We teach our children to have a "healthy fear" of the water, to respect that it's possible to drown in the shallows or to hit our head on a rock if we get knocked down by a wave. So we swim with a buddy who's paying attention to us. We should have a healthy fear of viruses too.
Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, the guy who told the Senate Hearing that the burden Long Covid is on par with the burden of cancer and heart disease, wrote a brief explainer of a recent study (Gascon, Martorana & Moore, 2024) that found "a significant surge in the number of people with a disability in the U.S."
I still have educated people in my life that argue Covid isn't a big deal because they know tons of people and don't know anybody who's been disabled or died from it. They don't seem to understand why the scientific method uses random sampling instead of taking anecdotal accounts as evidence. But the numbers don't lie. And the big picture will hit home eventually:
This is the first September that I'm not going to school as a teacher OR a student since I was 4 years old (not counting maternity leaves for all my spring babies), and all I can think about is the giant Covid wave engulfing all the little ones without any mitigations even suggested.
"New" research says that kids actually DO get harmed by Covid, which is something most should have known years ago. For a while there, the story was that kids carry it, making schools the number one vector of transmission, but somehow aren't actually affected by it, which is clearly malarky! Even without an eye to long term damage, just being sick for a few weeks several times a year takes a told. As a trustee in 2022, my phone rang off the hook with parents frantic that their kids were getting sick again. I talked to parents with kids in the hospital, so I can imagine in what universe people ever believed it's harmless.
Salon reports,
"For years, public health experts have said that Covid-19 infections in children are 'mild.' . . . While some children with the coronavirus are admitted to the ICU and there are pediatric deaths, studies have found that underlying medical conditions including obesity, diabetes, cardiac and lung disorders, increase the risk of severe outcomes."
Apparently we're all in with Pfizer and Moderna despite Novavax providing significantly better protection and fewer risks.
Novavax is preferred for people who can't tolerate mRNA vaccines as Novavax uses protein-based fomula instead. It's targeting the JN.1 variant, as well as KP.2 and KP.3, which originate from JN.1 and most widespread (the "FliRT variants").
The WHO has declared an international Public Health Emergency for a more lethal version of Monkeypox, now called mpox, which is clade 1b, aka 1 MPXV, and comes with a 4% fatality rate (compared to Covid's current approximately 0.7% rate -- or 1 in 25 vs 1 in 150). However, Forbes reports that clade I could "kill up to 10% of people."
The different "clades" (a broad grouping of variants) matter. Anyone can get it regardless of sexual orientation, but men who have sex with men had a significantly higher risk of getting Clade II, which was big in 2022. Right now, we've got Clade 1. an airborne infectious disease that is more severe. In Burundi, almost half of the cases are in children under 5, and, from Forbes, "children younger than 15 years old now make up more than 70% of cases and 85% of deaths. . . . The outbreak in children suggests that clade I is transmitted through air." So all the comments about gay sex are moot for this one, like these lovely examples:
In the fall of 2020 and 2021, we had masks, even if some were a poor fit or made of cloth. Now we have zero mitigations. School is starting soon at a time with the highest fall case count in the states since this all started!
But Covid doesn't just kill. It hangs around to reappear later in a disabling form.
It's the pinnacle of denialism and such a waste of talent to have top athletes practice for decades of their lives for this one event, then put them together with coaches and family members without ANY precautions, and then watch them get sick one after another.
Sports Illustrated argued (from J. Offir),
"If the International Olympic Committee insisted that all participants be at their mental and physical best at the moment of competition, no event would ever take place. . . . Lyles said he never considered withdrawing. . . . Of course he was sick, and of course it affected him--and of course it doesn't really matter. They held the men's 200 at the Olympics this week, Noah Lyles was the third-fastest man in the final and that's that."
In other words, we have to live with the virus. Tons of athletes are just going to collapse during or after or before performing. That's the new normal we're ushering in rather than wear N95s. In another article they splash the "R" word around: resilience!! We have to push through despite having preventable spread of a virus allowed throughout the Olympic village!!
Many of us live in a punitive, carceral type of society that can make it difficult to have compassion for ourselves or others. It's an era of the glorification of the individual over the group, leading to perfectionism and narcissism and so, so much loneliness. We can't connect when we're working with blind determination to find our place above the rest. We can't connect when we don't dare show an ounce of vulnerability for fear of being taken down like a wounded gazelle on the Serengeti. Our quest to rise to the top for the security we think comes with status and money is completely at odds with our very real need to feel authentically known, within the security of a community.
We're no longer following that love and forgiveness bit from Christianity, if we ever really did wide-scale. And we project our fear of losing on anyone who has suffered through difficulties, no matter if it's a natural disaster or massive layoff. We distance ourselves from the suffering of others by convincing ourselves they must have done something stupid to be in this position, and, therefore, we're safe as long as we keep on going hard. It's just a trick to make us feel safer, that unwittingly keeps us from too consciously noticing the floods and fires, layoffs and illnesses lapping at our heels.
Leading causes of death have changed over the past four years. In the States, Covid slipped from 3rd to 10th place. Or did it?
The numbers are from this study and discussed in this article.
Eric Topal looked more closely at the numbers. There were "still 50,000 [official] Covid deaths in 2023. Heart disease and stroke are not declining. Small reduction in cancer deaths."
This is just bananas, but another county in NY State banned masks.
From this article,
"Nassau lawmakers on Monday approved a bill making it a misdemeanor--punishable by up to $1,000 and/or a year in jail--for anyone wearing a mask or any facial covering to hide their identity while in public places. The measure exempts people who wear masks for health, safety, 'religious or cultural purposes, or for the peaceful celebration of a holiday or similar religious or cultural event for which masks or facial coverings are customarily worn.'"
That's a lot of words to ensure that Hallowe'en is safe.
We need external organizations to monitor for safety without any conflicts of interest! And we need to stop throwing people into dangerous situations as if human beings are expendable, expecting more and more to be available to fill their spot like it's flippin' D-Day!!
Social psychologist, Dr. J. Offir, wrote a great thread on how hard it would be for Olympic competitors to not jump in the Seine despite how sick it was obviously making them:
This was obviously a policy failure that we watched unfold in real time. ("Wait! Stop! Come back!" says Willie Wonka.) But it also demonstrates how people selectively trust authority figures when those leaders are saying what we want to hear. (This pattern of behavior has also been on clear display during the pandemic: people were suspicious of leaders whom they perceived as restricting freedoms, due to psychological reactance, but once those experts said to unmask and go to the mall, the same folks who had been disbelieving suddenly found faith in authorities' messages again. Ask people why they aren’t masking, and many will give you some variation on "the CDC said I don't need to.")
I totally understand the feeling of being out for blood right now about the number of children who are likely to get sick in our public schools this fall, some who will never recover. We want to find someone to pay.
But the nature of our fucked up bureaucratic system is that it's engineered so that nobody takes responsibility for anything. It's rule by nobody.
If anyone should be in trouble, it's the premiers of each province. They're the ones who are in charge of directing the mess. Now the CMOs aren't their own entity, so they take direction from premiers. And, more to the point, school boards can't do much to override whatever direction they're given or they risk losing their right to govern themselves. That means a supervisor can be appointed by the government to take over a board. At some schools, teachers who have complained about how things are run have been suspended.
If we want blood for the anti-mask rhetoric, then we need to aim at the top. But will that accomplish anything?? It might feel good, but is it productive?
