It's a Ruse!

We have to acknowledge how far we've gone down the rabbit hole of lies to be able to ignore this Covid wave that's almost reaching the highest peak of hospitalizations.

It's the third leading cause of death and children are the fastest growing population affected by it, but people still balk at masks. 

Forbes made it clear that ditching masks is all about saving money:

"As an industrial hygienist, Seminario was extremely critical that there were no experts in respiratory protection on the committee. . . . She believes that the HICPAC committee members are likely so opposed to respirators 'because once you are into recommending respiratory protection, with that comes a full respiratory protection program from OSHA', with penalties for violations."

Our current wave actually made a mainstream paper: yesterday's Toronto Star: 

"Ontario Covid Wastewater signal hits one-year peak: Your chance of being exposed is very high. . . . Health-care professionals are recommending the public undertake a familiar suite of measures to protect themselves . . . wear a high-quality mask in crowded indoor settings like public transit, and stay home from work or school if you are under the weather."

A Brief History of Letting it Rip

Something, at some time, eventually, will be the last straw that finally gets people everywhere to change their behaviour around Covid.

This is where I live, and I rarely see another person in a mask! 

This is save-worthy post on Twitter. Long Covid advocate Laura Miers wrote a timeline of threads to show how intensely we're ignoring reality. I didn't link all the threads inside the threads, but I tried to link all the news outlets for the initial quotation in each sub-thread for a while until it started taking too long. 

"What’s happening in China has been quietly happening in western countries since we Let It Rip in 2021. Below, you will find a thread of history we are choosing to forget. 

In the US, we started off with Covid coinfections in 2021. Kids were testing positive for like 6 viruses simultaneously, and this was shocking and novel. (massive thread:) 

'I was on call in the pediatric ER a couple of weeks ago, treating a child with respiratory distress, when I looked up at the census board and saw 'RSV+COVID.' This was the first time I'd seen this combination of Covid-19 and respiratory syncytial virus.' (CNN, August 2021)

A Genius of a Virus

We're starting to see more effects of Covid.  

Yesterday, biorisk consultant Conor Browne wrote about something many have been screaming into the void for some time now:

"A core part of the analysis I perform involves zooming out; that is to say, taking a very broad view of the effects of infectious disease on populations, rather than individuals. People often reply to my posts here with something like, 'everyone I know who had Covid is ok'. And that is almost certainly true because most people only know a few people well. 

However, when I zoom out to the population level, it is crushingly obvious that continued unmitigated transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is having increasingly damaging population-level effects. This manifests primarily as ever-increasing levels of disability caused by Long Covid, and, more perniciously, sequelae of Covid. Increased cardiovascular problems, increased autoimmune problems, increased diabetes etc.

Diagnosing Mental Illness During Difficult Times

A guest essay in the NY Times makes some excellent points about the way we're framing mental health issues in kids. 

Psychologist Darby Saxbe discusses the well-intentioned but problematic way many schools have added mental health resources, like those focusing on emotional regulation or mindfulness:

"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.

On Learning Loss

A New York Times piece discusses, again, learning loss from the lockdowns of 2020, but a new study shows the lockdowns actually improved some skills. 

The Editorial Board of the NY Times wrote about the "Startling Evidence on Learning Loss" insisting that school closures "may prove to be the most damaging disruption to the history of American education."

Really? More damaging than many children getting a brain invasive virus over and over, sometimes 2-3 times each year, a virus we know swells glial cells around neurons that then fuse together, blocking signals to the brain, which creates Alzheimer's-like symptoms in the young?? Those months off, in most places a shorter time than a typical summer break, caused more disruption than this ongoing virus? That was just the first paragraph, so let's keep reading:

The Moonshot to End the Pandemic

 A recent paper explains how easily we could stop the pandemic even with current highly transmissible, immune evasive variants.

Barry Hunt explained the paper's findings:

Rt [the replication rate of the virus] typically hovers just around 1, just enough to sustain transmission endlessly. Rt typically peaks at less than 1.50. That means a 30% reduction in transmission can extinguish the pandemic even at its peaks. Even less between waves at non-peak Rt times. 

It's a Good News - Bad News story.

Compassion as the Antidote for Capitalism

A Taylor Swift fan took the brave position of calling out the beloved superstar, and everyone else involved, for the death of Ana Clara and many in need of medical attention at her concert Friday night in Rio:

"First of all, Taylor made sure fans had water during the show. She took a pause a few times and even adjusted her performance in "All Too Well", the 10 minutes version, to include a heads-up to her crew about water supply. There are people blaming the heat wave for Ana Clara's passing, but let's be clear—it's not a "natural disaster." The venue intentionally shut the air vents to block the view from outside. Reports say the heat index hit 120F or 62°C. Despite the scorching conditions felt by everyone, Taylor included, the staff refused to tweak the script. Adding to the discomfort, stage flames blazed on, and local news reports reveal a staggering 1,000 people required medical support. Despite efforts from Taylor's team to provide water consistently, there are reports indicating that the supply eventually ran out, leaving certain areas without water. 

Party Like It's 1699

 It feels like there are three realities out there. It's not just three separate groups of people, because lots of people straddle a couple or even all these realities. 

One reality is full of facts and figures. Climate change is being exacerbated by continued fossil fuel use and beef farming. The pandemic is still here, and it's affecting more children this year, and an increasing amount, likely from children being infected over and over. There's a clear upward trajectory of dangers to our lives that require an urgent response. 

Excess deaths from disease in the U.S. relative to the 2015-2019 average as baseline.

Then there's a marked counter reality sometimes full of facts and figures from dubious sites (or govenment officials) completely at odds with what the majority of high quality, peer-reviewed papers are reporting. In this version of reality, Covid is long over despite the overflow in hospitals and lack of ambulances available. Vaccines will kill you, and N95s either don't work at all or will suffocate you. Kids are sicker now because of immunity debt from a lockdown that happened before some of them were born. Things that have been shown to work irrefutably for decades are suddenly being scoffed at.  

Putting the Brakes on Car Culture

I'm sure I've used that title before!. It's a funny time of year for this, but lots has been reported recently on the trouble with cars. 

Part of it may have started from this video put out by the RCMP, depicting the car fatality issue as if it's equally a problem caused by motorists as pedestrians.

Tom Flood made a much more accurate version, clarifying that the problem isn't 50/50, but that it rests primarily on the shoulders of motorists to be more careful:

The Frustrating Run-Around on Filtration Units in Schools

This is a long but very informative video about what happened when people tried to improve air quality in schools. 

This is a very loose collection of things said that resonated with me in this meeting between Robert Bean and Adam Muggleton of Edifice Complex Podcast and Amanda Hu, a visual artist and safer schools advocate out of Alberta who got certified by the National Air Filtration Association despite not being an engineer. Most of this was explained by Amanda:

On Legislating Kindness

If kind, other-centred behaviour isn't entirely natural to us, then should it be legislated (more than it already is)?

Many old timey philosophers agree that happiness is predicated on an increase in pleasure and decrease in pain, and that just seem like common sense. Yet all too often the choices we make don’t lead towards our intended outcome of increased pleasure; instead, we make choices that lead us towards misery. We want a clean world, but we drive everywhere. We want a strong uptown core, but we don’t stop shopping at Wal-Mart. We want civilization to continue with beautiful nature to hike in and plentiful conveniences, but we're definitely not about to stop using fossil fuels or eating beef. 

Plato might say our problem is that we don’t have the skill of measurement, and he'd call for better education. Epicurus called the same thing a lack of prudence, and he ditched the city to live in a garden with a careful selection of friends. And B.F. Skinner would agree that our immediate reinforcers or punishers seem much larger than distant rewards and punishments. It all boils down to a society full of people making poor choices. Most of us. There are some people who measure well because they seem to just care more about making wise decisions while the rest can’t be bothered to worry about long-term consequences. I think what makes the difference between those that measure well and those that don’t isn’t so much a skill they learned, but a personal disposition they inherited.

Which mean it's a fools errand to try to teach it.

From Childcare to Prisons

There's a growing and obvious labour shortage in certain fields that all connect to one culprit. But we don't want be explicit about it. 

And N95s help as well! 

As mentioned by 1GoodTern, a Guardian article came so close to saying it in this editorial: 

"These days, staff shortages are causing problems across public services, above all in careers demanding high levels of personal interaction."

But that article's focus stuck to economic issues as if the sudden and widespread shortage is due primarily to pay levels or student debt despite it hitting professions with significant physical contact with many other people. 

Biologist Arijit Chakravarty pointed out the connections more specifically yesterday:

"This point has been made before, but if you want to know what the future holds for long Covid, look to high-contact-rate professions. In the UK, the Guardian noted the shortage of workers specifically in this category. If you think of high-contact-rate professions in the US, ones where people are likely to come in contact with Covid, what are they? Childcare workers, bus drivers, nurses, pharmacists, prison guards, for example? So how’s the labor situation working out in these professions? Chronic and nationwide shortages in each of these categories, showing no signs of abating and in some cases, the worst that they have been since the beginning of the pandemic.

We Need to Backtrack and Explain the Disease

Many people are surprised that Covid is still around, or that it can cause permanent disabilities. It might be time for a refresher.

Kaveri Roy is an Assistant Professor of Nursing, and she explained how Covid works to her first year students last year in very simple terms, like this:

"I teach patho to nursing students. Every semester since spring of 2020, I have taught about Covid. And every semester to have to change my lecture to keep up with new data. I was teaching Covid this semester and I told them that if nothing else, understand the science. 

I explained how Covid attaches to ACE2 receptors in the nose, throat, heart, kidneys, and gut first. That’s why you see a runny nose, sore throat, myocarditis and acute kidney failure first. There aren’t as many ACE 2 receptors in the lungs, so Covid hits the lungs later. That’s why you see lag time between initial infection and respiratory symptoms. More importantly, I explained that Covid is not just a lung disease, it is a massive systemic inflammatory response to the virus. Covid also upregulates a protein called bradykinin, causing clots. If nothing else, I told them to think of Covid as huge inflammatory process that causes injury, scarring and clots to form everywhere. That’s why we are seeing so many strokes, MIs, weird liver failure in peds, bowel ischemia, and long Covid. It all points to chronic inflammation. 

How It Began

When it all started, I immediately started reading news from China and Italy, figuring that what was happening there could easily happen here, and we should be prepared. 

Esther Hopkins did the same thing. She wrote an excellent thread about it, which I'm saving here. She's in the UK, where there was just a remarkable inquiry into the handling of Covid, but it's all pretty much the same in Canada as well, except I think we vaccinated children earlier. 

We're still waiting for our inquiry!

We know that when governments are finally willing to act, legislation can be life changing:

Here's Hopkin's words: 

"This is a thread about going back to the beginning of the Pandemic to explain why I myself, like many others, started to campaign for safer schools and clinically vulnerable. I feel it's a good time to revisit how this government caused such division in our society with the current ongoing Covid Inquiry. 

Culture of Uncare or Pandemic of Inhumanity

Psychoanalyst Sally Weintrobe coined the term "culture of uncare" to explain intentional efforts to sever links from one another and from the environment.

She calls it "severing links," but the word that comes to mind is alienation. We've been alienated from our environment, from our work, from others, and from ourselves. The neoliberal capitalist system has been far too successful at breaking us away from our own sense of integrity, of wholeness, as it works to turns us into unquestioning cogs in the machine.

This manufactured uncaring, the loss of a capacity to care, is at the heart of why we can't actually do anything about climate change, or covid, or all the horrific conflicts going on right this minute. Marx predicted that capitalism would naturally, eventually, self-destruct as inequity got too extreme for people to accept. But that was before (just before) we understood that burning fossil fuels could have a profound effect on the stability of our ecosystems. Marx wrote about alienation in 1855, and John Tyndall started looking at how carbon dioxide concentrations change the climate in 1859. Now we're frozen in place, watching industry continue to expand while the world literally burns. We won't make it to the glorious end of capitalism. 

Consumption is Back in Vogue

Tuberculosis is making a comeback! (Mass-consumerism never left.)

About 2 million people die worldwide from TB, but not here, right!?! Now there's a case in the University of Victoria and an outbreak at Boston University of over 30 cases. The immune deficiency created by Covid's attack on T cells is urging TB out of hibernation. Even the WHO is warning that we're at the highest ever recorded levels of infection, and they're loathe to give bad news! 

Seven years ago, the American Lung Association wrote an article about the amazing way the United States had conquered consumption, "the most feared disease in the world." The ALA started back in 1904 as the National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis, and the organization was critical in developing and funding methods to prevent, detect, and treat TB. They used a direct mail Christmas Seals campaign to raise needed funds. There's a treatment for TB, but it's a handful of highly toxic, expensive meds taken daily over months or even years, which cause nasty side-effects like vomiting, itchy skin, and fatigue. 

TB is airborne, but, as far as I can gather, somewhat less infectious than Covid. Here's the current treatment prototol:

"When you cough, sneeze or laugh, cover your mouth with a tissue. Put that tissue in a closed bag and throw it away. Do not go to work or school until your healthcare provider says it's okay. Avoid close contact with anyone. Sleep in a bedroom alone. Air out your room often so the TB germs don't stay in the room and infect someone else." 

Nothing about hand washing, and definitely open those windows! 

Newsflash: Covid Should Be Avoided

Studies make it very clear that Covid is really bad for us, yet we're going to do nothing to prevent the spread.

In case you didn't know, if you have almost $20,000 to spend each year, per kid, on a private school, that many of them have excellent pandemic plans still in place. People with money are able to keep their children very safe from the pandemic. One school still recognizes that, 

"There is no such thing as a harmless single case of Covid that someone with 'a healthy immune system' can overcome." So, all staff, students, and any visitors, "will wear masks whenever we are indoors, and any time we are close to one another outdoors. . . . The only options for masks indoors are KF94s, KN95s, or N95s (or higher filtration masks or respirators), and they must completely cover both the nose and the mouth and be snug against the sides of the face." 

What a dream it would be if all schools cared so much for our kids!

A recent National Geographic article explains how Covid triggers cardiovascular problems by directly infecting the arteries of the heart. The study they discuss was published in Nature in September. The big news is that they figured out that, "the virus can survive and grow inside the cells that form plaque. . . . If the plaque breaks, it can block blood flow and cause a heart attack or stroke. The SARS-CoV-2 infection makes the situation worse by inflaming the plaque and increasing the chance that it breaks free."

Permission to Learn from Home

An Australian case determined that it's discriminatory to force kids to attend school if doing so could be harmful to the student or family members. 

From CovidSafeEdAus, 

"Victory! Our appeal to make schools safe and against disability discrimination by the NSW Department of Education has been successful! It's the first time the Disability Discrimination Act has been applied to 'Pandemic Leave'. Thank you to all of our supporters."

Here's the case:

"Fiona [a pseudonym] lives with type 1 diabetes which puts her at elevated risk should she contract Covid-19. Her son attended a NSW primary school during 2020-2021. When schools returned to the classroom, she applied for leave to keep her son home to avoid the risk of infection at school. The school refused, and eventually threatened to take Fiona to court if he did not return to school. Fiona claimed that the NSE Department of Education discriminated against her and her son by not allowing 'home learning' even though her doctor provided a letter recommending her son not attend school while the risk of Covid-19 was high.

Kearl Lake Outbreak of 2020

I'm sometimes spurred on by the idea that it's possible for average people to put things together in a way that might have an effect.

I read Michelle McNamara's excellent true crime book I'll Be Gone in the Dark a few years ago, and I keep thinking about it. Significant useful theories about the case came from average people discussing it on message boards, which actually prompted the capture of a serial killer.  

Several people on social media are posting lists of early emails about the pandemic. I'm not sure any of them are a gotcha in any substantial way, yet I'm absolutely compelled to read through them!! They're all really just proof that our highly-paid and democratically elected officials had no idea how to take the decisive action needed when it was needed in order to prevent spread of this virus. I could forgive them their earlier gaffs if they took any decisive action to curb the spread now! 

Here's another set of emails from Bean & Sprout's Mom, who says, 

"While schools were closed / online and people were working from home and banging pots and pans for healthcare workers every night, Imperial Oil's Kearl site was spreading COVID across Canada. I can't think of a more darkly perfect pandemic story."

Kearl Lake is in northern Alberta, 40 km north of Fort McMurray, where an outbreak was first officially reported on April 16, 2020, although the Globe and Mail wrote about it on Wednesday, April 15th:

"Dr. Deena Hinshaw (Alberta's CMOH at the time) said Wednesday that Alberta Health Services has implemented outbreak procedures at the Kearl site to minimize the risk of coronavirus transmission. . . . The company said a small number of other Imperial workers have tested positive for the contagion over the past several weeks while off-site. It said anyone who many have been in contact with infected workers has been informed and asked to self-isolate at home. Imperial has had a dedicated COVID-19 team for Kearl in place since mid-March. It said measures to curb the virus on-site include enhanced cleaning and sterilization, employee health monitoring, and isolation and treatment of sick individuals. . . . 

Dr. Hinshaw said the consequences of shutting down the sites would be 'significant' in an economic and practical sense, 'so we're doing our best to make sure they have all the information that they need and the guidance they need to operate in the safest way possible." . . . Shutting down the oil sands 'sounds a lot easier than it it actually is,' Mr. Kenney (Alberta premier at the time) said, and could have 'devastating' long-term economic effects on Alberta."

We were in the cleaning and sterilizing hygiene theatre part of the show at this point, although Fauci said we should be in N95s on March 1st! Under no circumstances were they going to stop the plant from running. That was made crystal clear.

The emails about this specific outbreak paint a picture of government officials bumbling around trying to get information on the workers who were present during the outbreak in order to track them, but the worksite said the workers' info was confidential, so the MLAs and Medical Officers couldn't figure out who they were or how to warn anybody, and they spent way too long trying to figure out what to do! There's over 30 pages of trying to figure out how to contact infected workers. I skipped all that.

Here are just a few snippets of their words over ten days taken from 116 pages of emails:

Goleman's Emotional Intelligence

Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than IQ, was originally published in 1995 but there's a more recently updated in a 25th anniversary edition in 2020. It's not quite updated enough, though. 

He added a new introduction, but no study or concept in the book was updated despite huge changes in our lives since then and tons of new studies with updated technology. It's kind of refreshing to read a book about the problem with kids today without a single mention of phones, but it feels a little sloppy. Goleman is a science journalist without a clinical practice in psychotherapy as far as I can tell. While his book is about how to be smart according to the front cover, it's also being used in psychotherapy. It's a fast, engaging read, but I have some concerns about the content and application.

The book outlines the need for emotional intelligence (EI) to be overtly taught to children, explains the psychoneurology of EI, argues for the primacy of emotional intelligence for success, adds in the need for emotional supports, and ends with a call for parents to be better educated as well. The principle underlying Goleman's text is that there are four specific domains, adapted from Salovey & Mayer, that emerge from the activity of our brain circuits that have more of an impact on our general well being than does our intelligence: self-awareness, self-management (formerly motivation and self-regulation), empathy, and skilled relationships. Goleman explains that people will be better off emotionally, relationally, and vocationally if they develop their emotional intelligence to identify and understand their feelings as they happen, manage them effectively, understand other people's feelings, and relate to others more positively. With a calm mind, people can make better decisions, which positively affects all other aspects of their life. Goldman has used these domains to help to develop educational programs to teach children Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) in the schools through the CASEL organization. I feel like it goes without saying that being able to manage our emotional experiences helps in other aspects in our lives, so I'm all in at this point.