Safe Schools and Hospitals

We're starting the school year with high levels of Covid in Ontario, and kids are still getting sick from a disease that, unlike the flu or a cold, has potential long-term consequences, leaving behind micro-clots that can lead to strokes, as well as increase chances of diabetes, brain damage, and more as it runs through the bloodstream and can affect every organ. 

Vaccinations don't entirely prevent illness and spread, but they CAN keep most people out of the hospital from the acute illness. Unfortunately they wane after several months and most of us are only allowed to get one once/year. If you're going to do it, now is the time. Also unfortunately, they're not ready yet. The government keeps putting them out with the flu shot despite that Covid is not seasonal; it spreads when people congregate. The best time to get the shot might be one in mid-August in time for school, and then early December in time for all the celebrations in late December and winter travel. Then open the windows in the spring and summer! But the powers that be will likely not release this one until next month.

Professor Raywat Deonandan posted about the Covid vaccination back in December 2020, 

"I love looking at this graph, showing it to my students, and sharing it on social media, even though it unerringly brings out the trolls. This is the efficacy curve of Pfizer's mRNA Covid vaccine. This, people, is what ended the emergency phase of the Covid pandemic. Despite what RFK Jr. says."

The red line on the bottom shows the illness level in people with the vaccine over four months, and the blue line shows the results in people who got a placebo. It was later immortalized by xkcd:

A recent article in Medscape reports that healthcare works have been significantly impacted by Long Covid. 

"I thought that 3 months was a long time ... here I am, 5 years later, and I still have symptoms. AI think that's the case for a lot of patients with Long Covid, that it just keeps getting longer. ... A systematic review of Long Covid's impact on the National Health System out of the UK found that 18% of healthcare workers were out of work due to the condition. ... A large percentage of peopel continued to work despite their condition. 'Our occupational health policies really aren't fit for an episodic disability. It's almost a dichotomy between being in work or being out of work, whereas these people's symptoms can fluctuate over time, and they can have crashes.' ... Four nurses with Long Covid profiled in The Irish Examiner said their lives have never been the same since their initial infection, with none being able to return to work. They feel their voices are being ignored."

One New Brunswick hospital decided to resume mandatory masking in all patient-facing clinical areas, but not hallways or lobbies. "There are currently COVID-19 outbreaks at the Moncton Hospital, in the geriatrics and chronic care units, and at the Saint John Regional Hospital, in the transitional care unit." Patients and visitors are asked to self-screen for symptoms before entering a facility, but that continues to ignore all the asymptomatic transmission. Patients with symptoms must "clean" their hands (not "wash" so hand sanitizer counts) and put on a mask, but they offer medical masks, which still enable transmission.

Covid is similar and different to many other diseases:

• Covid is like the flu in that we need regular shots because it mutates so quickly.
• It's like chlamydia and tons of diseases in that you can have it and spread it without having any symptoms. Almost 60% of Covid transmission is from someone asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic.
• It's like measles and polio in the disability rate and fatality rate. 
• It's like chicken pox (and polio and HIV) in that it can hibernate in the body for years or even decades before showing up as a more serious longterm illness.
• It's often like ME/CFS and POTS in its presentation of the chronic condition, Long Covid, but it also shows up as a stroke in young people among many other things.
• But it's most frighteningly like HIV/AIDS in that it causes lymphopenia, the reduction of B, T, and NK cells that fight off infection. The big difference is that Covid is airborne. People who contracted HIV in the early 70s, which felt like a flu, started dying of AIDS in the mid-80s. 

I plan to continue to err on the side of caution on this one. Wearing a mask in public isn't that big a deal compared to the alternative.

Opening windows helps as does air filtration units, like very affordable and effective CR boxes, but too many schools just aren't into that kind of thing. Upper air UV really works, but it's expensive and requires professional installation. Well-fitting N95s really work, and, so far, they can't stop your kids from wearing one! It's pretty much all we've got at this point.