Cost of Covid, Sore arms & cold bodies, Abandoning the vulnerable, Impacts on brain health, and more
Bonus Good luck fighting disinformation and More lists than you can shake a stick at
Welcome to the latest edition of the Covid-Is-Not-Over newsletter!
What’s up this week? Well, we have some great readings below, as usual. I hope that these will be as interesting and illuminating for you as they were for me.
I will note that some care should be taken with the Tom Nichols article below. While there’s some interesting analysis on the role of expertise during the pandemic, it’s rather ironic that there’s so much bad actual information about said pandemic in his article. Very typical of The Atlantic, unfortunately.
We also have more lists than you can shake a stick at. We have a list of great foundational, must-read articles that should be shouted from the rooftops. We have a list of What Are We Even Doing bad takes. We have a quick hit list of articles mostly focusing on the health effects of Covid, titles only with no excerpts. We have a musical interlude for a bit of recovery and healing.
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Top Five Articles Everyone Should Read on Covid
Real Impact of COVID-19 Infection and Why We Should Care by Jeff Gilchrist, PhD
What SARS-CoV-2 Does to the Body (3rd Edition, December 2023) / Pandemic Accountability Index
Let's Face It, Covid Trashed Our Immune Systems by Jessica Wildfire / OK Doomer
How the press manufactured consent for never-ending COVID reinfections by Julia Doubleday / The Gauntlet
Mounting research shows that COVID-19 leaves its mark on the brain, including with significant drops in IQ scores by Ziyad Al-Aly / The Conversation
The "cost" of COVID-19 by Sheena Cruickshank / Independent SAGE continues
In the UK, since the beginning of the pandemic, economic inactivity due to long-term sickness. New economic analysis reveals that if the 1.6 million working-aged people with Long Covid struggle to work this could have huge impacts on their household income and consequentially expenditure. As such, Long Covid could be a long-term drag on economic growth as well as adding pressure to already strained NHS. The cost of healthcare provision too for people with Long Covid is high and only increases over time - a huge cost for NHS with estimates about £4.2 billion per year. Based on the assumption that there are no long-term healthcare funding commitments to manage Long Covid, modelling estimate that Long Covid is likely to reduce GDP by around £1.5bn each year. Were prevalence of Long Covid to double (say due to waning immunity) this economic cost could be even worse and could considering the current UK fiscal environment could mean other public services suffer consequently.
Taken together it would seem that economic considerations of COVID-19 might be important to consider however, neither living with long Covid nor the economy appear to be considered in the costs benefit analysis of vaccination. Until we truly understand how we can protect against their being further cases of Long Covid then this seems a glaring omission for costing considerations.
COVID-Cautious Americans Feel Abandoned by Jamie Ducharme / Time
Data and communication are all Lindy Greer, a 45-year-old in Washington State, wants these days. Greer has taken COVID-19 seriously since the very beginning, both because she previously had long-term symptoms after a non-COVID viral illness and because she works as an esthetician, putting her in close contact with others. She still wears an N95 every day and uses a HEPA air purifier in her work studio, because she still feels COVID-19 is a major threat.
It’s frustrating, Greer says, that many experts, including those she looked up to earlier in the pandemic, don’t seem to feel that way anymore. When even the experts have moved on, she says, it becomes harder for everyone to figure out how to stay safe—and causes people who remain COVID-cautious, like her, to wonder if they're “crazy” for still caring.
“People in our community are pegged as wanting lockdowns again, and that’s not the case at all,” she says. “All I ever want is for people to have the right information.”
COVID Linked to Lower IQ, Poor Memory and Other Negative Impacts on Brain Health by Erin Clack / People
Another study in the same issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, involving 100,000 Norwegians, documented worse memory function at several points in time up to 36 months after a positive COVID test.
"Taken together, these studies show that COVID-19 poses a serious risk to brain health, even in mild cases, and the effects are now being revealed at the population level," Al-Aly wrote in his essay.
"The growing body of research now confirms that COVID-19 should be considered a virus with a significant impact on the brain," he added. "The implications are far-reaching, from individuals experiencing cognitive struggles to the potential impact on populations and the economy."
Good Luck Fighting Disinformation by Quinta Jurecic / The Atlantic (Archive version)
The difficulty of responding to falsehoods about COVID isn’t just because of the First Amendment or institutional inaction. It’s because there’s political benefit in promoting those falsehoods, and political, legal, and even physical danger for those who oppose them. Lies, it turns out, have a constituency.
That constituency uses harassment as a tool to silence those who disagree, as Sawyer and Nichols discovered—a way to raise the cost of pushing back. Reporting and research have documented how both misinformation researchers and health-care workers seeking to combat pandemic falsehoods have struggled under the weight of online threats. Among the doctors affected by such harassment is Natalia Solenkova, a Florida critical-care physician who collaborated with the NLFD team and was later targeted with online abuse after a faked tweet of hers began circulating widely among anti-vaccine activists and was promoted by Joe Rogan. (Rogan later apologized.) “Whoever speaks about disinformation immediately gets harassed,” Solenkova told me. “And there is no institution that can support you.” She still posts about health care and COVID on social media, but worries about the security of her job if another, more convincing, fake begins to circulate.
Reflecting on her initial efforts with NLFD to respond to COVID lies, Solenkova seemed to look back on that early idealism with resignation. She explained to me over email that the organization’s work had been motivated by the belief that responding to falsehoods was largely a project of spreading truth. If No License for Disinformation could identify those falsehoods and explain their dangers clearly enough, the group had reasoned, then surely medical authorities would take action. But, she wrote, “we were naive.”
When Experts Fail by Tom Nichols / The Atlantic (Archive version)
The coronavirus pandemic, in particular, would prove the perfect crucible for accelerating the decline of faith in experts. Paranoia and appeals to ignorance have long been part of the American political environment, but they were especially destructive at a time when the U.S. was riven by partisan hostility. The pandemic struck at multiple political and cultural weaknesses within the edifice of American life: A mysterious disease—from China, no less, a nation that typically serves as a source of American anxiety—forced citizens to rely on the media, including outlets that many of them already distrusted, for scattered pieces of information from white-jacketed experts and relatively unknown government officials.
Many elected leaders, especially at the national level, failed in fact to lead. The dysfunction of President Donald Trump’s administration, on COVID-19 and on so many other issues, has been amply documented in numerous books and articles. Despite the undeniable success of Operation Warp Speed, the government’s crash program to work with private industry to develop a vaccine in record time, Trump and his people have much to answer for—including the hesitancy they engendered among Americans to take the very vaccines that his administration helped develop.
The road to America’s pandemic meltdown, however, did not begin with Trump. When the coronavirus arrived, a significant number of Americans were already primed by the media, their political leaders, and their own stubborn narcissism to reject expert advice during a crisis. The collapse of gatekeeping authority in the media, the explosion of worthless online sources, the emergence of celebrity pseudo-experts, and the unwarranted self-confidence of millions of people who believed that they could simply “do their own research,” as the internet mantra has it, all combined to make a brutal outbreak of disease even more deadly.
Over 1,000 Americans have died of COVID-19 each week since August 26 by Benjamin Mateus / World Socialist Web Site
The latest provisional data from the CDC indicates that at least 1,036 people died of COVID-19 during the week ending March 2, which would mean that for 28 consecutive weeks since August 26, more than 1,000 people died from a preventable infection. In total, the CDC estimates there have been roughly 1,185,000 COVID-19 deaths in the US, but reliable estimates of excess deaths attributable to the pandemic place the real figure at over 1.4 million.
The complete silence on the present state of the pandemic and the ongoing dangers facing the global population is not surprising. It has been the coordinated response between governments and public health agencies from the beginning of the pandemic to, in stepwise fashion, normalize illnesses and deaths from COVID-19 and to drive out all public discussions on the catastrophic impacts that the prioritization of profits over lives has had worldwide.
Some Doctors Cared Much More About Sore Arms Than Cold Bodies by Jonathan Howard / Science-Based Medicine
In a pandemic where over a million Americans died and millions more were injured- many of them unvaccinated or undervaccinated– some doctors, aided by a prominent vaccine hero, put forth enormous effort to discourage boosters. As an alphabet soup of immune-evading variants invalidated their 2021 declarations that the initial two vaccine doses would end the pandemic, these doctors responded not by humbly acknowledging they initially overhyped vaccines and underestimated the virus, but rather by trashing subsequent vaccine doses, even for older, vulnerable people. …
There was nothing unique about the campaign against boosters, but it was very revealing. It was just a small part of a pathetic, pandemic-long pattern where doctors expressed grave concern about the mildest harms of measures to limit COVID, even mere abnormal lab values, while being totally indifferent to literally anything the virus could do, including the deaths of children and young adults.
Like the inexorable passage of time, some doctors treated the virus as a totally unmodifiable force – Repeat infections are inevitable. More the longer you live. Nothing can be done about it. Getting COVID is inevitable. It is just another cold or flu like illness. By claiming- falsely– that COVID was just another cold or flu and that “nothing” that could be done about it anyways, they gave themselves permission to breezily brush away its harms. Indeed, the same doctor who fretted mightily about “grade three fevers” in vaccinated children and “AEs at time of injection” also said we should accept children dying of COVID “as a matter of course” and there are zero “smart people who still give a shit about COVID.”
Put another way, some doctors cared much more about sore arms than cold bodies.
Protecting yourself from COVID-19 these days is hard. And it comes at a cost. By Samantha Fields / Marketplace
In New Jersey, David Kronig, 40, has avoided COVID-19 so far “by basically giving up going anywhere,” he said.
He has a primary immunodeficiency, which makes him high-risk, and his partner and his mom are both immunocompromised and disabled. So Kronig still operates like most people did in 2020 — he’ll only go indoors if he has to, like to the doctor or the grocery store, he drives everywhere to avoid public transportation, and he spends a lot of money on N95 masks, HEPA filters and high-quality at-home tests.
He’s also worked remotely since 2020. Until recently, that wasn’t an issue. Kronig is a voting-rights and nonprofit attorney, and his last employer, in Wisconsin, was happy to accommodate. But when he left that job last year and started looking for a new one, his need to be fully remote slowed down his search.
“There are some jobs that I would otherwise be interested in that I simply chose not to apply to, because they seemed like they would require too much in-person work,” he said. …
“Had I not needed to protect my health, I’m fairly confident that I would have had that job in November,” Kronig said. “So literally, I would have been working for four months that I then continued to have to search for a job.”
Projecting the long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on U.S. population structure by Andrea M. Tilstra, Antonino Polizzi, et al. / Nature Communications
Our study provides first results on how the COVID-19 pandemic’s reshaping of the U.S. population is expected to repercuss into the future. Despite the general perception that the COVID-19 pandemic mainly affected old populations, our projections show that population pyramids will exhibit consequences of the pandemic until at least 2060. These rippling effects are expected when modeling the consequences of COVID-19 pandemic-induced changes in all three processes: mortality, fertility, and migration. We highlight three of the most important results from our study. …
The consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic are not over. They ripple beyond immediate, independent changes to mortality, fertility, and migration to affect the population structure of the United States for decades to come. It is thus important to move from process-specific models to a broader and more informative approach that accounts for co-occurring disruptions in mortality, fertility, and migration. As this paper shows, such a design is a powerful tool for quantifying the relative size of different effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and for projecting their effects over time. Because the United States is known for having exceptionally high COVID-19 mortality52, it is important to note that COVID-19 pandemic-induced migration changes are projected to have a comparatively large and longer-lasting effect on population size.
Health workers fear it's profits before protection as CDC revisits airborne transmission by Amy Maxmen / NBC News
Researchers have repeatedly criticized the CDC for its reluctance to address airborne transmission during the pandemic. According to a new analysis, “The CDC has only used the words ‘COVID’ and ‘airborne’ together in one tweet, in October 2020, which mentioned the potential for airborne spread.’”
It’s unclear why infection control specialists on the CDC’s committee take a less cautious position on airborne transmission than other experts, industrial hygienist Deborah Gold said. “I think these may be honest beliefs,” she suggested, “reinforced by the fact that respirators triple in price whenever they’re needed.”
Critics fear that if the final guidelines don’t clearly state a need for N95 masks, hospitals won’t adequately stockpile them, paving the way for shortages in a future health emergency. And if the document isn’t revised to emphasize ventilation and air filtration, health facilities won’t invest in upgrades.
“If the CDC doesn’t prioritize the safety of health providers, health systems will err on the side of doing less, especially in an economic downturn,” Stokes said. “The people in charge of these decisions should be the ones forced to take those risks.”
Covid Is Bad for You
Psychiatric conditions linked to more COVID-19 hospital stays | CIDRAP
Clinical outcomes worse for young, immunocompromised COVID patients | CIDRAP
COVID-induced lung infection linked to heart damage | CIDRAP
Climate change unleashing torrent of infectious disease threats, physicians caution
Swedish study suggests link between long COVID and severity of illness
Shingles cases are increasing in New South Wales. Experts say COVID might be why
Vaccines cut risk of post-COVID heart failure, blood clots for at least 6 months, data suggest
What Are We Even Doing: Very Bad Takes on the Pandemic
Why California and Oregon Broke With the CDC - The Atlantic https://archive.is/yftHk
Is it time to get rid of vaccine mandates in healthcare? | HRD Canada
Masked protesters could soon face arrest, says Home Office | Police | The Guardian
Aaron Rodgers says he has 'important responsibility' to speak out against COVID, vaccines | Fox News
Trying to kick a nagging cough? It often just takes patience and time, physicians say | CBC News
As most have probably noticed, there is no paid subscription option for this newsletter. However, Substack does have an option where subscribers can pledge to subscribe “just in case” and a few kind subscribers have made that pledge. I very much appreciated the vote of confidence in what I’m doing here. What I’ve decided to do on a trial basis is to set up a “tip jar” on the Ko-fi platform. I’m not anticipating a huge surge of income from using Ko-fi but whatever revenue I do end up with, I plan to spend on supporting artists on Bandcamp. Sadly, who knows how long that will seem like a good idea.
New Beth Hart with Little Heartbreak Girl.