Covid causes car crashes, Persistent immune dysregulation, Devastates healthcare workers, and more

Bonus Why keep masking! Indifferent policy makers!

Apr 25, 2025

grayscale photo of volkswagen beetle — Photo by Boston Public Library on Unsplash

Welcome to the latest issue of the Covid-Is-Not-Over-Newsletter!

I’m almost starting to think of this period in history as the WTF Train, like Snowpiercer but more ridiculous and infinitely harder to escape.

No theme this week, other than Covid is really bad for you and you should avoid it at all costs. Theme or no theme, each week my hope is that this humble newsletter can serve as a kind of Michelin Guide to the infinite ride, helping understand where we are, where we’re going and providing some resources to help us help others get to that same understanding. If anything I share in these issues can help us explain to a friend or relative what’s really going on or provide some evidence for a claim we might make in a debate or discussion, well, my work here is done.

WTF, indeed. A measles outbreak in Ontario underscores spread of infectious diseases across Canada. Or Trump’s DOJ claims academic journals hold “partisan” stance in scientific debates. Not to mention RFK Jr. says autism rates have bigger impact than Covid ‘because covid killed old people’. And even the Trump-Harvard showdown is the latest front in a long conservative war against academia.

Let’s be careful out there.

Like! Share! Subscribe!

Driving under viral impairment: Linking acute SARS-CoV-2 infections to elevated car crash risks by Baran Erdik / PLOS Global Public Health

Legislatures and public health experts should not only view COVID-19 in the sense of acute mortality and morbidity. As brief neuropsychological tests are predictive of Long COVID and validated for driving risk, agencies responsible for driving licenses should implement a short questionnaire at license renewal inquiring about Long COVID/COVID and refer applicants to neuropsychological testing as needed. Perhaps even asking if drivers have had ongoing taste and smell disturbances post-COVID might link applicants with ongoing neurological sequelae of COVID.
Finally, clinicians, particularly those dealing with Long Covid patients in the cognitive setting, such as neurologists, must remember their obligation to report patients who potentially constitute medically impaired drivers. Such patients may include those with COVID-19 or those who suffer from the after-effects. Indeed, clinicians, particularly primary care practitioners, should contemplate warning patients with COVID-19 that they should minimize driving and report back if they feel any cognitive sequelae.

MAHA and “soft eugenics” revisited: The “autism tsunami,” Dr. Oz, and your “patriotic duty” to stay healthy by David Gorski / Science-Based Medicine

Indeed, there is an underlying attitude among the antivaccine movement that is such a part of MAHA that “natural” is better and that if a child dies of a vaccine-preventable disease like measles, it’s not because the measles killed the child, but rather because the child was somehow “unfit,” the usual reason being chronic disease, malnutrition, and the like. This makes the death of a child from such diseases sad and regrettable, but, to the antivaxxer, probably unavoidable because, of course, they believe that vaccines don’t work and are actively harmful. Meanwhile, the “correct” parenting, “virtuous” parenting, in which the children are raised the “right” way from a health standpoint (as defined by MAHA) will make the children virtually immune to vaccine-preventable disease and chronic disease. Far be it from me to say that a good diet, lots of exercise, and enough sleep are not important to children. They most definitely are. They are not, however, panaceas, nor are they a substitute for vaccines and modern medicine. Children should have access to both.
Meanwhile, never does anyone in this administration consider the social determinants of health or that universal health insurance would alleviate a lot of the problems. If you want to see the disconnect, just observe how recently the CDC had to decline to help the health department in Milwaukee when they requested that the CDC assist their investigation of elevated lead levels in Milwaukee public schools. You’d think that MAHA would be all over a known, science-based environmental toxic metal like lead, but, no, they fired all the people at the CDC who could help. One can’t help but wonder if this lack of concern stems from the likelihood that it is poorer communities and poorer children in Milwaukee who are most affected by lead exposure. Depressingly, Dr. Michael Totoraitis, the Milwaukee health commissioner, was quoted as saying, “I can’t pick up and call my colleagues at the C.D.C. about lead poisoning anymore.” That’s on top of the FDA gutting the departments responsible for routine food and drug safety inspections. How is any of this “making America healthy again,” given RFK Jr.’s “MAHA” emphasis on improving the healthiness and safety of America’s food supply? The disconnect here is most telling.

When we stop talking about COVID-19, policymakers can stop caring by Andrew Wilkin / The Spectator (non-paywall version)

To care for others, it’s helpful to think and talk about them. Caring about others in an ongoing pandemic and growing fascism demands challenging conversations. If everyday people and organizations, like school boards and unions, do not have these conversations and demand from policymakers what they’re entitled to, most politicians will follow the billionaires.
A major economist has said that some policymakers are OK with people getting sick and dying because AI can replace them as workers while private health-care providers profit from their illnesses. This is a cruel type of morality, but research shows a pandemic can influence fascist and eugenisist thinking.

Studies detail high rates of long COVID among healthcare, dental workers by Stephanie Soucheray / CIDRAP

Researchers have estimated approximately 8% of Americas have ever experienced long COVID, or lasting symptoms, following an acute COVID-19 infection. Now two recent international studies suggest that the percentage is much higher among healthcare workers and dental professionals.

COVID led to professional burnout for many health workers, survey suggests by Mary Van Beusekom / CIDRAP

Today in JAMA Network Open, researchers present findings on high levels of burnout—but decreasing professional stress—among workers (HCWs) in the US Veterans Health Administration (VHA), particularly at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Persistent immune dysregulation and metabolic alterations following SARS-CoV-2 infection by Silvia Lucena Lage, Katherine Bricker-Holt, et al. / medRxiv

Compared to the naïve controls, those with prior COVID-19 demonstrated profound metabolic and immune alterations at the proteomic, cellular, and epigenetic level. Specifically, there was an enrichment in immature monocytes with sustained inflammasome activation and oxidative stress, elevated arachidonic acid levels, decreased tryptophan, and variation in the frequency and phenotype of peripheral T-cells.

Why I Keep Masking by Nicholas Russell / Defector

And yet it’s difficult not to emphasize that something as simple as masking can continue to make a world of difference. If nothing else, and there are many lessons still to be learned from the pandemic, COVID made clear that our tolerance for the demands that other people’s vulnerabilities place on us are unforgivably low, and that our sense of what constitutes freedom and mobility, those buzzy virtues that tell us we are in control and at the mercy of no one else but ourselves, are warped beyond reality.
Masking is a reminder that I share a bustling, contradictory world with other people who deserve some assurance that their health, and my own, isn’t taken for granted. So maybe it is a symbol after all. A lasting existential consequence of pandemic fatigue is capitulation to the sentiment that there are some people who deserve to get sick, who deserve to die. At every turn, we must reject this idea as insidious, pernicious, and unforgivable. There are graceful gestures we can offer one another, no matter if we deserve them. Masking will remain a lifelong baseline priority for me for this lofty reason, among more practical considerations. Make no mistake, it would be more convenient if I never had to again. I don’t cling to my boxes of N95s and often dread wearing them for long periods of time. But in the grand scheme, it’s a small thing, and worth doing.

After New York COVID play reporting vanishes, artists launch global cultural intervention, call-in Eric Bogosian by HEPA (Holy Erotic Propaganda Arson) / Canary

In recent weeks, a small but pointed COVID-based theater project has triggered a strange trail of digital disruption.
First came the play announcement: a poster featuring an empty chair, an exploding heart, and a quote attributed to “(Not) Eric Bogosian” — “Why is everybody sick all the time?” A riff on his 2002 monologue collection Wake Up and Smell the Coffee, it signalled the arrival of Wake Up and Smell the C*VID: An Evening Without Eric Bogosian — a black-box elegy for prophetic clarity in a time of silence, grief, and ongoing pandemic collapse. Then came the coverage. And then, articles began to disappear from search engines. Quietly. Strategically. Almost completely.
Now, across cities, empty chairs have started to appear, planted outside theaters, civic spaces and natural environments, in LA, New York, across the Atlantic in Barcelona, even in a shorn springtime cornfield in the Midwest. Each one bears the phrase “Wake Up and Smell the C*VID.” No flyers. No QR codes to ticketing sites. No pamphlets. Just presence. Just absence.

Public ignorance, apathy toward avian flu could threaten containment, researchers say by Mary Van Beusekom / CIDRAP

Coauthor Kenneth Rabin, PhD, of CUNY, called for cooperation among agricultural leaders, farm communities, and food-processing companies to raise awareness of H5N1 and its implications. "The fact that most of the agricultural workers who are at direct risk of exposure to the bird flu virus may be undocumented could seriously jeopardize efforts to track and control the spread of infections," he said in the release.
Public health officials, the authors said, need to better engage the public and determine and address the causes of government distrust.
"Clear, targeted messaging that engages local leaders and academic partners that are already working in the community, such as agriculture extension personnel, and that focuses on messages that resonate with a variety of political groups will be critical in helping people understand the risks posed by H5N1 and the importance of preventive measures," they concluded.

Trump’s cronies aren’t what broke public health by Mark Ungrin / Canada Healthwatch

Public health didn’t die when RFK Jr. became Trump’s Health Secretary. It was already on life support, hamstrung by a siege mentality, turf wars, and an erosion of its connection to science.
Recently, the Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care had its activities paused by the federal government after it recommended that breast cancer screening not be offered to women aged 40–49, despite sharply rising cancer rates in this age group.
The controversy raised a deeper question: how exactly is medical guidance made — and why does it so often resist change, even in the face of compelling evidence?

Is Public Health Really Dead? Podcaster Daniella Barreto on how messaging around the COVID vaccine undermined trust, and more. A Tyee Q&A. by Michelle Gamage / The Tyee

Measles is a disease where a free, readily available vaccine with a proven safety record can prevent someone from ever getting sick. And yet we’re seeing measles outbreaks. How could public health improve its messaging around vaccines?
There’s all kinds of challenges, especially given how anti-vax misinformation has begun to make people question vaccination.
We need stories of how vaccines work, not just “They work, end of story.”
Public health contributed to this problem by pushing a vaccine-only strategy for COVID. They said all we needed to do was get vaccinated. People are seeing that didn’t really work in the way they were hoping it would. That strategy undermined public health messaging around vaccination.
I don’t think people understand that vaccines work differently for different viruses or pathogens. There needs to be more storytelling to respond to that.

Paring PPE to just N95s in pandemic kept hospital staff safe, slashed waste and costs, study finds by Mary Van Beusekom / CIDRAP

Limiting the use of personal protective equipment (PPE) to only N95 respirators late in the COVID-19 pandemic in Singapore healthcare facilities kept staff safe, reduced plastic waste and carbon emissions, and lowered related costs, a JAMA Network Open study concludes.

Studies across 14 nations show 25% to 30% rate of long COVID by Stephanie Soucheray / CIDRAP

A new study in BMJ Global Health across 13 middle- and high-income countries reveals that 25% of patients reported symptoms of long COVID after symptomatic COVID-19, and long COVID is significantly more prevalent in participants from less wealthy nations and in patients of Arab or North African ethnicity.
A second study published in BMC Public Health showed that, among 3,693 COVID-19 patients in China, 30.2% reported at least one persistent long-COVID symptom, and 10.7% noted symptoms affecting daily life.

Explaining international differences in excess mortality due to Covid-19 by Donya Brown, Martina Dattilo & James Rockey / Scientific Reports

The results suggest that a key determinant of countries’ success in containing Covid-19 has been the strength of the Rule of Law. We also find evidence that rainfall and seaborders are key potential explanations for differences in excess mortality.

Extra Readings from a Busy Week

Pat Benatar, We Belong.

The Covid-Is-Not-Over Newsletter

Discussion about this post