📧PCDC campaign for better guidelines and resources🚗What are your DMV options?📚Covid Safe Campus Advocacy Letter for Students😷New York City Guide to Places with Mask Requirements❤️
The U.S.P.S. order free at-home COVID-19 tests program will be suspended on Friday, September 2 - make sure everyone you know has ordered their allowed allotment before the deadline!
Contents:
- Events, Actions, & Campaigns
- Pandemic field notes & “Living with the virus”
- In the News (virus & adjacent media)
- This is NOT Fine section (gaslighting & other outrages)
- He(a)rd Scuttlebutt (pandemic grapevine)
People’s CDC Letter & Call Campaign: We need responsible, clear CDC guidelines and resources
Join us in calling and writing to the White House and our Congress people to denounce the new guidelines, and demand they use all the tools available to keep us all safe.
U.S. households: Place Your Order for Free At-Home COVID-19 Tests
This order for free at-home COVID-19 tests program will be suspended on Friday, September 2, 2022. If you haven’t gotten all your allowed tests, order them now.
https://special.usps.com/testkits
New York City Mask Guide
This is a list of museums, businesses, and other public spaces in NYC that are still requiring masks and other COVID-19 prevention efforts to protect people, including higher-risk staff, customers, and visitors.
www.mandatemasksny.org/nycmaskguide
Covid Safe Campus Advocacy Toolkit
Includes Advocacy Letter for Students designed to support students in their advocacy and provide information on disability rights in education as they pertain to the coronavirus pandemic.
www.covidsafecampus.org/advocacy
Find out in advance - what are your DMV options?
In Pennsylvania, it is still possible to renew your drivers license using the old photo without having to go to the DMV, by calling the PennDOT customer service number and requesting accommodation to not to have to unmask and be exposed at the Drivers License Center. It may take longer but won’t involve going to the office in person.
IT’S WORTH ASKING ABOUT THIS WHEREVER YOU LIVE.
And if you find out, let me know what are the options where you live!
🗞️ In the news
💰 The Intercept_: Real Estate CEO: Recession Could Be “Good” If “Unemployment … Puts Employers Back in the Driver Seat” by Ken Klippenstein, Jon Schwarz (The executive told Wall Street analysts that joblessness could help companies “bring people back in the office … where they want them.”)
🇺🇸 Brookings: New data shows long Covid is keeping as many as 4 million people out of work by Katie Bach (“On prevention, some scientists are calling for a second “Operation Warp Speed” focused on nasal vaccines that reliably prevent COVID-19 infection. Until we have such vaccines, it makes good economic sense to encourage or mandate the use of masks, air purifiers, and other interventions known to reduce spread. Even with such prevention options, people will continue to get infected, and some of them will end up with long Covid. We need knowledgeable, affordable health care providers to help them recover, or at least improve.”)
🇺🇸 NBC News: Black Covid long-haulers felt invisible to the health care system, so they formed their own support groups (Smith said she visited hospitals a dozen times seeking help, but the physicians brushed her off, and one doctor labeled her “aggressive” when she insisted that severe headaches she experienced were due to Covid. She said she was repeatedly discharged with no resolution after each visit.)
🇺🇸 Miami Herald: DeSantis wants cops, other first responders to help fill teaching vacancies by Ana Ceballos (archive link) (“After giving military veterans easier access to temporary teaching certificates, Gov. Ron DeSantis on Tuesday said he wants state legislators to expand that same option for law enforcement officers and other first responders next year.”)
🇺🇸 Politico: HHS says it plans to extend Covid-19 public health emergency by David Lim (State and local public health officials — having not heard differently this week — are expecting the Biden administration to extend the Covid-19 public health emergency for another 90 days in mid-October. An extension would ensure expanded Medicaid coverage, telehealth services, boosted payments to hospitals and other pandemic measures remain in place beyond the midterm elections even as public health experts and lawmakers debate the merits of a PHE that was first declared in January 2020.)
💵 Financial Post: Posthaste: Sorry, but the economy isn't over COVID — and won't be for some time by Pamela Heaven (“But COVID isn’t fading away as a supply constraint, or as a health issue”)
This is NOT fine
Introducing…
… the nonsense term “herd safety”
Yes this was a ridiculous meaningless term actually floated.
No matter what they call it, it’s all the same picture. A fantasy.
He(a)rd Scuttlebutt, herd death fatigue…
National Nurses United sent a letter to the CDC director last month urging strengthening post-exposure quarantine and isolation guidance as well as to “more fully recognize the risks and impacts of long Covid and to conduct more effective public education regarding the risks of long Covid.”
When workers go on strike, they often endure their employer cutting off employee health insurance coverage. Seems like a good reason for unions to have everybody masking on picket lines.
Long Covid Families has a page: What every U.S. Employer needs to know about Long Covid, where they advise employers about ADA accommodations and recommend protecting employees from infection exposure.
I found this tweet thread by @hanolliver a very good description of how it is to be informed about things and watching other people who are uninformed or under-informed make “risk calculations” based on faulty & incomplete data, and finding it difficult to even explain it those people.
Lara @Iamgoingtosleep has been calling attention that the WHO Infodemic team has failed to take down the tweet that authoritatively but falsely claims that SARS2 is not airborne. Maia @angeliquedeberg, Infodemic manager from WHO actually replied to Lara quite sharply saying “dear Lara, putting shitty messages all over internet under all my posts won't help you to reach anybody.” But she’s wrong. this message reached me. And Lara is right, WHO should delete the old tweet that, to this day, is sometimes used to mislead people.
Bob Wachter this time is hand wringing about “peer pressure” to unmask, and equating it to being pressured to speed by tailgaters. He tried to say that speeding and tailgating are a right or privilege — that it’s the “driver’s prerogative”… But that’s not true. TAILGATING AND SPEEDING ARE ILLEGAL. The last thing we need is a vanguard to float the idea of “personal choice” for going the wrong way on the highway.
The same people who warned about SARS & MERS and other things are warning about CWD. I listened to a disturbing recent episode of the It Could Happen Here podcast: “Have you heard of Chronic Wasting Disease? You will.”
"Lots and lots of people live in fear forever for their whole lives. Thinking that you can’t live in fear forever or that you refuse to live in fear forever is the kind of thing you believe when your life has been so comfortable you’ve never had to look at the world straight on. Because if you’ve grown up in a world with plenty of things to fear, and that fear is a guide to the behavior that keeps you safe, then yes, you can live in fear forever and in fact you should."
— Alanna Shaikh