A fourth winter of death, Recession, Disabled outrage and Failure to protect frontline workers
Oh yeah, Covid still isn’t just a cold and a clean air revolution
Welcome to the latest issue of the Covid-Is-Not-Over newsletter!
This issue doesn’t really have any kind of theme, just a dozen or so articles that will hopefully help you all understand where we are in the pandemic right now and maybe even something that we can all share in our networks to spread a little more Covid-awareness.
This weekend I have something a bit special coming. No hints, other than the fact that it’s going to be a big narrative-via-links collection similar (and actually inspired by) the two holiday bonus issues from the later half of December and beginning of January. They were a A sad, tragic and infuriating list of (Mostly Ontario) Covid healthcare outbreaks and Everything you ever wanted to know about the UK Covid-19 Inquiry but were afraid to ask. Check them out if you missed them!
For the first time in a while, both the What Are We Even Doing and Musical Interlude features are back. Enjoy!
See you all next time. Like! Share! Subscribe!
Amid fourth winter of death, COVID excess death toll approaches 30 million globally by Benjamin Mateus / WSWS
After more than two months of silence, on Wednesday the London-based weekly financial outlet, The Economist, finally updated their global daily estimate of excess deaths attributable to the COVID-19 pandemic. According to their projections, the cumulative global excess death toll now stands at 28.5 million, 4.1 times higher than the official COVID death toll, which surpassed 7 million at the end of 2023.
For inexplicable reasons, The Economist’s tracker, which uses a machine-learning model that provides estimates of excess death for every country on every day since the pandemic began, suddenly stopped updating in mid-November, just as the winter surge of the JN.1 variant began. …
What is evidently clear though, is that official COVID deaths and excess deaths now differ by as high as 50-fold or more. Specifically, while on November 27, only 183 COVID deaths were officially reported, there were 10,200 excess deaths above the pre-pandemic period.
What is most concerning is that excess deaths remained stubbornly high throughout the entirety of 2023. While official COVID deaths for 2023 stood at only 284,000 globally, the excess death toll was 3.2 million, a figure that is more than 11 times higher. During the JN.1 surge, while official public health agencies have counted a mere 31,802 COVID-related deaths across the globe, excess deaths have been estimated at over 700,000 so far, or 22-times higher.
Disabled Outrage and #PodSaveJon by Alice Wong / Disability Visibility Project
A few days ago Jon Favreau, the co-host of Pod Save America who has over a million followers, screenshot and commented on a Tweet by someone in response to Sen. Bernie Sanders’ announcement that he tested positive for COVID, planned to work from home, and was glad to be vaccinated. I began to read numerous cogent responses by people with Long COVID and other chronic illnesses and disabilities about why Sanders’ message was inadequate since it ignores the fact that many people do not have the privilege to work from home; how minimal activity can be detrimental to recovery; and how vaccines cannot be the only source of mitigation especially as the Senator is Chair of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committee.
The outrage, frustration, and sadness in the replies was real; people were tired of the “vax and relax” narrative and glib responses like the ones from Favreau. I Tweeted suggesting people push for an episode on long COVID policy on the podcast with the tag #PodSaveJon because he and other progressives do not understand the magnitude of abandonment of high risk people by the state and how far away we still are from having any tools or solutions for people with and developing Long Covid (which can happen to anyone).
Hashtags don’t always take off but this one resonated deeply with disabled and sick people who have been forgotten and gaslit since and before the pandemic. An outpouring of deeply personal stories and free education happened and this became much more than about one person’s ableism, but about the pervasive framing of disabled outrage as bullying, piling on, and “unhinged” a sanist slur used by Favreau. As someone who curses on his podcast, Favreau tone policing people with Long COVID and saying this type of advocacy is counterproductive and absurd is the height of respectability politics and privilege.
Germany entered a recession last year because the average worker needed 20 sick days by Julia Doubleday / The Gauntlet
A new study from Germany confirms what COVID-informed doctors, researchers, patients and allies have been expecting for years: record high sick days in 2023 pushed the nation into economic recession. …
For those who have been following the flood of data showing myriad, serious health impacts of COVID infection, this news comes as more of a grim confirmation than a shock.
Twenty sick days is four full work weeks off sick of fifty-two. And twenty sick days was the average- meaning many German workers took more. This data, unsurprisingly compiled by a suffering health insurance firm rather than the state, confirms what we’ve all anecdotally experienced: that the “new normal” of “living with COVID” is not so much normal as it is new.
Impacts of unmitigated, constant COVID spread at the national and global level does not end with acute infection and short-term absences. Yes, the average person is contracting COVID between 1-2 times a year; that alone would be a massive new burden on the economy. But COVID also carries a high risk of long-term illness that can be disabling. It impacts your organs and can lead to death months after infection. It damages the immune system and leaves you vulnerable to other pathogens. It causes cognitive damage and can lead to new onset mental illnesses. Like watching climate impacts compound, year after year after year, this will continue to worsen.
US government failure to protect frontline workers from COVID led to thousands of deaths, scientists say by Mary Van Beusekom / CIDRAP
Thousands of frontline workers may have survived the COVID-19 pandemic if the US regulatory system had better protected them, report the authors of an analysis published yesterday in BMJ.
The study is the first in a series that discusses the lessons learned from COVID-19 and the steps needed to avert deaths in the next pandemic and improve public health.
Frontline workers are those who couldn't work from home and thus were at higher risk of exposure to SARS-CoV-2. Black and Hispanic workers and immigrants make up high proportions of "essential" workers, or those in healthcare, meatpacking plants, agricultural production, and public transportation.
"Federal policies on workplace exposure were developed to protect the supply chain of food or other vital products, or to prevent staff shortages at healthcare facilities, rather than to protect frontline workers from virus exposure," wrote the George Washington University–led study authors. "Some employers, with the support (and encouragement) of elected officials, put production and profits ahead of worker safety and health."
Three fourths of adults have hidden infectious illness to work, travel, or socialize, survey suggests by Stephanie Soucheray / CIDRAP
In the first study, the researchers surveyed 399 university healthcare employees and 505 students and asked how often they actively covered up symptoms of infectious diseases from others, came to campus or work without telling others they were feeling ill, or falsified answers to mandatory symptom screening tools that the university had required for anyone using campus facilities.
Eighty-five percent of students reported concealing a contagious illness, as well as 61% of healthcare workers. Only 8% of healthcare workers and 3% of students said they concealed illness due do a university policy requirement. Instead, almost all efforts at hiding were made because of not wanting to miss social engagements, school, or work.
"Thematic qualitative coding revealed that participants frequently concealed illness because their illness would conflict with their other social goals (e.g., going on a date); very infrequently they cited pressure from institutional policies (e.g., lack of paid time off) as a motivation for concealment," the authors wrote.
Why Covid Can Never Be 'Just A Cold' by Nate Bear / Do Not Panic
The reality is covid can never, ever be a common cold.
The mistake The Atlantic makes is equating the symptoms with the disease.
If covid is here in three hundred years, it won’t be a cold.
Why? Because Sarscov2 infects cells in the human body in a very different way to any other virus that causes a cold. …
Most genuine cold-causing viruses only have a few paths of entry and are generally restricted to the upper and lower airways.
When it comes to Sarscov2 however, your body is like a giant hotel with hundreds of doors. And as soon as it rocks up, the virus has a way of unlocking these doors (more on that later) and strolling through them into the organs that lie behind.
This is why, once the virus has established itself in your body, it can cause heart attacks, liver damage, kidney damage, gut damage, thyroid damage, brain damage and on and on.
Breathing room: Why parents and experts are calling for a clean-air revolution in schools by Simon Spichak / TVO Today
The final tab has a dropdown menu of all the schools in the school district along with a checklist that states whether new filters were installed, whether the fresh-air intake and frequency of filter changes were increased, how many HEPA filters were purchased, and whether the HEPA filters were deployed. These reports, however, don’t measure air quality or CO2 levels or state whether HEPA units are functional and running.
“There are many spaces that might be fine. But we’re not monitoring or measuring,” Fox says. “There’s no accountability. There’s no transparency. So we don’t know.”
There is also no guidance for improving air quality in school buses, although some regions, like Ottawa, are experiencing driver shortages, which were heightened by the pandemic.
Many of the parents who spoke with TVO Today say they’ve tried to bring these issues to their school administrators, trustees, school boards, and the province — but they feel stonewalled. The Ministry of Education declined to answer whether it’s met with concerned parents and engineers.
Racial minorities have greater long-term harms from COVID-19, data show by Stephanie Soucheray / CIDRAP
A longitudinal study yesterday in Frontiers in Public Health shows Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) COVID-19 patients in America had greater post-COVID-19 burdens than non-Hispanic, white peers.
The long-term negative consequences were seen in health status, activity level and missed work, despite White and BIPOC patients having similar initial symptoms of infections. The findings are part of the ongoing INSPIRE study, a collaboration of eight major academic medical centers looking at the long-term effects of COVID-19.
Analysis of SARS-CoV-2 transmission in a university classroom based on real human close contact behaviors by Nan Zhang, Xueze Yang, et al / Science of The Total Environment
Due to high-population density, frequent close contact, possible poor ventilation, university classrooms are vulnerable for transmission of respiratory infectious diseases. Close contact and long-range airborne are possibly main routes for SARS-CoV-2 transmission. In this study, taking a university classroom in Beijing for example, close contact behaviors of students were collected through a depth-detection device, which could detect depth to each pixel of the image, based on semi-supervised learning. Finally, >23 h of video data were obtained. Using Computational Fluid Dynamics, the relationship between viral exposure and close contact behaviors (e.g. interpersonal distance, relative facial orientations, and relative positions) was established. A multi-route transmission model (short-range airborne, mucous deposition, and long-range airborne) of infectious diseases considering real close contact behaviors was developed. In the case of Omicron, the risk of infection in university classrooms and the efficacy of different interventions were assessed based on dose-response model. The average interpersonal distance in university classrooms is 0.9 m (95 % CI, 0.5 m–1.4 m), with the highest proportion of face-to-back contact at 87.0 %. The risk of infection of susceptible students per 45-min lesson was 1 %. The relative contributions of short-range airborne and long-range airborne transmission were 40.5 % and 59.5 %, respectively, and the mucous deposition was basically negligible. When all students are wearing N95 respirators, the infection risk could be reduced by 96 %, the relative contribution of long-range airborne transmission increases to 95.6 %. When the fresh air per capita in the classroom is 24 m3/h/person, the virus exposure could be decreased by 81.1 % compared to the real situation with 1.02 m3/h/person. In a classroom with an occupancy rate of 50 %, after optimized arrangement of student distribution, the infection risk could be decreased by 62 %.
Update on COVID-19 and How It Changes the Brain by Barbara Koltuska-Haskin / Psychology Today
There is agreement that COVID-19 is a systemic illness often involving the central nervous system. Reportedly, neurological symptoms affect more than 30 percent of COVID-19 patients. Frequently, there is neurological involvement in all stages of this illness, such as acute, subacute, chronic, and post-acute sequelae.
Even asymptomatic patients can develop neurological symptoms and conditions such as headaches, myalgia (muscle pain), Guillain-Barre syndrome (in which a person's immune system attacks peripheral nerves), encephalopathy (brain disease or malfunction), and myelopathy (neurologic deficits related to the spinal cord).
The magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies of COVID-19 patients revealed a reduction in grey matter thickness mainly in the orbitofrontal cortex (which processes sensory information, decision-making, and emotions) and the parahippocampal gyrus (which plays an important role in memory encoding and retrieval) and are associated with the greater reduction in global brain size and greater cognitive decline. The virus can directly infect endothelial cells of the brain (cells that make up the lining of blood vessels), which may promote clot formation and stroke. …
The research indicates that severe COVID-19 is associated with long-term cognitive impairments, but even mild COVID-19 can cause changes in the brain that can lead to cognitive deficits. Therefore, it is best to do whatever it takes not to get sick. However, if you have had COVID-19 and are experiencing some cognitive deficits, it may be beneficial to contact your community neuropsychology office and complete a neuropsychological evaluation. This will show if you have some cognitive deficits (memory, attention/concentration, information processing, etc.); how severe (mild, moderate, severe impairments); and how to improve or maintain your cognitive functioning.
Why countries had such different COVID death rates in spite of similar policies by / Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
In countries that saw lower death rates during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, it wasn’t so much the policies those countries instituted that kept rates low, but how quickly and flexibly they responded to the emerging outbreak, according to a new study. The researchers found that in these countries, governments and their populations more readily adopted and adhered to measures to curb transmission than in countries with higher death rates.
“Greater responsiveness indicates a community’s willingness to adopt and adhere to various nonpharmaceutical interventions even at lower levels of perceived risk,” the co-authors wrote. They noted that variations in responsiveness were partly influenced by social and cultural factors such as greater tolerance for uncertainty—for instance, being more flexible about intermittent school closings—and being more willing to follow the mandates of a centralized government or experts.
Here's why COVID-19 isn't seasonal so far by Tina Hesman Saey / ScienceNews
If the coronavirus changed relatively slowly the way other respiratory viruses do, COVID-19 might have already become a seasonal illness. But the coronavirus continues to change fast, often in ways that help it barrel right past immune defenses and infect even those with prior immunity.
For instance, the JN.1 variant started appearing in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s reports in October. As of January 20, it made up almost 86 percent of cases in the United States. The virus sent more than 30,000 people to the hospital in the week of January 7 to 13 alone.
So far, the biggest outbreaks of coronavirus happened when new variants, such as delta and omicron, that allow the virus to escape antibodies came along. No one knows whether the virus has such dazzling escape acts left in its bag of tricks. …
“If you test negative on day one, you are not done,” Pollock says. “If you continue to be symptomatic, you should repeat your test, because it’s possible that your highest viral load will be on your fourth day of symptoms, or your third or your fifth.” Repeat testing “is the FDA recommendation. It’s on the box.”
Evidence mounts that Covid in pregnancy can cause health issues in babies by Aria Bendix / NBC News
Just over four years since Covid emerged, it has become increasingly clear that infections in pregnant mothers can lead to serious health risks in infants.
The latest finding: Babies born to mothers who had Covid during pregnancy had "unusually high rates" of respiratory distress at birth or shortly thereafter, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature Communications.
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What Are We Even Doing?
Is it a cold, a super cold or Covid? And should I carry on regardless? | Zoe Williams | The Guardian
UK Christmas Parties Are Roaring Back After Years of Covid and Strikes - BNN Bloomberg
1/5 Today marks the end of an era as we wind down our emergency #COVID19 pandemic response & officially close the doors to our vaccination clinics. / Toronto Public Health (@TOPublicHealth) / X
Nothing like a good, cheesy pop metal tune! My Sacrifice by Creed!
I think you are doing important work amidst the overwhelming news blackout , but here I was with you up until the reprint of the article with the headline “Forget Long Covid.” I cannot because I must live with its horrific consequences almost daily for twenty months now, so whatever’s in the article, and I know journalists often have no control over their headlines, such an ignorant dismissal of such a monstrous disease I did nothing to invite or deserve I take very personally.