospital,” Hagopian said. “You go to solve one problem and you might get another problem.”
🇬🇧 Healio - Infectious Disease - Nosocomial Infections - SARS-CoV-2 surged in hospitals after end of universal screening. By Caitlyn Stulpin, April 13, 2023 The researchers noted that the relative increases in cases from the delta to omicron period in England and Scotland (113% and 92%) and after the end of admission testing (32% and 72%) were “significant.” “Stopping asymptomatic screening of hospitalized patients in two national health systems was associated with significant increases in hospital-onset SARS-CoV-2 infections,” Pak and colleagues wrote. “Hospitals should exercise caution when considering reductions in SARS-CoV-2 admission screening.”
🇦🇺 7News: ‘Rock bottom’: Adelaide hospitals experience several Code Whites over two months. April 28, 2023 Not a single emergency bed was available in hospitals across Adelaide on four nights over the last two months, with the state opposition warning that South Australia’s health system is at breaking point. A Code White was experienced at all metro emergency departments on Monday April 24, and Wednesday April 27, a classification which meant that all treatment rooms were occupied, the state opposition said.
🇺🇸 Capital & Main: Disability Denied: Unable to Work, COVID Long Haulers Face Barriers to Benefits. By Larry Buhl, April 12, 2023 A report by the Center for Law and Social Policy notes the severe backlog of applications at SSA as a hindrance for long COVID applicants, and others. And it says medical providers’ knowledge gaps about long COVID are a hurdle as well: “Few providers know what tests need to be conducted to adequately document evidence of long COVID. Providers stick to basic tests that come back normal despite the presence of debilitating symptoms.” The CDC estimates that more than 7% of American adults have long COVID, but there are no statistics on how many need disability coverage due to their conditions. Darren Lutz, a spokesman for the Social Security Administration, said in an email that “disability evaluations are based on functional limitations that affect an individual’s ability to work, not a diagnosis,” and that the agency has no data on how many cases flagged for COVID-19 were rejected.
🇺🇸 Important Context - Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Homecoming. Throughout the pandemic, the anti-vaccine activist raked in cash and cultivated right-wing allies. Now he's running for president with a new support base. By WALKER BRAGMAN, MAY 3, 2023 He has long promoted discredited, unscientific claims about vaccine safety. The Center for Countering Digital Hate listed him as one of the “Disinformation Dozen”—a group of the most prolific spreaders of online misinformation about COVID vaccines. Those vaccines have saved millions of lives, but Kennedy and his dark money group, Children’s Health Defense (CHD), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit founded in 2011 under the name World Mercury Project, have sought to ensure that fewer people get them. In the summer of 2021, CHD even targeted anti-vaccine propaganda at Black communities. At the time, Black Americans were dying from COVID at a significantly higher rate than white Americans.
🇺🇸 Daily Beast - Stanford Was Conducting a Long COVID Study. Then the Staff Stopped Masking. By Simon Spichak, May 05, 2023 In a tweet posted April 30, former Stanford Medicine oncologist Jeffrey Bien mocked the safety concerns of the patients who walked off on April 30, writing, “Be careful or you’ll upset the super secret ultra-double-long-Covid community.” (Bien did not respond to a request for comment.) There were already signs that the staff and Stanford Medicine were ready to unmask: One pediatric infectious disease expert at Stanford, Yvonne Moldanado “celebrated” the lifting of mask mandates in a presentation to medical colleagues on April 13. Still, it’s especially notable to see unmasking around patients who are being specifically attended to for long COVID.
This is NOT fine
Long Covid study knowingly exposes Long Covid research subjects to reinfection.
Patients who’ve suffered some of the worst of covid already are being deliberately put at risk of reinfection. Why would Stanford want to put them through that again?
MedPage Today - No Masks in Long COVID Study? Participants Aren't Happy — Stanford says masks are no longer mandatory, but are recommended. by Kristina Fiore, May 3, 2023 The Reddit commenter alleged that in addition to putting participants' health at risk, changing the conditions of the study could alter its outcomes. He or she questioned whether investigators "risk invalidating the entire project and its data by suddenly increasing the odds of reinfecting their participants and negatively changing the course of their health."
A few people responded to a Medpage Today poll that they think healthcare workers should unmask and expose the study participants to reinfection. This is why we need to REQUIRE masks in healthcare - because there are some number of people who are unthinking, unethical, immoral, thoughtless, cruel, unconscientious, or possibly dangerously criminal - and some of those people work in healthcare settings. We need strong regulations to protect patients from their harmful actions and the harm they would do out of negligence, gross incompetence, or malice.
He(a)rd Scuttlebutt… 🍇🌱
Mass General Hospital in Boston last week had a notice on their website prohibiting patients from requesting reasonable accommodation of healthcare providers to mask. Then there was a protest in Boston against ending masks and pre-procedure testing by Massachusetts Coalition for Health Equity. Now, Mass General has removed that notice from their website.
Podcast Theatre of the Absurd: American Foreign Policy Council has a podcast called Disinformation Wars and they use their most recent episode “Propaganda and the Pandemic” to spread disinformation about covid when the podcast host actually said: “If you’re anything like me you’re enormously grateful that covid is now in the rear view mirror while some lingering signs of our fight against the coronavirus remain, the U.S. and increasingly more and more of the world has moved beyond the pandemic.”
We’re still having bodies of Americans pile up from a preventable cause and who knows how many people so sick they’re unable to work because of Long Covid. What an own-goal to say such bullshit while claiming to be against disinfo. The American Foreign Policy Council have themselves been duped into passively endorsing the needless preventable deaths of Americans.
Officials more or less seem to say that covid is no big deal because we have vaccines and treatment. It’s still dangerous even so - But even as far as it’s true vaccines and treatment have helped, people hear that covid is no big deal so they don’t bother to get vaccinations nor treatment, so that doesn’t help. This public health messaging failure is a big deal.
"20th century advertising is the most powerful and sustained system of propaganda in human history and its cumulative cultural effects, unless quickly checked, will be responsible for destroying the world as we know it. As it achieves this it will be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of non-western peoples and will prevent the peoples of the world from achieving true happiness. Simply stated, our survival as a species is dependent upon minimizing the threat from advertising and the commercial culture that has spawned it."
SUT JHALLY, Advertising at the Edge of the Apocalypse