📝 Petition: Require masking in all healthcare settings 😷 Is it Quiet Quitting or is it Long Covid? 🦠 Worker safety regs should be independent of the virus PR agency CDC 🧑‍🏭

For some reason people still don’t know about the possibility of false negatives on Rapid Antigen Tests.

Contents:

- Events, Actions, & Campaigns

- Pandemic field notes & “Living with the virus”

- In the News (virus & adjacent media, science, news, essays, and op-eds)

- This is NOT Fine section (gaslighting & other outrages)

- He(a)rd Scuttlebutt (the pandemic grapevine)

---

USA Petition: Require masking in all healthcare settings

Just in time for flu season, with 300-400 US residents dying from COVID-19 daily, the CDC revised its infection control guidelines regarding mask-wearing in healthcare settings, from hospitals and clinics to home care providers and nursing homes. The new guideline recommended masks only need to be worn in healthcare settings when COVID Community Transmission rates are high, based on the CDC map.

This change is dangerous, unethical and based on flawed data.

By the People’s CDC

https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/require-masking-in-all-healthcare-settings/

---

USA Absentee Ballot Deadlines

https://www.vote.org/absentee-ballot-deadlines/

Please especially remind anyone you might know who might be planning on attending or might know someone who plans on attending, the APHA event in November which is scheduled ON ELECTION DAY. (Don't assume everyone remembers! Ask! Find out if you have friends & family traveling on election day!) In some states applications for absentee voting must be received 15 days before Election Day.

---

Virtual Meeting Webinar: Marked By COVID Covid Community Meeting

October 27: Suzanne Firstenberg artist, In America: Remember (White Flags on the Mall) with Sarah Wagner and Jeremiah  Lindemann

4:30pm US Pacific Time (Los Angeles) / 7:30pm US Eastern (New York)

---

---

Is it Quiet Quitting or is it Long Covid?

Workers are now pressured to not wear masks, and nothing has been done in many workplaces to mitigate the risk at all, so they’re getting covid repeatedly for years now. More workers have been forced back to the office, so even more are getting covid from coworkers and some die. Many get long-term complications from covid. Worse many told by their doctor that it’s nothing because many doctors are not well informed on post-covid conditions. The Surgeon General’s Framework for Workplace Mental Health and Well-Being was released last week, and blames stress for “increased vulnerability to infection” — along with the risk for diabetes, and the risk for other chronic health conditions. Mental stress in the workplace is nothing new, and it’s awful for sure, but… Everyone seems to be ignoring a huge deterrent to happiness in the workplace. Repeatedly getting infected with a dangerous virus is not an appealing job requirement, and becoming debilitated for weeks, months, or years with chronic illness doesn’t facilitate full bore productivity.

Nature: Diabetes risk rises after COVID, massive study finds

CDC: Risk for Newly Diagnosed Diabetes >30 Days After SARS-CoV-2 Infection Among Persons Aged <18 Years

Harvard Health Publishing: Diabetes risk increases after COVID-19 diagnosis

The BMJ: Covid-19: Infection raises risk of diabetes and heart disease diagnoses in following weeks, study finds

from @Annalisa840917

---

🗞️ In the news

• 🇺🇸 Fox2now: Illinois executive order encourages everyone to mask again by: Sean Lisitza (Illinois is encouraging its citizens to mask up again Friday. According to the latest Illinois COVID-19 Executive order, “All individuals, including those who are fully vaccinated, are recommended to wear a face covering consistent with CDC guidance.”)

• 🇺🇸 Bloomberg: Texas Judge Says HIV Drug Mandate Violates Religious Freedom (archive link) (A federal judge in Texas ruled that a provision of the Affordable Care Act that mandates free coverage of groundbreaking drugs that prevent HIV infection violates the religious beliefs of a Christian-owned company.)

• 🏢 CNBC: Google employees frustrated after office Covid outbreaks, some call to modify vaccine policy by Jennifer Elias (The employees, who spoke with CNBC on the condition of anonymity, said since they have been asked to return to offices, infections notifications pop up in their email inboxes regularly. Employees are reacting with frustration and memes. The company began requiring most employees to return to physical offices at least three days a week in April. Since then, staffers have pushed back on the mandate after they worked efficiently for so long at home while the company enjoyed some of its fastest revenue growth in 15 years.)

• 🌬️ CIDRAP Experts suspect Ebola virus sometimes spreads by air by Robert Roos Feb 19, 2015 (… they suggest that Ebola viruses have the potential to evolve in the future into pathogens that spread mainly by the respiratory route, "particularly if extensive ongoing human transmission results in selective virus evolution.")

---

This is NOT fine

Worker safety regulations should be independent of an opaque agency like the CDC

Confined Space: OSHA COVID-19 Standard Approaches as CDC and Republicans Complicate Matters By Jordan Barab

First, CDC issues extensive infection control guidance, but that guidance, unlike OSHA standards, is voluntary. CDC cannot cite or penalize healthcare employers for non-compliance. In addition, worker advocates would dispute whether CDC adequately protects workers’ health. While the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) falls under CDC’s umbrella, NIOSH is not generally allowed to play a leading role in establishing CDC guidance that affects healthcare workers. Nevertheless, to ensure federal government consistency, OSHA’s regulatory and enforcement actions cannot be in conflict with CDC’s guidance and CDC generally carries a bigger stick than OSHA when it comes to hashing out potential conflicts. So if CDC unexpectedly changes its guidance in the middle of OSHA’s rulemaking, OSHA is sent rushing back to the drawing board to make appropriate modifications.  Issuance of OSHA’s original COVID ETS, for example, was repeatedly delayed because CDC would change its infection control guidance.

I have questions.

From OSHA healthcare rulemaking hearing:

“OSHA is required to have a transparent process like we are having today... CDC is a black box we have no idea how these recommendations are determined until there are FOIA requests or Congressional inquiries.”

— Dr. David Michaels, Epidemiologist, longest serving OSHA head (2009-17)

I did a FOIA to CDC but most of it was redacted claiming the deliberative privilege, which apparently we’re not allowed to know.

---

He(a)rd Scuttlebutt… pandemic grapevine 🍇🌱

• For some reason people still don’t know about the possibility of false negatives on Rapid Antigen Tests. Someone told me of someone who went out to a restaurant for dinner and then came down with the worst cold ever - a very very bad bad cold that laid them up for quite awhile. They tested negative on two Rapid Antigen Tests - when they first got symptoms, which happens to be the time when RATs are least reliable.

• I’ve seen troubling reports about ERs and pediatric hospital wait times in Alberta Canada.

• I have heard of 2 universities which lifted campus mask requirements, however allow the professors to require masks in class and 2 professors who have chosen to do so, and provide masks for anyone who forgets or needs one.

• Alana Saltz weighed in on the unfortunately seemingly perennial and disappointing divide between disabled lefties & some leftists in the labor movement.

• Lots of schools reporting huge “outbreaks of illness” unspecified and whole school sports seasons cut short because of “shortage of healthy players” and this while a dangerous pandemic rages on… But they’re blaming lockdowns. What lockdowns? And no, getting viruses repeatedly doesn’t make you better, it makes you sick repeatedly. There’s no mystery here. Put on a damn mask.

• CDC Director recommended hand washing with no mention of the utility of respirator mask protection… in the midst of multiple airborne spread epidemic diseases including an ongoing pandemic. The response should not be against hand washing. I’m glad finally people care about that. But I think we can go ahead and just call Rochelle Walensky an anti-masker.

• I hear about people who mask “most of the time” but then take it off here and there to, I guess socially fit in momentarily, or “just to eat” — and I also regularly hear about people who give into that, and get sick from doing so. Why wear a mask all the time to protect yourself, and take the social hit wherever, only to unmask just long enough in dicey situations to get infected anyway? As Mike Hicks said, “You can’t mange COVID exposure risk like saving up leave to splurge on a vacation, or rollover minutes on your phone plan.” Risk just doesn’t work that way.

---

Most of us view the world as more benign than it really is, our own attributes as more favorable than they truly are, and the goals we adopt as more achievable than they are likely to be. We also tend to exaggerate our ability to forecast the future, which fosters optimistic overconfidence. In terms of its consequences for decisions, the optimistic bias may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases. Because optimistic bias can be both a blessing and a risk, you should be both happy and wary if you are temperamentally optimistic.

- Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow, 2013