Studies make it very clear that Covid is really bad for us, yet we're going to do nothing to prevent the spread.
In case you didn't know, if you have almost $20,000 to spend each year, per kid, on a private school, that many of them have excellent pandemic plans still in place. People with money are able to keep their children very safe from the pandemic. One school still recognizes that,
"There is no such thing as a harmless single case of Covid that someone with 'a healthy immune system' can overcome." So, all staff, students, and any visitors, "will wear masks whenever we are indoors, and any time we are close to one another outdoors. . . . The only options for masks indoors are KF94s, KN95s, or N95s (or higher filtration masks or respirators), and they must completely cover both the nose and the mouth and be snug against the sides of the face."
What a dream it would be if all schools cared so much for our kids!
A recent National Geographic article explains how Covid triggers cardiovascular problems by directly infecting the arteries of the heart. The study they discuss was published in Nature in September. The big news is that they figured out that, "the virus can survive and grow inside the cells that form plaque. . . . If the plaque breaks, it can block blood flow and cause a heart attack or stroke. The SARS-CoV-2 infection makes the situation worse by inflaming the plaque and increasing the chance that it breaks free."
A three-year long research study of 138,000 veterans found for sure that the more times you get Covid, the more likely you are to get Long Covid, and that Long Covid symptoms create a greater burden of disability than heart disease or cancer. In an interview, the lead researcher said,
"Some patients do experience some recovery. But that's not the norm. Most people do not really fully recover. The health trajectory for people with Long Covid is really very heterogeneous. There is no one-size-fits-all. . . . Vaccines do reduce risk for Long Covid, but do not completely eliminate the risk. . . . It's important for doctors to get up to speed on Long Covid as a multisystem illness. Management at this point is really managing the symptoms. We don't have a treatment for it; we don't have a cure for it. . . . Some people may come back to the clinic and say, 'I'm doing better,' but if you really flesh it out and dig deeper, they didn't do better; they adjusted to a new baseline. . . . The number-one lesson that I take form this pandemic -- that infections can cause chronic disease. Looking at only acute illness from Covid is really only looking at the tip of the iceberg."
We know it harms the immune system. A recent study in Nature looked at biological features associated with Long Covid compared to controls and found significant differences in myeloid (cancer prevention) and lymphocyte (pathogen destruction) cells.
A recent study in Infection on CD4 T cells, the lymphocytes destroyed by HIV, are rendered ineffective in clearing Covid, and they continually respond to the antigens, which increases metabolism, which is connected to people becoming so tired they can barely sit up in bed. It also explains the increase in other illnesses in Long Covid patients.
A groundbreaking study in Science found a way to look at the immune system using dynamic positron emission tomography (PET) to measure CD8+ T cells in tissue. CD8 T cells - lymphocytes - are necessary for immunity against pathogens out there. So now we have a way "to study the total-body immune response" with a PET panel. This is important because, as explained in an interview with Dr. Amy Proal, RNA viruses, like Covid and measles, are often not found in the blood because they hide in tissue or in nerves to better protect themselves from any immune response.
Proal said the criminal part of the pandemic is public health not telling people how the virus spreads, calling the 6' rule and allowing baggy blue masks with gaps a tragedy. So few people know that it spreads in the air like smoke, that it's painful. She worries that researchers are going to burn out. We need to explain to more people about masks, exposure, being outdoors, and opening windows.
"We can try to run more trials of therapies, which we are, but if it's not in concert with basic efforts, like cleaning air so people are inhaling less virus in the first place, then I don't see much of a solution. . . . Just pull a fraction of money from the military industrial complex, and we're good to go!"
Finally, the John Snow Project has a great editorial out about the "death of public health" as part and parcel of neoliberal capitalism:
"No national or regional government is making serious efforts towards infection prevention and control, and it seems likely this laissez-faire policy will continue for the foreseeable future. . . . The shifts that have taken place in attitudes and public health policy will likely damage a key pillar that forms the basis of modern civilized society, one that was built over the last two centuries; the expectation of a largely uninterrupted upwards trajectory of ever-improving health and quality of life, largely driven by the reduction and elimination of infectious diseases that plagued humankind for thousands of years. In the last three years, that trajectory has reversed. . . . Because it is much easier to stop an outbreak when it is still in its early stages of spreading through the population than to eradicate an endemic pathogen, the governing principle has been that no emerging infectious disease should be allowed to become endemic. This goal has been pursued reasonably successfully and without controversy for many decades. The most famous newly emerging pathogens were the filoviruses (Ebola, Marburg), the SARS and MERS coronaviruses, and paramyxoviruses like Nipah. . . . Such epidemics were almost always aggressively suppressed. . . . The major counterexample of a successful establishment in the human population of a novel highly pathogenic virus is HIV. . . .
The emergence of a new pathogen with pandemic potential was a well understood and frequently discussed threat. . . . The eventual appearance of SARS-CoV-2 should therefore not have been a huge surprise, and should have been met with a full mobilization of the technical tools and fundamental public health principles developed over the previous decades. . . . After HIV, SARS-CoV-2 is now the second most dangerous infectious disease agent that is 'endemic' to the human population on a global scale. And yet not only was it allowed to become endemic, but mass infection was outright encouraged. . . .
We need to be clear why containment of SARS-CoV-2 was actively sabotaged and eventually abandoned. . . . This is not a technical problem, but one of political and social will . . . because powerful economic and corporate interests have been pushing policymakers to let the virus spread. . . . First, NPIs [non-pharmaceutical interventions, like masks] hurt general economic activity, even if only in the short term, resulting in losses on balance sheets. Second, large-scale containment efforts of the kind we only saw briefly in the first few months of the pandemic require substantial governmental support. . . . In an era dominated by laissez-faire economic dogma, this level of state investment and organization would have set too many unacceptable precedents. . . .
The long-established principles governing how we respond to new infectious diseases have now completely changed - the precedent has been established that dangerous emerging pathogens will no longer be contained. . . . Populations are largely unaware of the long-term harms the virus is causing to those infected, of the burden on healthcare, increased disability, mortality and reduced life expectancy. . . . Another lesson of the pandemic is that if there is no testing and reporting of cases and deaths, a huge amount of real human suffering can be very successfully swept under the rug. . . . We can also expect previously forgotten diseases to return where they have successfully been locally eradicated. . . . We have now entered the phase of abandoning respiratory precautions even in hospitals. . . . We are told that it is impossible to contain SARS-CoV-2 and we have to 'just live with it,' as if germ theory no longer holds. . . . And that does not bode well for the near- and medium-term future of the human species on planet Earth."
We learned so much over the last 150 years or so, and now we've decided not to pay attention to any of it. Well, more specifically, the protections we have - quiet filtration units and N95s in school - are only for the wealthy. If you think your children deserve them too, let your principal and the school board director know over and over and over and over until it's made a priority.
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