Lots of people are still wearing masks. It can feel a bit like we're the only ones at the store, getting pointed at or coughed on despite intentionally and conscientiously reducing the spread of a brain-invasive disease.
But entire industries, like film sets, are maintaining masking to protect their employees (i.e. movie stars). The boss perceives them as irreplaceable. (What does that say about the rest of us??) And many famous people are masking in public.
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| Wil Wheaton |
Professor Akiko Iwasaki and team just put out a pivotal paper showing that "passive transfer of IgG from patients with Long Covid into mice recapitulates increased pain and other symptoms." IgG stands for Immunoglobulin G; it's the most common type of antibody found in blood circulation. Without enough of them, you get more infections!
The paper is titled, "A causal link between autoantibodies and neurological symptoms in Long Covid." Last September, they started by looking at Long Covid sufferers with neurological symptoms, and compared their antibodies and autoantibodies with people recovering and with uninfected people. Autoantibodies are antibodies produced by the immune system that attack a person's own proteins and can cause autoimmune diseases (lupus, MS, colitis...).
Covid is amazing for harming the immune system, right up there with HIV. Even mild and asymptomatic cases of Covid harm the body's ability to fight off infections, and makes us susceptible to other viruses and parasites. Yale made a poster about it:
Statement from Yale School of Public Health (sources here):
"Five years with SARS-CoV-2 in our midst, and the CDC reports that 43 million Americans have experienced Long COVID. Some have recovered, but roughly 17 million - the same number of people who have cancer in the U.S. - still deal with the condition, and that number continues to grow. At Yale, Dr. Akiko Iwasaki's laboratory is investigating how the virus can create long-lasting impacts on the immune system. And with many left incapacitated by the novel condition and at risk from rolled-back mitigations, the desperate need for answers grows.
Noam Chomsky passed today at 95. --- Actually, he's still alive. He was just sent home from the hospital after a stroke, and people feared the worst!!
His efforts to dig beyond the surface level of propaganda in the media is needed now more than ever. I try to follow his call to act in such a way so you can look yourself in the mirror each night, and his unwavering optimism amid his deep dives into atrocities. Here's Jacobin's farewell and one from Yanis Varoufakis. I summarized some of his words in these posts over the last dozen years or so.
On Chomsky (summary of Understanding Power)
Chomsky's Forward to Albert's Realizing Hope: Life Beyond Capitalism
On Chomsky's Driving Forces in US Foreign Policy
Requiem for the American Dream
Nader Interview with Chomsky on the Requiem for the American Dream (with Ralph Nader)
Inconceivable! His Dinner with Chomsky (interview with Wallace Shawn - I don't get enough credit for my post titles!)
Chomsky's Optimism: On Climate. Change, Nuclear War, and Activism (podcast with Truthdig)
The Future of the Left with Natalie and Noam (interview with flippin' Contrapoints)
Chomsky's Lessons from 2021 (interview with Yanis Vanoufakis)
And a bunch of iconic quotes:
Three articles came out in the past few days that should remind us that Covid is really here, and maybe we should act on it. But all the facts in the world can't penetrate the wall of hopeful denial.
"Contrary to public belief, he warns, Covid is not like the flu. New variants evolve much faster, making annual shots inadequate. He believes that if thinks continue as they are, with new Covid variants emerging and reinfections happening rapidly, the majority of Americans may eventually grapple with some form of Long Covid. . . . Some people can get Long Covid, and maybe it ages them a little bit, but it doesn't change them very much. But for others, their lives are devastated. . . . Only 22% fully recover within a year. Others remain stable or get worse. . . . There are all kind of weird things going on that could be related to Covid's cognitive effects. . . . traffic fatalities increased by 19%. . . . .
"A little learning is a dang'rous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again."
~ Alexander Pope
Is it, though?
We're in a mental health crisis and people need more access to help. How much learning is necessary to help one another, and is it dangerous to listen and offer another perspective or even some suggestions without an advanced psych degree? In old movies, people told their stories to bartenders, hairstylists, or cab drivers for the price of a beer or trim or trip to the airport. They just needed a captive audience willing to listen to their worries Now we want people with credentials as if that will provide more certain results.
But not all credentials are created equal.
Last year BetterHelp got in the news for allegedly sharing confidential health data to social media sites, and was fined $7.8 million. TV writer Mike Drucker wrote:
"EVERY BETTERHELP AD: 'We're like therapy but cheaper and easier! We have people for every problem so you get care just for you!'
ACTUAL BETTERHELP: 'We're gong to set you up with a confused therapist that will ghost after two sessions. Also we told Facebook about your assault.'"
More recently, the New York Times had an article on scams in the wellness coaching industry, describing scenarios in which the new recruits were bilked out of massive amounts for "tuition" made up of a few hours of videos, and then were never helped to find clients.
"Business is booming. . . . The number of coaches increased 54% between 2019 and 2022. Because the industry lacks standardized accreditation, it's most likely larger -- one of the dangers of life coaching is that anyone can claim the title of life coach. . . . [One coach] has spent an extraordinary amount of money on the certification and clung to the dream that had been sold to her . . . found herself short of clients and scrambling to make any income. . . . There is a problem in the industry of coaches who coach coaches to become coaches. . . . Life coaching attracts people who are vulnerable to exploitation."
Just this from xeviuniverse.
Here's the link in case embedding doesn't work.
@xeviuniverse I didnt have time to cover all the other vomit inducing things he did
♬ original sound - Xevi
The CDC put out some crappy comms with an image with a mask photoshopped upside down, with "N95" shopped onto a KN95, and only on the patient, not the doctor, which suggests that doctors don't need to wear them. I almost feel bad for how hard they failed on this except that disease prevention is THEIR ONLY JOB, and their incompetence has cost so many lives.
And now North Carolina is banning masks during protests and adding to the punishment if a mask is worn in a crime, but they added in a health exemption - after people protested - that allows medical grade masks to prevent spreading illness. However, the law still allows law enforcement and property owners to ask anyone to remove their mask for identification despite the reality that sunglasses obscure identity more than masks and there are no laws banning sunglasses during protests.
The Minden ER closed June 1, 2023. A recent article in the Minden Paper explains why this should worry all of us.
"After we analyzed the decision-making processes before, during, and after the closure of Minden ER, our team audited teh audited financial statements of every hospital in Ontario. . . . For FY22, 25% of Ontario hospitals posted a deficit . . . For FY23, 75% of Ontario Hospitals posted a deficit. . . . Their average deficit was $5.9 million. . . . One healthcare system -- Mackenzie Health [in Richmond Hill] -- posted a $93 million surplus. . . .
Without testing or wastewater data warning us of rising cases of viruses in our regions ahead of time, we can only look to excess deaths after the fact. Bleak times.
This is a graph of Finland's excess deaths relative to pre-pandemic levels. Pay attention to that blue line. It's the excess deaths of children aged 5-9. The dip in 2021 is when kids all wore masks and fewer died of RSV and the flu. The current excess death rate for kids is 2.4 times pre-pandemic levels. More than twice as many kids are dying, and we're still not acting on this.
Schools are the number one vector of infection. If we can halt transmission there, it will make a huge difference. We could have CO2 monitors in every room that beep at 500 ppm to alert the teacher to open doors and windows. And we could have super quiet and super cool CR boxes that run on computer fans. The CO2 monitor is a one-time buy at about $200 - likely far less in bulk, and the CR boxes are under $300 fully assembled or under $200 if you make them yourself - again, far less if in bulk. Those changes would be cheap and doable today, except opening windows and having CR boxes in class will get you in trouble in my neck of the woods. If we actually wanted to spend money protecting kids - and the rest of us by extension - we could add upper room UV!!
Business as usual means we're risking our lives for conveniences we didn't expect to have when I was young, and we pretty happily lived without. It's not a call to go back to the stone age, just fifty years or so.
In my house growing up, we rarely drove places despite being almost 5k from the closest mall. As kids, if we wanted to go anywhere, we could bus, bike, or walk. My parents lived their entire lives without ever being in an airplane. That's a luxury of excess, they said. That entire Aristotelean ethics is gone now. "Waste not, want not" was successfully drilling into our little heads. Now we'd rather buy new than get something fixed.
I occasionally get anon comments telling me, in one way or another, to stop writing about Covid and/or climate change.
It's really bizarre to me. I mean, I get that people don't want to hear about the crap going on in the world, and I get that a lot of people don't believe any of this is true despite lots of citations from many reputable sources. But what baffles me is that this is a teeny-tiny, little blog. They'd have to really go looking for this content just to tell me that I'm wasting my time writing it. That seems like a whole lot of effort with no result since I largely ignore them and they could easily just ignore what I write. You would think people had better things to do with their time.
Would you rather get used to wearing an N95 or get used to needing help to eat or sit up? It's a choice.
From Nate Bear:
"Neuroscientists are out here telling us that SARS-CoV-2 is worse for the brain than viruses we're rightly scared of like Zika and HIV, and this information is running into a brick wall at the institutional medical, media, and political level."
