Recent studies still show that Covid is serious, particularly in children, and that masks and filtering the air in schools can dramatically reduce the spread.
Katherine Wu, in The Atlantic asks,
"Why are we still flu-ifying Covid? The diseases are nowhere near the same. . . . In 2023, Covid hospitalized more than 900,000 Americans and killed 75,000; the worst flu season of the past decade hospitalized 200,000 fewer people and resulted in 23,000 fewer deaths. A recent CDC survey reported that more than 5% of American adults are currently experiencing Long Covid, which cannot be fully prevented by vaccination or treatment, and for which there is no cure. Plus, scientists simply understand much less about the coronavirus than flu viruses. Its patterns of spread, its evolution, and the durability of our immunity against it all may continue to change. . . . And yet, the CDC and White House continue to fold Covid in with other long-standing seasonal respiratory infections . . . show[ing] how bent America has been on treating Covid as a run-of-the-mill disease--making it impossible to manage the illness whose devastation has defined the 2020s. . . . The less people test, the less they'll be diagnosed--and the less they'll benefit from antivirals such as Paxlovid."
She explains that most dangerous is the idea that one vaccination/year is enough, that isolating briefly when actively sick is enough when "symptoms alone don't yet seem enough to determine when mingling is safe . . . infected people can shed the virus after their symptoms beginning to resolve." And then she comes to the biggest disappointment:
"America's leaders blew right past a middle ground. The U.S. [and Canada] could have built and maintained systems in which everyone had free access to treatments, tests, and vaccines for a longer list of pathogens; it might have invested in widespread ventilation improvements, or enacted universal sick leave. American homes might have been stocked with tests for a multitude of infectious microbes, and masks to wear when people started to cough. Vaccine requirements in health-care settings and schools might have expanded. Instead, 'we seem to be in a more 2019-like place than a future where we're preventing giving each other colds as much as we could,' Bhattacharyya told me. That means a return to a world in which tens of thousands of Americans die each year of flu and RSV, as they did in the 2010s. With Covid here to stay, every winter for the foreseeable future will layer on yet another respiratory virus--and a particularly deadly, disabling, and transmissible one at that."
Instead of evolving to better preserve life, we've just expanded our tolerance for preventable suffering.
Two new studies came out showing the long term harm to the brains of children. The first study collected brain scan data found brain abnormalities in over 40% of pediatric Covid-19 patients including neurovascular findings, ADEM-like lesions, encephalitic patterns, myelitis, and transient splenial lesions. The second study looked at the effects of neonatal infection on long-term neurodevelopment, and found that Covid in pregnancy portends prolonged developmental disruptions including impaired psychomotor development and smaller head circumference.
And the solutions are so easy!! A recent study on mask use when we just had crappy surgical masks found an almost 50% reduction in cases in schools with mandates. But even if you're triggered by masks, we can clean the air! Persistent absence rates in the UK are up to close to a quarter of students, and a recent RCT study found that adding in CR-boxes or HEPAs, that are well-placed and actually running all day, reduced absence rates by more than 20%. These ones are super quiet, almost inaudible, and a low energy draw, and the fact that they're still banned in public schools here is unconscionable. Maybe the increase in wildfire smoke coming our way will change that policy, but what a thing to have to hope for!!
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