🖇️ Workers also save money with telework 😷 Keep Masks In Healthcare 🩺 Keep the Public Health Emergency 🚨
"They don't talk about the covid rate death rate" in Kalamazoo County, Michigan.
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 State Governors: Keep Masks In Healthcare
By People’s CDC: Policy to remove masks in healthcare is dangerous, unethical and based on flawed data. Health care is the most essential place to prevent spread of infection, and keeping health care safe should be a bare minimum of accessibility in every state.
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/keep-masks-in-healthcare/
USA Letter Campaign: Tell elected reps: Keep the Public Health Emergency
President Biden and Members of Congress, Three years into the COVID-19 pandemic, we need you to treat the pandemic like the ongoing public health emergency it is. We need you to embrace a comprehensive approach to public health based on layers of protection and public policies aimed at protecting the most vulnerable people among us.
by People’s CDC
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/maintain-healthcare
New York State USA Letter Campaign: Reinstate the Mask Mandate for Healthcare Settings in NY!
By Mandate Masks NY: Contact the Governor, Commissioner, and State Assemblymember and Senator to say that we need New York State to reinstate the mask mandate for healthcare settings!
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/reinstate-the-mask-mandate-for-healthcare-settings-in-ny
Office workers are saving money working from home and avoiding the virus exposure of the workplace
It’s a win-win for workers. Workers in Philadelphia who telecommute are saving $2,161 per year in expenses. Workers in New York City save $4,661.00 per year!
This is According to research from: https://wfhresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/WFHResearch_updates_February2023.pdf

🗞️ In the news
ConsumerAffairs: Commuting to work in heavy traffic can cause brain damage, study claims. Researchers may have handed remote workers an excuse not to return to the office. By Mark Huffman (Working remotely eliminates the daily commute to the office, and for those whose route took them through heavy traffic, there might be a health benefit from working at home. Canadian researchers have published a study showing that common levels of traffic pollution can impair human brain function in only a matter of hours. The peer-reviewed findings, published in the journal Environmental Health, found that the damage can occur in as little as two hours when drivers are exposed to heavy diesel fumes in heavy stop-and-go traffic.)
PBS NewsHour: People living with long COVID explain how the disease changed their lives (VIDEO) (The specter of long COVID, with its mysterious cause, no obvious cure and an unknown duration, haunts millions and millions of people. In this report, we hear from some of those who are suffering with it and Wiliam Brangham speaks with Dr. David Putrino of Mount Sinai Health in New York about the varied symptoms people are dealing with.)
Revolving Door Project Newsletter: The Value of a Human Life, According to Economists (Cost-benefit analysis as a practice has many critics. One major criticism is that cost-benefit analysis is far more useful to people pushing deregulation, because the financial costs of implementing new rules are so much easier to quantify than the more amorphous benefits. Given the enormity of what the social cost of greenhouse gases purports to represent, it is in some ways a perfect example of the foundational flaws of this kind of economic analysis. This is what Rebecca Hersher’s story last week gestured to, when she characterized the social cost of carbon as both a “powerful tool and ethics nightmare.”)
This is NOT fine
Status Coup: Kalamazoo Michigan Air Pollution SCANDAL You've Never Heard Of
Jordan Chariton: If you look at data comparing Michigan, Kalamazoo to the rest of Michigan to the U.S. Look at the chronic lower respiratory disease uh 48%. Yeah it's uh about seven seven percentage points higher than the United States in terms of leading causes of death a little bit over the state of Michigan this is from 2017 so it could be worse.
Brandi Joy Crawford: They don't talk about the covid rate death rate either in the neighborhood which is extremely high. There's a ton of people that were in their early 20s that had asthma since they were kids that died from covid. I tried to get the news to like talk about it um. Yeah, younger people, kids, there was a report I found from the county Health Department that showed 1900. there's only like 8,000 people in the neighborhood and like it said like 1950 people, black babies which most of them, are in the neighborhood and Kalamazoo County died in 2017 under the age of one so I asked the toxicologist said the report do you think that it could be because the babies had underdeveloped lungs and were exposed to the air pollution — he said absolutely.
He(a)rd Scuttlebutt… pandemic grapevine 🍇🌱
People with Long Covid have told me that they’re concerned about the amount of people with Long Covid being subjected to intense target market sales for unproven treatments. I’ve been pointed to several posts on Reddit where people say they were “scammed by naturopaths selling expensive supplements” - sellers who make bold claims that don’t pan out. And worse, when they don’t work the people selling the stuff make BS excuses that it’s really just the fault of the person with Long Covid. This is egregiously offensive.
“This idea that social media is curating content specifically for you based on your interest. You have outsourced your filtering of information to an algorithm that's now feeding you really just specifically information that reinforces your own biases. And that's very dangerous. Because you're getting a very tailored curated perception of reality that's skewed to what you already think is true.”