📝Open Letter calls for pandemic funds to be spent on covid not cops📢Covid Safe Campus Town Hall📚Petition for Indoor Mask Req recommendation launched by coalition of groups😷
Detroit Automakers Reinstating Mask Mandates
Contents:
- Events, Actions, & Campaigns
- Pandemic field notes & “Living with the virus”
- In the News (virus & adjacent media)
- 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
“We demand an end to the US’s failed pandemic response, that President Biden demand appropriate use of this funding to further stop spread, and for this funding to be equitably deployed.”
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📝😷 Joint Petition urgently requesting President Joe Biden and Director Walensky to recommend Indoor Mask Requirement to protect the most vulnerable in the U.S.
📚🎤 Monday May 23 at 8pm US EDT - Covid Safe Campus Town Hall online
“A town hall to discuss how we can work together to build a safer and more inclusive fall semester!”
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📋🖥️ Friday May 27 at 12 noon US EDT - Marked By Covid TEACH-IN online
Covid Accountability Commission Task force for Truth & Reconciliation"
Register for this event & Follow Kristin Urquiza on Twitter
🎙️😷 Massachusetts Coalition for Health Equity COVID Precautions Now Webinar Recording
Birding in the Pandemic
Last week I went on a mini-vacation road trip 2-1/2 hours drive away from Scranton Pennsylvania, for spring migration birdwatching at Montezuma Wetlands Complex in upstate New York. Quadruple vaccinated, took rapid test before leaving, wore an N95 mask everywhere around people and indoors - which was extremely brief & limited. Staying in a tent with my own camp toilet, in an otherwise unoccupied group tenting site at a campground.
The visitors center at Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge required masks because it is a federal building and Seneca County NY is in a High Community Level by CDC standards. The Montezuma Audubon Center, which is state owned facility in Wayne County NY, also at High Community Level, and this building also required masks.
It doesn’t seem like a huge burden to take steps to avoid a potentially dangerous damaging disease, and taking those steps to avoid it seems very worth it to me. This should happen society wide and before the hospitals are in potential jeopardy.
I look forward to a day when a birding trip doesn’t carry excess risk. I have to believe a better world is possible.
🗞️ In the news
🚨⚕️ Boston Globe: Health experts call for stricter COVID measures in Massachusetts as cases and hospitalizations rise (archive link) (“Right now, what we are actually requiring is kids to go to school and get COVID,” Jirmanus said. “And so, instead of requiring kids to get COVID, I think it’s better to require kids to wear a mask, which are much safer than COVID until the end of the surge.” … “Nobody in this pandemic is safe until all of us are safe,” Jirmanus said.)
🚗🧑🏭 The Detroit Bureau: Detroit Automakers Reinstating Mask Mandates as COVID Surges (“There are growing concerns in the medical community that yet another new variant of the virus could make it especially easy to pass on infections — especially in indoor environments where people may come into close contact, such as automotive assembly and parts plants.”)
🌉📚 San Francisco Chronicle: Berkeley schools reinstate indoor mask mandate for staff and students (archive link) (“Superintendent Brent Stephens said the city’s health officer, Dr. Lisa Hernandez, made the recommendation. He noted that the district has only been able to cover about half its teacher absences with substitute teachers during the current surge.”)
This is NOT fine
One word: Monkeypox
Herd Scuttlebutt
😥🤦♀️ I’ve heard of multiple reports recently of people being told to go to work or send kids to school, attending church and other activities, even though they have at least one person in their household already tested positive and sick. This seems to be an obvious recipe for promoting spread of the virus especially in the absence of mask requirements. I don’t know why anyone would do something like this, but I think it’s important to know this is happening when you’re deciding whether to attend church or a ball game unmasked.
♾💊 I don’t recall hearing so much about paxlovid rebound a few months ago. Now, if you go to twitter or google and start typing in just “pax” the auto-complete puts in “paxlovid rebound” as the first choice.
“The pandemic is a portal. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.”
- Arundhati Roy