🎓😷Covid Safe Campus releases Graduation Toolkit📝Open letter to the Chicago Party Scene🥳SDA calling on San Fran DPH to reinstate masks on transit😷
Mark the Million Online Vigil Monday May 16th 8pmET
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?)
Covid Safe Campus Graduation Toolkit
Every graduate deserves a safe and accessible celebration of their accomplishments
https://www.covidsafecampus.org/gradtoolkit - Share on Twitter
San Francisco California Tuesday, May 17 4pm US PDT
Senior and Disability Action (SDA) Calling on San Francisco Department of Public Health to reinstate masking on transit. Twitter: #Masks4Equity
http://bit.ly/SFHCmeeting
Mark the Million Online Vigil
Monday, May 16, 2022 5:00 pm PT (6:00pm MT, 7:00pm CT, 8:00 ET)
Registration: http://markedbycovid.com/million #MarkTheMillion, together
Marked By COVID Online Community Meeting
May 19, 2022 07:30 PM US EDT - Register to Attend
Covid-19 and Health (In)Equity with Harvard's Justin Feldman
Chicago Illinois
Open letter to the Chicago Party Scene
“We are disappointed to see that, in over 2+ years of living with Covid, event and party planners still plan and promote events that are unsafe and inaccessible. To us this means parties with no capacity limits and no mask requirements.”
Form to sign onto letter here: https://forms.gle/7rsgL1f96uh22yrt5
Nicolas Smit has shared a collection of quoted text pulled from the CDC web site showing that the CDC had documented concern about airborne transmission and had advised for airborne precautions as early as January 2020. I’ve had people react to this with disbelief. But these are from the CDC’s own web site archive. (See the list below.)
It’s much like the report OSHA put out in March 2020 about engineering controls to prevent airborne disease spread in workplaces, which was just cast aside. That report recommended “installing high-efficiency filters” and increasing ventilation
I have noticed that the hospital Geisinger CMC in Scranton Pennsylvania has improved their ventilation. But many people I talk to even now don’t know that HEPA air filtration can help.
From Nicolas’ document https://tinyurl.com/CDCsaidSARS2airborne
This January 2020 document from the CDC explains the agency wanted hospitals to use precautions against airborne pathogens around Covid patients and to take extra precautions since the agency did not know if SARS-CoV-2 remained infectious in the air as long as the virus causing tuberculosis. “Standard practice for pathogens spread by airborne route (e.g. measles, tuberculosis) is to restrict unprotected individuals, including HCP, from entering a vacated room until sufficient time has elapsed for enough air exchanges to remove potentially infectious particles. We do not yet know how long 2019-nCoV remains infectious in the air. In the interim, it is reasonable to apply a similar time period before entering the room without respiratory protection as used for pathogens spread by airborne route (e.g. measles, tuberculosis).”
Direct links to the CDC web site with the information:
https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/84639/cdc_84639_DS1.pdf?download-document-submit=Download
https://www.cdc.gov/hicpac/pdf/2020-March-HICPAC-Summary-508.pdf
https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/115055/cdc_115055_DS1.pdf?download-document-
submit=Download
https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/115232/cdc_115232_DS1.pdf?download-document-submit=Download
https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/107956/cdc_107956_DS1.pdf?download-document-submit=Download
Files
🗞️ In the news
😷⏱️📄 Roll Call: CDC has backlog of applications from manufacturers of N95 masks (“Without CDC approval, makers of N95s cannot advertise on social media sites”)
🩺🧑⚕️📚 Falvey Memorial Library Blog: Celebrating, Supporting Nurses During National Nursing Week and Beyond (“These nurses must be recognized for their efforts, and it is imperative that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration implement a permanent safety standard for hospital and healthcare settings to protect our vitally important nurses and healthcare workers.”)
🧠🩹😔 Forbes: Covid-19: Long Term Brain Injury (🔊 audio available) (“Our social support systems must recognize Covid-19 related long-term disability as a reality and assure those who suffer are protected. It is now clear that our encounter with Covid-19 will not fade with the pandemic but will endure for decades.”)
💵🩺🧑⚕️ Business Insider: Healthcare workers with long COVID are having their careers cut short due to debilitating symptoms as the industry struggles with labor shortages (“According to the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit research group, one in seven US workers may experience lingering COVID-19 symptoms like Maddy's. That means long COVID, formally called "post-acute sequelae of COVID-19," could be preventing or stalling 1.6 million Americans from returning to work amid a national labor shortage.”)
🚨🦠🚓 NPR: COVID was again the leading cause of death among U.S. law enforcement in 2021 (“It has been reported to NLEOMF that these officers have died due to direct exposure to the virus during the commission of their official duties," the report says.)
This is NOT fine
🚨🦠 The Biden administration is telling us we won’t get federal funding for a pandemic response and at the same time is telling local governments to spend whatever pandemic relief money is left on buffing up police. Please join me in writing to the White House and your local reps to say we need the pandemic money spent on the pandemic response. (Share on Twitter & Instagram) https://tinyurl.com/FundPandemicRelief
Herd Scuttlebutt
Farid Jalali has pointed out that there are not just public health wrongs implicated with the reluctance to consider SARS-CoV-2 in the the outbreaks of child hepatitis, but immediate clinical treatment concerns that could go terribly wrong. It’s hard to believe that over 2 years into this we’re still watching MDs forced to take to Twitter to sound the alarm , while weird influencers criticize attempts to save lives.
A number of DC media people are claiming without evidence, no harm no foul from the Gridiron Dinner & White House Correspondents Dinner super spreader events. In response to this, Beatrice Adler-Bolton of the Death Panel Podcast pointed out that DC stopped reporting cases in April, and quoted Abby Cartus & Justin Feldman, “There is a bias towards interpreting uncertain and inconclusive research findings about health risks as evidence of no risk…” And what is the case count for the Gridiron & WHC dinner workers and their families? Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
I’ve started a Pandemic Memes Collector substack newsletter to try to save and document the various interesting helpful infographics and (often sardonic) pandemic memes.
“Just because it is inconvenient is not a reason to not build these interventions into our standard public health systems and societal infrastructure. Just like we built plumbing, sewers and toilets.”
Dr. Dick Zoutman of Kingston Ontario, speaking about pandemic mitigations such as air filtration, testing, masks, and vaccines without patents