Covid, the T-Shirt

Last March I had the funniest experience as a trustee. We were required to attend a seminar about creating inclusive classrooms where everyone can feel comfortable belonging, about mental health and problems with students' executive functioning, and about understanding the brain and how to keep it healthy. Yet there wasn't a mask in sight from any of the presenters or staff or many of the trustees, and they said it would be impossible to bring in a HEPA unit to the room, and I definitely couldn't bring in a CR box. I wrote a bit about it at the time. All those involved didn't see the two-fold irony in this at all. First, they didn't (and likely still don't) see a disconnect between offering an inclusive setting where nobody who was immunocompromised in any way would be safe attending. And secondly, they didn't (and likely still don't) see a disconnect between talking about the health of the brain while refusing to do anything to prevent the spread of a virus that CAUSES BRAIN DAMAGE. 

I attended remotely and was lucky to at least garner that accommodation, but it didn't allow me to feel comfortable belonging in that room in the least. 

Now, in a similar unwitting quest for irony, the University of Waterloo just announced a fantastic change to campus: No more tobacco products.

They explained further that, "becoming a smoke-free campus is part of the University's ongoing efforts to foster a healthy and safe campus environment for all . . . it is our responsibility to create environments where health is embedded into campus culture and policy."

It doesn't start for another nine months, so smoke 'em if ya got 'em! 

Courage to Admit our Mistakes

Translation from Maarten De Cock

"Many people know, from unfortunate experience, and doctors recognize that most contagious diseases are communicated by breathing the air that comes out of the chest of individuals already suffering from these kinds of illnesses. ~ M. Rouland, 1784."

We've known about airborne pathogens for literally hundreds of years, yet the CDC and WHO have a bizarre aversion to acknowledging it. Surely they've all seen that Wired article by now, right?!?

Some suggest that it might be significantly more difficult for people in healthcare to start wearing a mask again:

"Imagine being a doctor and realizing your medical training overlooked the most important and basic fundamentals of patient safety, and that you were taught outright pseudoscience by charlatans, and that you repeated these lies confidently to patients who trusted you. Shit. We dug the hole too deep. The only way out now is to keep pretending. It can't be true."

It's hard to realize you've made a huge mistake, but people have to get over it.

As a teacher who focuses on teaching good science from junk and good media from biased unsubstantiated bullshit, I once told a class that some coaches were taking balls out of soccer games to make it so kids weren't humiliated by losing. I heard just a piece of what sounded like a news report on CBC while getting a lift, and I didn't look for any corroborating evidence or even the name of the show to check that it was the news! 

My students rightly pointed out it was a satirization of current events. Of course it was!! How incredibly embarrassing!! I used it as an example of how easy it is to get sucked in. A really humiliating example. I could have said I was just testing them, but I didn't. I owned it. 

You just have to eat it and go on. 

I get that it's a different kettle of fish with lives on the line -- nobody died thinking that some schools don't allow balls on the field or realizing that their teachers can make giant whoppers of mistakes -- but the longer they wait to fess up, the more lives will be harmed by this travesty. 

Jump in with both feet: strap on an N95 and goggles when you leave the house TODAY! People will ask you about it, and now's your chance to admit that you had been duped all this time and want to rectify that, to fix things as much as you can, and to teach others how airborne viruses work -- that they can worry far less about what they touch and far more about what they inhale. It'll be a difficult first day, but it will get easier. Soon it will be second nature. 

So brave!!  

(Tip: N95s are actually more comfortable and breathable than a surgical mask; they don't move on your face and slip around or fold into your mouth when you talk, and you can stick your tongue out at people without them knowing. If you really hate masks, you might just be wearing the wrong kind.)

Blazing a New Trail, Literally

Is this year different, or is this the new trajectory we're on to the very end?

The Climate Brink collected a series of unnerving graphs showing what an outlier this year is. 

Some pollyanna types are hoping just this year will be different, and then we'll somehow get back within our typical ranges despite doing fuck all to change anything, but I can't imagine how that could be the case. Tipping points have been tipped. We're on the last leg of our journey together.

In a review of Adam Welz's new book, The End of Eden, it's explained, 

We are ALL the Immunocompromised!

Since Covid affects the immune system, everyone who has ever had it has a significant change of being immunocompromised now! 

Dr. Gary Payinda noticed,

"Some viruses, which used to cause barely a sniffle in healthy adults, were now putting people in hospital. We're now seeing your typical regular healthy middle-aged person presenting to the emergency department with bad cases of RSV, and that's pretty novel for us."  

A paper published in July looked at how Covid causes immune dysfunction, and raised this concern:

"The oncoming burden of Long Covid faced by patients, health-care providers, governments and economies is so large as to be unfathomable, which is possibly why minimal high-level planning is currently allocated to it." 

Love Wins Over Hate

On social media, my Covid posts have suddenly lost all their troll-drawing capacity. The angry mob has moved on to bombard people's 2SLGBTQIA+ posts. Just a few months ago, just mentioning the word "mask" was considered divisive and harmful to the very fabric of society. Some people wanted to get me for it. Now it's divisive to condemn hate. 

This comes as no surprise. The messaging around parental rights has way more tractions as a means to divide groups, you know, like if anyone had some warped desire to form a militia of some kind. Jus' sayin'. All parents have an innate drive to protect their children from perceived harms, so that parental rights messaging really works in their favour to find more of a rabid following than masks restrict freedom ever possibly could. In this regard, the mantra of "parental rights" is pure genius!! 

On Teaching Public Health

Organizations have done such a bad job of explaining Covid to the public over the last almost four years, that it will be difficult to ever get mitigations back in place. 

Research director with a PhD in education, Dr. Sean Mullen said incredulously, 

"They said herd immunity would work. Then hybrid immunity. What's next? They should just come out and say it: Hocus-Pocus, Hail Mary Hypothetical Immunity. Seems we've been banking on magical thinking, prayers, and theories rather than results. Hallucination immunity. Might as well be dreaming."

When asked why health care professionals aren't masking he explained why he thinks people in general stopped:

Known Knowns and Known Unknowns

On May 27, 2022 , we heard the simplest possible explanation of what Covid does to our bodies and how to prevent the spread, but we gave a finger to that information in favour of business as usual. Change is hard. 

Between the time the CDC told people to unmask and Biden declared the pandemic over, and just a couple months after mask mandates were removed from the schools in Ontario, transplant surgeon and bioscientist (and LA Times owner and billionaire) Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong explained what was definitely known about Covid (h/t Jesse International - transcript abridged a bit further down):

Staying Healthy Takes Work

If social media is any barometer of this, anti-mask abuse appears to be skyrocketing.

Fixed it for ya!

There are tons of comments by the Covid cautious about about being accosted at stores and in the street, followed by others suggesting that's just not happening. 

I wrote about being harassed on the street over a year ago, and a few people (men) commented that it never happens to them, so I added in: 

"If right now you're thinking, 'Nobody ever hassles me about my mask,' it could be because you're male or a more imposing female or neurotypical or you don't travel around alone on foot or by bike all the time, or you don't live a few blocks away from a site home to regular anti-mask rallies!"

I've actually found the level of harassment directed towards me has decreased in my area -- knock wood -- which could be because I travel similar route, and see the same people over and over, and people have grown weary of hassling me and having no effect.

On Helping Professions

Should mental health professionals be more concerned about the spread of a brain-invasive virus that affects mental health by doing a number on the brain??

Amanda Hu wrote 

"I feel like therapists and counselors as an entire profession (save a few individuals) not understanding how serious Covid is, thinking it's over and being part of the minimization of the pandemic is actually a crisis. We need the people who are supposed to guide us through grief and trauma to not be in denial of reality themselves. I've heard a lot of stories about avoiding Covid, or physical symptoms being pathologized even when the person has physical and medical proof of the damage Covid infection did to their body! I had a therapist I saw when I had a lot of climate grief a few years ago. I don't really see how she would have been able to help me if she didn't think climate change was real." 

And Dr. Mike Hoerger, a licensed psychologist, responded, 

"We need more psychologists who take the ongoing pandemic seriously. This means masking, using right-sized HEPA, contextualizing life struggles in terms of discrimination, exclusion, suffering, and loss, and empowering people to fight for safety." 

Children Risk More Illnesses after Covid

What every pediatrician in the world needs to read - from tern: 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is a really bad thing, isn't it?

I wonder what the percentage is after the 2nd, 5th, 8th, and 12th infection?

Here's a really really interesting point in the study: Only a tiny proportion of the kids have a constellation of problems.  The new issues are spread out across all the body's systems: 

"Only 2% of children had two disorders at the same time."

Do you understand the significance of that?

Chasing Pirola

Last week I wrote that we don't need to know all the specifics about different variants. It just confuses people. What the public needs to know is that there are a lot of variants out there at once, so getting sick or immunized doesn't prevent getting sick again. It's one virus, but many, many different iterations of it.

And now I'm going to eat my words.

Pirola (BA.2.86) is different. It's now the most immune evasive variant and has the highest reproductive rate, which means it's even harder to avoid, and it's spreading further. A paper in The Lancet explains:

"BA.2.86 bears more than 30 mutations in the spike protein when compared with XBB and the parental BA.2, and many of these mutations are assumed to be associated with immune evasion.  . . . BA.2.86 has been detected in several continents (Europe, North America, and Africa), suggesting that this variant might be spreading silently worldwide."

Vaccines aren't ready for this one. As always, vaccines are behind the curve, forever playing a guessing game with the variants in hopes of predicting which will be the best match by the time the vaccine is available to the public. This round is targeting XBB.1.5, the Kraken.

If you haven't already, for the love of all that is good in the world, please wear a mask. 

And consider nasal spray, mouthwash, mini-HEPAs, and far-UV lights if you can afford them. 

Myths We Live By, and Die By

A brief but poignant thread by T. Ryan Gregory: 

It's painful to think about how much damage these myths have caused. 

Myth #1: Droplet vs airborne transmission.

Myth #2: Pathogens inevitably evolve to become more benign.

Myth #3: Endemic means mild.

Myth #4: Viruses quickly run out of evolutionary space. 

Myth #5: Children need to be infected with pathogens (vs. commensal microbes) to build up their immune system.

Not to mention all the new myths in the making that have arisien during this pandemic:
  "Immunity debt"
  "Robust hybrid immunity"
  "Respirators work at an individual level but not at a population level"
  "Targeted protections"
  "The virus doesn't transmit in schools"

I'd add that calling the Long Covid symptoms "brain fog" and "fatigue" led to people thinking they'd just be a little more forgetful than usually or a little sleepier than usual--no big deal--when the reality is some people can't get out of bed or sit up for long, and they need help to eat and go to the bathroom. 

Of course, we know now, and we knew back in 2019 as well, that most viruses that cause a pandemic are airborne; pathogens can get worse; endemic means it's continuing rather than rising and falling; viruses can evolve forever; and the more times we get sick - the more times our children get sick - the worse the outcome. 

We need to do everything possible to avoid getting this virus - or avoid getting it again. Well-fitting masks work. Cleaning the air with filtration units helps. Schools and hospitals are seriously exacerbating the situation since removing mask mandates, and policies must change to prevent such open transmission in public places that people need to be.

Covid or Climate: Can't it be both?

In a local school board meeting from last June, in which they discussed their plan to remove HEPAs in rooms that had mechanical ventilation added (as if it's and either/or option), they first discussed how far they've overshot their energy budget. There were clear implications that Covid mitigations had forced this increased cost. 

Taking the price tags off for a moment, if we're faced with reducing CO2 emissions by reducing energy usage, OR reducing CO2 in the air by adding HEPA filters, which do we choose??

It can be both! 

But we can't do it within a neolibertarian capitalist framework. I always include that 'neoliberal' part because this current version of capitalism is very different from what Adam Smith and John Locke proposed! We're essentially back to a feudal system with CEOs our new Kings and Queens and workers given scraps like peasants. 

Round of Accommodations for All!

Last fall, when I started back to school for the first time in a couple decades, WLU had mask mandates, which was such a relief for anyone trying to avoid getting Covid. Then they dropped them last February with this announcement: 

"While face coverings will no longer be required, members of our community are encouraged to wear masks in higher-capacity, close-proximity settings."

For the winter and spring terms, I sent an email to my classmates to just ask if they wouldn't mind wearing a mask in class. It went something like this:

Hi everyone! Looking forward to starting the course tomorrow, and a bit nervous asking this - but, if possible, I'm wondering if people could wear masks in the room?? I have some health concerns, and while I'll be supermasked, one-way masking isn't nearly as effective as two-way. Every little bit helps! If you can't, or even just can't stand it, then you can't. I get it - no worries. But if you can.... I would really appreciate it.

Last term, one student responded, 

The Weirdness of Now

This morning I listened to a Naomi Klein interview from this week about her very different type of book, while reading a prescient Geroge Monbiot article that he reposted from last March. There's a striking amount of overlap.

Both are about the new right-wing alliances being formed, and the furthest right political parties we've seen in some time creeping up worldwide. 

George Monbiot:

Monbiot blames the influencers who are feeding the young conspiratorial messages, including Russell Brand (hence the recent repost). 

"He appears to have switched from challenging injustice to conjuring phantoms. If, as I suspect it might, politics takes a very dark turn in the next few years, it will be partly as a result of people like Brand. . . . He wastes his talent on tired and discredited tales. . . . Such claims are not just wrong. They are wearyingly, boringly wrong. But, to judge by the figures (he has more than 6 million subscribers on YouTube), the audience loves them. . . . 

Stages of Genocide

We like to think we are way beyond barbarity and that the outrageously cruel acts of the past (many not in the too distant past) will never be anything we consider again. But neoliberal capitalism feeds an addiction to profits, and addicts will do anything to get a fix. 

We have unbridled climate change, harmful viruses in our schools, daycares, and in hospitals, which still won't protect people from getting a virus while they're dealing with broken bones or cancer or giving birth. In Canada now the sick are sometimes offered MAiD instead of healthcare. The hospitals are closed or overwhelmed to the point that 11,000 Ontarians died waiting for surgeries or scans in the past year. Healthcare isn't an option for too many people. 

Despite sitting on billions of dollars, Ford plans to "partner with private clinics" to address the problem instead of just re-opening the hospitals and actually paying more healthcare workers. This is the useful crisis they needed to usher in privatization. Many in private equity firms that are capitalizing on this crisis already have expensive homes and cars and all the toys. It will never feel like enough. They'll keep scheming to get more and more.

How to Profit from Pandemics

Three threads from this week outline the political and media pandemic protocol being followed around the world, the similarities and differences between prior pandemics, and how the profit motive fuels it all.

Prognostic Chats outlined a baker's dozen of steps taken by many countries to get us to this damaging place. His post comes with receipts, but I've grown weary of including them. I don't think they need evidence. It's just how most of us are living now. 

"Masks have been removed from healthcare. Now schools are encouraging parents to send their sick children to class. We didn’t get here by accident. We have been brought here through carefully orchestrated system changes. They have been common in many counties. Few have noticed.

How Vaccines Work

Poilievre wants to make it illegal to have mandated vaccinations as a condition of employment and travel. He introduced the bill last June, and a second reading in the house is currently in progress. (FYI - It has to pass through three readings in the house, then three in the senate before it reaches royal assent, so it's got a long ways to go, and private members bills often don't get through the process.) You can read what different MPs have said about it at the excellent website, Open Parliament.

But just think about it a minute: imagine going to a country with a dengue fever outbreak, as is happening now in several countries, and you don't have to be immunized for it. That's just nuts! 

Bill Comeau, math prof at UW, said of Poilievre's tweet about the bill,

"As a mathematician and a follower of science, this was one of the scariest posts I have ever seen from a modern politician. The potential for exponential spread from a new future pandemic is very real. This scale of anti-science denial could potentially harm millions. . . . This bill would appear to also erase existing vaccine mandates, such as the ones that protect modern school children from a host of serious diseases."

We are moving so far backwards with this party, and too many people are climbing aboard. It's just following the Republican talking points to the letter. 

In Florida, the governor recently backed up the surgeon general in "urging residents against new Covid vaccines." They're trying to make people worried because the vaccine wasn't tested on people, but on non-human primates. But, that doesn't mean they're not safe! Very similar versions of the vaccine have been tested on people and used on people with very few ill effects. If you didn't react poorly to the former versions, then you won't to this one either.

His other main talking point is that "Pharma will make more money if this thing is approved and they start pushing it on everybody." It's a familiar narrative, and does what most effective spin does: it takes a grain of truth, an authentic worry on people's minds, and generalizes it large enough so it's all encompassing and also no longer even close to the truth. Yes, Big Pharma has allowed some drug through, like oxycontin, that ended up harming some people while making others rich. But the pharmaceutical industry is massive. Most of the drugs that have been tested and used by people saved their lives. Vaccines, in particular, have saved lives. Did people make money doing the work of producing them? Absolutely. We can't all be Jonas Salk. People also make money building new hospitals, but that doesn't make it a bad thing. 

Here's a 85 second video to explain how these vaccines work from Drew Comments:

Information Without Action Leads to Devastation

How it feels to watch it all (Judgment Day).

We know all the things we need to know!

From Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding:

"Want to know why even mildly symptomatic sick folks shouldn't attend school/work? Because they can exhale high viral loads for 8 days! (As high as 1,000 virus copies per minute!) Mask up? If you don't stay home or mask--use at least a HEPA." 

It's nothing really new, this study that verifies how many and how much; it's just more specific. Every exhale from an infected person sends the virus all throughout the air in the room. Some people track specific variants and which ones are dominating, but that also doesn't necessarily add to a useful knowledge base for the layperson. The important bit to understand is that there are enough version of the virus in play that we can get it again and again! That reality has been around a while. 

We cling to each next new vaccine like it walks on water, but we've seen literally millions of "breakthrough" cases. Isn't that enough to show that vaccines reduce severity of acute symptoms but not the ability to catch and spread it significantly enough to be the only prevention. In fact, reduced symptoms and unrealistic expectations of the vaccine's effectiveness likely causes more transmission as overconfident people stop masking. Definitely get vaxed, but don't forget the limitations of what Covid vaccines can do.

It doesn't help that people keep referring to it all in the past tense or any reference to "during the pandemic..." which implies that it happened in the past and then ended. New variants keep forming and will keep forming as long as the virus is able to mutate inside host bodies. We're unable to get rid of it as long as we keep allowing it to spread. It didn't end and won't end.

Still Working On Filtration Units

Ontario School Safety is still working hard to try to get CR boxes allowed in classrooms. 

They donated some directly to the local board office. Unfortunately (and unsurprisingly), they can't be used without these following six questions answered, so they crowdsourced for studies. Here are some of the answers they got - in case others need them - and some links I found myself. (The letter-writer that responded to them appears unfamiliar with question marks.)

1. In relation to CADR, is it possible to obtain manufacturers data ideally showing the fan curve air volume (at low speed) vs static pressure and similarly the MERV-13 filter pressure drop data, again air volume vs static pressure curves.

I couldn't find a study that specifically referenced fan curve air volume vs static pressure, but I did find...