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."
I know weather is different from climate, but it feels like April outside today.
All the snow's melting (at least we got some snow after a very green Christmas), and I started peeling off layers as I walked.
Leon Simons (the "gentleman" climate scientist, not the Snowfall character) created the meme above. When it was criticized, he wrote:
"Some thought my meme wasn't accurate enough (it's a meme, not a peer reviewed paper). What about this one?"
ETA: This perfect line from British MP Florence Eschalomi:
"Freedom in death is only possible if you have freedom in life."
In March 2024, Canadians with mental health problems who haven't found significant relief from their condition will be able to get Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD).
As I wrote recently of the mental health crisis,
"We no longer lock people up in asylums; instead, we give them less than they need to survive, and they end up living in tents that randomly get bulldozed into the trash by government officials. We're back to the pre-asylum days where people who couldn't work because of a mental health condition have to resort to begging in the streets. In just a few months, they'll be eligible for MAiD."
Of course this is not to suggest that all homeless have a mental illness, but that many people with a mental health condition end up homeless because of a lack of supports.
According to Stats Canada,
"In the database, the underlying cause of death is defined as the disease or injury that initiated the train of morbid events leading directly to death. As such, MAiD deaths are coded to the underlying condition for which MAiD was requested, . . . In the case of a disability or mental health condition, deaths are coded to the underlying disability or mental health issue that MAiD was granted for."
A guest essay in the NY Times makes some excellent points about the way we're framing mental health issues in kids.
"Recent studies have found that several of these programs not only failed to help young people; they also made their mental-health problems worse. . . . Researchers suggest, convincingly, that the teenagers weren't engaged enough in the program and might have felt overwhelmed by having too many tools and skills presented to them without enough time to master them. . . . I would venture three additional explanations for the backfiring. . . . First, by focusing teenagers' attention on mental health issues, these interventions may have unwittingly exacerbated their problems. Lucy Foulkes, an Oxford psychologist, calls this phenomenon 'prevalence inflation'--when greater awareness of mental illness leads people to talk of normal life struggles in terms of 'symptoms' and 'diagnoses.' These sorts of labels begin to dictate how people view themselves, in ways that can become self-fulfilling. . . . Greater awareness of mental health problems risks encouraging self-diagnosis and the pathologizing of commonplace emotions--what Dr. Foulkes calls 'problems of living'."
I agree that framing every negative emotion as depression or anxiety can be self-sabotaging for people. On top of that we're also forcefully ignoring how withdrawn and exhausted people can become from chronic illness from repeated exposure to viruses and from watching friends and family members suffer, not to mention seeing catastrophic news about climate change and the many conflicts around the world and the burgeoning rise of authoritarian governments. Nothing feels stable anymore. Many of us in my part of the world have lived relatively comfortable lives for a few generations, long enough to forget what it might look like and feel like to struggle profoundly and to watch the suffering around you. Our problems of living have changed dramatically in the last few years, and it can be hard to come to terms with that change, so we might end up thinking something's horribly wrong with us instead of the world at large.
Dr. Rae Duncan is a cardiologist who, pre-pandemic, mainly saw people aged 55-80. Now most of her clients are 16-40. They were previously healthy, but Long Covid affected their heart. Most are housebound, some cannot walk. Some are in bed for over 20 hours per day, and can only sit up for 15 minutes at a time. Here's the video, but I've summarized it with some quotations further down:
"I don't see how this is sustainable in the longterm. I am seeing the devastating impact of this virus on young lives that have been damaged on a massive scale. . . . It makes me angry because some of this could be prevented . . . There's a need for public health to be extra vigilant on the new variants to reduce re-infection rates from this virus. We already know from published data that re-infection increases the risk of Long Covid and vascular complications. And there needs to be a plan for the level of health care provision we're going to need in the future moving forward. If we don't look, we can't see. . . . We know now that Covid is causing endothelial damage . . . that means the virus is responsible for causing inflammation of the inner lining of the blood vessels. . . involved in the pre-cursor to Long Covid. . . . There are papers from multiple continents looking at millions of patients all showing the same thing, that there is a significantly increased risk of cardiovascular complications, not just in those with Long Covid, but anyone infected with Covid."
Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and Johan Rockström wrote about the "Cascade of Crises" we're experiencing right now. They discuss global hunger, people forced to moved, political authoritarianism, violations of human rights, violent demonstrations, ongoing conflict. They point to three things: the magnitude of consumption, vastly greater connectivity among our economic and social systems, and risk synchronization. Since everyone is specialized, we don't have experts that can analyze all the connections. They advocate for creating a consortium for this. But can we do it fast enough?
Some recent climate change articles are painting a frighteningly bleak picture. At the Paris Agreement in 2015, countries around the world signed on to reduce greenhouse gases (GHGs) in order to cap warming at 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels by 2030. It's become clear that we won't be able to make it.
Current pledges for action by 2030, if delivered in full, would mean a rise in global heating of about 2.5°C and catastrophic extreme weather around the world. . . . Global emissions must fall by almost 50% by that date to keep the 1.5°C target alive. . . . We had our chance to make incremental changes, but that time is over.
The climate crisis has been a test of our ability to put long term collective needs over individual desires, and we failed miserably. It's no wonder we're not sufficiently mitigating SARS-CoV-2. Despite all our knowledge and technology and ability, we just don't want to be inconvenienced.
I knew what he was going to say as soon as we made eye contact. A bearded shit-eating grin in a pickup-truck stopped at a light while I cycled across the intersection to join a trail packed with university students. I just wanted to clear my head after events of the past couple of days with a nice long ride, but here we go:
"Take off your mask, sweetheart!"
It's the new, "Show us your tits!" but it's strikingly more effective if the goal is to provoke fear. I used to write off the horn-dogs on my trips around the city, and welcomed their depletion as I aged out of harassment, but this new group isn't easily deterred or reasoned with, and their actions are overt and condoned. Threatening to film or let their boss or family know about sexual comments was embarrassment enough to stop drive-by creeps. They knew it was wrong, so there was often something we could do. I even called the cops and they listened to me, taking down a license plate number when a gentleman stalker wasn't so easily rebuffed. But if their mum found out they harassed random people about masks, they'd might actually be proud of them. There's absolutely nothing in our social system or legal system that suggests they're doing something wrong when they yell at strangers or stop them in their path, even when they circle the block to do it again.
I really do think we're in the worst timeline, and that we won't make it out alive.
CW: policy-driven lunacy and the resultant rambling, rage-fueled, depressing rant
