Denial, denial and more denial: The high price of peak denial, Gag orders, Excess mortality, and more

Bonus Canadian Covid cluster and summer catch up

Sep 20, 2024

2 women sitting on chair in front of table — Photo by Keren Fedida on Unsplash

Welcome to the latest issue of the Covid-Is-Not-Over newsletter! Weeklyish for now at least!

Have we learned anything at all in the last almost five years? Apparently not.

How come we haven’t learned anything yet? Yeah, that’s our mini-theme this week: denial, denial and more denial

Basically, humans just can’t stand unpleasant truths. So what do we do? Denial. We stick our heads in the sand and pretend everything is fine. I’m sure every single one of us has engaged in some sort of petty bit of denial in our lives. Or not so petty. The problem is that we’re indulging in some rather epic society-wide denial about what Covid is really doing to our society. Climate change too.

I hope that the resources here today will help each of us battle our own denial impulse. I hope that the resources here today will help us all spread the word in our networks and communities that maybe it might be time to stick our heads above the side of the foxhole.

There’s been a few relevant articles about the Covid situation in Canada that I’ve listed below. I hope my Canadian Covid Cautious colleagues will find some use in them. As well, there’s a whole bunch of links that I gathered during the summer that I wasn’t able to use in the Summer Bonus issues. I’ve listed a few of those at the end. I might continue with that for the next few weeks.

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Recent Cluster of Canadian Articles

Fluctuations in excess mortality tend to be short-term, reflecting developments such as a large-scale medical breakthrough or the negative impact of a large epidemic. However, as society absorbs these events, excess mortality should revert to the baseline.
With COVID-19 this has not been the case and all-cause excess mortality is still above the pre-pandemic baseline. In 2021, excess mortality spiked to 23% above the 2019 baseline in the US, and 11% in the UK^[2]. As Swiss Re Institute's report estimates, in 2023, it remained significantly elevated in the range of 3–7% for the US, and 5–8% for the UK.
If the underlying drivers of current excess mortality continue, Swiss Re Institute's analysis estimates that excess mortality may remain as high as 3% for the US and 2.5% for the UK by 2033.
The primary driving factor of both current and future excess mortality is respiratory disease (including COVID-19 and influenza), with other causes including cardiovascular disease, cancer and metabolic illnesses. The cause of death split varies by a country's reporting mechanism.

We’ve Hit Peak Denial. Here’s Why We Can’t Turn Away From Reality by Marianne Cooper & Maxim Voronov / Scientific American (non-paywall version)

Time and again, society pressures people not to see, hear or speak about the elephant in the room. To maintain our own “cognitive tranquility,” we tune out, malign and shoot the messenger because they remind us of what we would rather disregard. Just look at physician Ignaz Semmelweis, environmentalist Rachel Carson* and NFL player and social justice advocate Colin Kaepernick. Indeed, people are regularly punished for being accurate.
These tactics are how we get used to so many bad things, from mega-fires to insurrections.
So what can we do about our “Ignore more, care less, everything is fine!” era? We need to stop enabling it. This starts by being more attuned to our “everyday ignoring” and “everyday bystanding”—like that pinch we feel when we know we should click through a concerning headline, but instead scroll past it.
We need to work harder to catch ourselves in the act of staying silent or avoiding uncomfortable information and do more real-time course correcting.
We need to guard against lowering our standards for normalcy. When we mentally and emotionally recalibrate to the new normal, we also disassociate from our own humanity.
We need to demand that our leaders give the full truth and hold them to account. We must stand up for the silenced and stand with the silence-breakers.
To counter the new normal’s assault on normalcy, we must double down on our duty to know, to speak up, and to remember.

As COVID Surges, the High Price of Viral Denial by Andrew Nikiforuk / The Tyee

The subject of how to respond to a slow burn pandemic remains taboo because most public health officials have already declared the emergency over. They’ve also stopped collecting critical data. COVID-19 deaths in Canada are not reported in a readily publicly accessible fashion. And most of the media pretends that an immune-destabilizing virus that can harm the functioning of your organs including your brain has little more import than a benign cold.
As a consequence, authorities can’t now turn around and admit to the breadth of their mistake, let alone acknowledge the growing disorder in public health. Nor do they dare collect critical data documenting the scale of their errors including the relentless march of long COVID. …
Here, then, is where we’ve arrived. We’ve entered a vicious cycle where more infections generate more COVID variants. The new variants have become more immune evasive. At the same time society has generally abandoned masks, testing and basic public health messages.
We could slow and suppress the cycle by facing the challenge squarely. For example, by cleaning dirty air the way we once tackled the disease-ridden spectre of cholera-infested water.
But public health officials are afraid to talk about clean air let alone the obvious: avoiding infection.
Beating back COVID requires hard work, communal wisdom and clear policies that markedly reduce the level of infection in society.
To date we have chosen viral denial, dirty air and a triumphant reign for long COVID.

Denial: The Hidden Link Connecting Mpox, COVID-19, HIV/AIDS by Robert Pearl / Forbes

Looking back on this and other public health crises, it’s clear that medical science alone isn’t enough to save lives. To prevent similar tragedies, public health leaders and elected officials must first understand the role denial plays in people’s perception of medical threats. They must then develop effective strategies to overcome it. …
Our slow and delayed response to Covid-19, mpox, HIV/AIDS and nearly-all chronic diseases demonstrate how widespread denial is, the lives it continues to claim and the urgent need to address this hidden defense mechanism. The best way to overcome denial—both individually and collectively—is to bring the risks into clear focus. Simply warning people about the dangers isn’t enough.
Strong leadership is crucial in breaking through this subconscious barrier. …
Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, and more recently with mpox, officials hesitated to admit how little they knew about the emerging crises. Their reluctance further eroded public trust in government agencies. In reality, people are more capable of handling the truth than they’re often given credit for. When they have access to all the facts, they usually make the right decisions for themselves and their families. Ironically, if public health officials focused on educating people about the risks and benefits of different options—rather than issuing directives—more people would listen and more lives would be saved.
With viral threats increasing and chronic diseases on the rise, now is the time for public health leaders and elected officials to change tactics. Americans want and deserve the facts: what scientists know, what remains unclear and the best estimates of actual risk.

Years into a Pandemic, We're Stuck in Long Denial by Jessica Widlfire / OK Doomer

We're four years into a pandemic that feels like it's never going to end. If it goes on forever, there's one reason we can blame:
It's Long Denial.
Long Covid is real. It describes all the post-infection conditions that impact every cell in the body, sometimes for months, sometimes for good. Every week, a new stack of scientific articles catalogs the damage a "mild" infection does. Many people never recover. We're living through the consequences that early Cassandras warned everyone about. Everything they predicted is happening. We thought the denial would fade as reality came into focus.
It hasn't.
The denial remains as stubborn as ever. In many ways, it's getting worse. Those in denial are practicing strategic amnesia. They remember what makes them feel good about themselves. They forget what doesn't.

Covid-19: is there a gagging order? by Juliet Green / Central Bylines

Covid-19 has wryly been named ‘Coldemort’ on social media, as the disease about which we must not speak. Pundit avoidance feels so practised now that it was a bit of a shock to hear the word in the mouths of presenters at the Paris Olympics. It was almost as if the announcement that US sprinter Noah Lyles had raced (without winning the expected gold) while infected with Covid-19 slipped out before they had the chance to self-censor. Notably, the video has now been removed.
More commonly, Covid-19 is labelled the “the elephant in every room” – cognitive dissonance played out in absurd events across the world. A US presidential candidate declares the pandemic over and two years later, is infected again with the virus that ends his campaign. The first “post-Covid” Olympics is noticeably not: the virus makes headlines when it impacts performances but there is less fanfare when volunteers resign citing lack of mitigations. A US party conference announces a “surprise guest” and the world-weary joke is that the guest was Covid but it was no surprise.
The irreconcilable contradiction between pretending Covid-19 is gone and the reality of what it continues to do, induces collective face-palming from those who are aware. There is a sense of disbelief and frustration evident on social media, to the extent that some dogged posters take every opportunity to demand answers about infection control or air quality or disease surveillance. It is easy to imagine the annoyed eye-rolls by those being questioned but the overwhelming response appears to be no response.

People can't make "risk assessments" without knowing the risks by Julia Doubleday / The Gauntlet

Why do they, along with most other electeds on the Hill, pretend they have never heard the words Long COVID, refuse to acknowledge the ongoing toll of mass infection, and continue to push testing and data out of reach? Is this the behavior of leaders who are confident that the public has freely chosen to cruelly and deliberately abandon millions of people to long-term chronic illness, and to repeatedly risk joining them?
Or is it the behavior of leaders who know they are on borrowed time, sweeping the ever-growing body of evidence and ever-higher pile of victims under the rug while stubbornly repeating that “nobody is wearing masks”?
Scientists, advocates and reporters face an uphill battle getting information about the risks of repeated COVID infections to the public. It is uphill not because of the lack of studies, resources, victims, or voices, but because those who could do the most good continue to use their platforms to do the most harm. As long as the public receives the message from our leaders that recurrent COVID infections aren’t dangerous, the truth has a high wall of propaganda to hurdle.

Study puts understanding of long COVID and vaccination into question by Stephanie Soucheray / CIDRAP

A new study from researchers at the Mayo Clinic suggests that being vaccinated against COVID-19 does little to prevent long COVID.
The findings contradict what has become conventional wisdom in the last 3 years—that vaccines offer a chance to significantly reduce the risk of long COVID, or new or persistent symptoms 3 months or more after infection, most likely by reducing the severity of infection.
Melanie Swift, MD, MPH, was the lead author of the study, which was published in Open Forum Infectious Diseases. She said despite the current thinking that vaccines reduce the risk of developing long COVID, she wasn’t surprised she found no association.

National Academies: Wastewater surveillance could be even better for detecting pathogens by Mary Van Beusekom / CIDRAP

The Academies recommended five steps to more robust NWSS that could better support public health, including better readiness for future pandemics:
1 Optimize state and local sampling sites while improving the representativeness of wastewater data through the use of statistical tools and methods. Such work can boost equity in unrepresented areas and increase the value of investments in the system.
2 Substantially improve the quality and comparability of wastewater data across localities by determining optimal sampling, lab analytic methods, or performance criteria and requiring them as a condition of participation in the NWSS.
3 Increase data analysis, visualization, and interpretation by working with external partners to build models that integrate wastewater and other forms of surveillance data and strengthen its role in forecasting and estimating disease prevalence.
4 Strategically add more endemic pathogens, namely respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and influenza, to SARS-CoV-2 routine surveillance.
5 Increase capacity for early the detection of emerging pathogens, including those with pandemic potential, to facilitate early intervention.

Offices, long-distance shared transport, some activities tied to COVID spread by Mary Van Beusekom / CIDRAP

In the first 2 years or more of the COVID-19 pandemic, the risk of infection was higher in open-space offices, long-distance trains, convenience stores, taxis, airplanes, and nightclubs and during take-away food delivery, carpooling with relatives, and attending concerts, suggests a case-control study of various work, leisure, and other spaces in France.
A team led by Institut Pasteur researchers in Paris matched 175,688 adults who had a recent COVID-19 infection with 43,922 uninfected controls during nine periods from October 2020 to October 2022, a range spanning the wild-type to Omicron-variant eras. Participants completed an online questionnaire about sociodemographic information, health status, household, and recent exposures during the 10 days before symptom onset or diagnosis.

Long-term cognitive and psychiatric symptoms persist in COVID-19 patients even years after hospitalization by Eric W. Dolan / PsyPost

Importantly, the researchers compared the cognitive and psychiatric symptoms of participants at different time points: six months, 12 months, and two to three years after their initial hospital stay. This allowed them to track how these symptoms evolved over time.
The study’s findings paint a troubling picture of long-term brain symptoms following COVID-19 hospitalization. Cognitive and psychiatric issues, including depression, anxiety, and fatigue, did not diminish over time. Instead, they worsened for many individuals between the one-year and three-year marks.

Estimate: COVID vaccines saved up to 2.6 million lives in Latin America, Caribbean by Mary Van Beusekom / CIDRAP

COVID-19 vaccines saved about 610,000 to 2.61 million lives in 17 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) in the first 1.5 years of vaccine availability, estimate researchers from Yale University, Brazil, and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO).
For the observational study, published yesterday in Open Forum Infectious Diseases, the investigators used data on COVID-19 deaths and vaccine effectiveness (VE) and uptake to arrive at a counterfactual estimate of the number of unvaccinated adults saved through vaccination from January 2021 to May 2022.
"Despite the initial availability of COVID-19 vaccines across the region, wide inter- and intra-country variation in access and availability to vaccines were observed in the region," the researchers wrote.

Simple measures lessen hospital-acquired COVID-19 infections / Burnet

In a new study published in the Journal of Hospital Infections, Burnet researchers found simple infection control measures could save lives and reduce costs for hospitals.
These measures include testing patients for COVID-19 on admission, requiring staff to wear N95 masks in clinical areas and using Rapid Antigen Tests (RAT) or Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) tests to prevent transmissions.
One of the paper’s lead authors, Burnet Associate Professor Nick Scott, said on average, 15-25% of patients who tested positive for COVID-19 in hospital had contracted the virus after being admitted.
“The data also showed mortality was 6 percentage points higher for people who caught COVID-19 in hospital, compared to controls who did not,” he said.

Pestilence & Gender: Shattering the Twisted Spire of COVID & Misogyny / Pandemic Accountability Index

What has tragically taken place over the last four years is an explosion of misogyny in nearly every form across every specter of the COVID-19 pandemic - from medicine to academia, this scourge has largely gone unspoken and unconfronted. Unfortunately, disasters such as pandemics tend to exacerbate these sorts of bigotries in our culture, and reward bad actors that should, quite frankly, should be a little more afraid of their respective institutions taking disciplinary action.
This isn't a simple binary, either - women like Sunetra Gupta, a laptop class academic, co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, and Brookings Institute hack Leana Wen made a pretty penny sitting at home to encourage mothers to turn a blind eye to children suffering from COVID-19 - even when it leaves them disabled. However, our culture has coded certain traits as masculine (strong, positive, good) and feminine (weak, pathetic, bad) that becomes nonsensical when dealing with a global crisis.

Bonus Back to School Edition: Keeping Kids Covid Safe by BroadwaybabyTO / The Disable Ginger

I (perhaps foolishly) assumed that anti-maskers would stop short of bullying a child. That grown ups would realize it’s never ok to pick on, tease or harass a kid.
I was wrong.
I received countless messages from parents explaining how their child has been teased, harassed or bullied for masking. Not just by other children - but by people in positions of authority like teachers and doctors.
Disheartened parents confided in me that their children had been pressured to remove their masks in hospital settings - including in Long Covid clinics. Others shared stories of teachers docking marks for students who gave presentations while masking. Many said that healthcare workers had told their child that their parents were ‘anxious’ and that they shouldn’t listen to them.

The only thing more heartbreaking than the content of the messages I got was the sheer volume of them. These events are not outliers - they’re happening across the world to parents and children who are Covid cautious. Even in places where you would assume you would be ‘safe’ - such as a Long Covid clinic - there’s still pressure to remove one’s mask.

Summer Catch Up

The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Voodoo Child (Slight Return).

The Covid-Is-Not-Over Newsletter

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