Do android conspiracy theorists dream of electric tinfoil hat Covid responses
Or, All you conspiracy theorists, back to the office lest you dream of an adequate Covid response
Welcome to the latest issue of the Covid-Is-Not-Over newsletter!
This one by Julia Doubleday at The Gauntlet hits so hard:
Congratulations, You're Finally a Conspiracy Theorist.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been checking out tin foil hats on Amazon these days. When the message that “mainstream experts” are sending you is so patently wrong…well…sometimes I think that this newsletter must seem like the public health Flat Earth Society to 99% of the population. Of course, Covid is over. Any other thought or idea is clearly a conspiracy theory.
But, the science. Yeah, that’s it, the science. That’s what I hope distinguishes what I’m doing,and what so many others in the broader Covid Aware community are doing. Sharing good information: peer reviewed, accurate, validated.
And speaking of Amazon, this week’s very mini-theme is inspired by Amazon calling their workers back to the office five days a week. Given Amazon’s notoriously bruising work culture, that’s gotta hurt. A number of this week’s posts are directly about office mandates or health and safety procedures. Or mitigating and preventing Covid spread. I hope everyone finds all of these items interesting and useful.
Amazon workers aren’t happy. Resistance isn’t futile.
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Top Articles Everyone Should Read on Covid
What COVID-19 Does To The Body (Fifth Edition, August 2024) / Pandemic Accountability Index
"You Have to Live Your Life:" Responses to Common COVID Minimizing Phrases
Why is EVERYONE more SICK? by Lola Germs
Covid-19: Will It Mutate To Nothingness? by Rawat Deonandan
Everything "That Friend" Wants You to Know About Covid by Jessica Wildfire / OK Doomer
‘Immunity debt’ is a misguided and dangerous concept by Anjana Ahuja / Financial Times (Non-paywalled version)
Coronavirus Disease 2019 and Airborne Transmission: Science Rejected, Lives Lost. Can Society Do Better? by Lidia Morawska, William Bahnfleth, et al. / Clinical Infectious Diseases
Real Impact of COVID-19 Infection and Why We Should Care by Jeff Gilchrist, PhD
Let's Face It, Covid Trashed Our Immune Systems by Jessica Wildfire / OK Doomer
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
Navigating the Long Haul: A Comprehensive Review of Long-COVID Sequelae, Patient Impact, Pathogenesis, and Management by Nishant Rathod Jr., Sunil Kumar, et al. / Cureus
The Elite's War on Remote Work Has Nothing to Do with Productivity by Jessica Wildfire / Sentinel Intelligence
Many news outlets finally came clean last year and reported that a big chunk of companies might simply be using office return mandates as an excuse to lay off employees and “restructure” their workforce.
So, what's really going on?
It’s about real estate.
There's an office real estate apocalypse unfolding. Corporate landlords currently hold $1.2 trillion in loans on office towers all over the country. In some cases, these are the same jerks who've been buying up all the houses and driving up prices on residential real estate, too. When the pandemic hit, these landlords did something even dumber. As The Financial Times states, they took advantage of “nearly free money” from the Federal Reserve to buy up “trophy office buildings.” Now that everyone is embracing remote work, they can’t lease that office space to anyone. They have a bunch of zombie office towers. They can’t do anything with them.
The return-to-office wars have diminished workplace well-being—especially for these groups by LIndsey Leake / Forbes
Having steadily declined since 2020, overall workplace well-being last year was only slightly better than it was in 2019. By industry, companies in the health care and retail/hospitality sectors had the poorest scores. The report also revealed demographic disparities in workplace well-being, with white, male, and older employees faring better than their Black, female, and younger counterparts. …
Just as the gender pay gap continues to favor men and last year grew for the first time in decades, male employees consistently scored higher in workplace well-being than female employees in a gap that widened after 2020. However, the 2023 gap (4.11 vs. 4.16) was still slightly smaller than it was in 2019 (4.08 vs. 4.15).
All races and ethnicities experienced their healthiest work climates in 2020, with white workers taking the top spot (4.25). Asian employees were the only ones whose well-being met or exceeded that of white workers across the five-year span. While Black and Hispanic/Latino staff achieved the same score in 2020 (4.16), a gap soon developed, with Black workers having the worst well-being from 2021 through 2023.
When stratifying the data by both gender and race/ethnicity in 2023, Asian men had the highest well-being score (4.23)—and the largest gap between their female counterparts (4.14). Black women had by far the worst well-being (4.01). Among women, white workers fared best (4.18).
The great divide: are office workers more productive than those at home? by Richard Partington / The Guardian
This week Amazon joined their ranks, handing down an edict to corporate employees demanding they return to the office five days a week, effective from 2 January. The chief executive, Andy Jassy, argues there are “significant” advantages to face-to-face working.
Others, including Goldman Sachs, Boots and Barclays, agree, as growing numbers of companies push to limit remote working. At Tesla, Elon Musk has a typically outspoken approach, telling staff unwilling to return to the office full-time they can “pretend to work elsewhere”.
However, it is also clear the pre-pandemic working landscape will never be entirely rebuilt. After the initial push to return employees to the office after lockdown, flexible practices and the balance of power between bosses and workers is back on the agenda as the new Labour government promises a radical redrawing of employment rights. Expected within weeks, the plans include make flexible working the default option for workers from day one on the job.
What would an adequate COVID response look like? by Julia Doubleday / The Gauntlet
Start from the top: acknowledge that COVID is airborne. Loudly. Educate the public about airborne mitigation measures and model them.
Mandate airborne infection control in all healthcare settings
Legal and financial consequences for healthcare acquired infections
Legal and financial consequences for infections acquired in congregate settings, prisons, workplaces and schools
Comprehensive indoor clean air laws with specifications for upgraded ventilation, filtration, and other tools like Far UVC
Work from home should be encouraged, conferences should be virtual where possible, flights should be tested.
Free masks, free tests, free vaccines, free Paxlovid, universal paid sick leave, and negative tests to exit quarantine
Education
Congratulations, You're Finally a Conspiracy Theorist by Jessica Wildfire / The Sentinel Intelligence
Many of us didn’t want to believe our own governments would lie to us about one risk after another or sit back and watch toxic spills poison entire cities, or act like they’re not tacitly condoning or even funding mass murder.
But they did.
They are.
It’s really not so far-fetched to suggest that groups of rich, powerful people are working together against our interests. We see it all the time. Journalists have documented over and over how dark money groups and lobbyists craft legislation for politicians and surround them in echo chambers. There’s no need for secret societies. They do it out in the open.
Who needs the Illuminati when you’ve got the Koch Network?
Study sheds new light on severe COVID's long-term brain impacts | CIDRAP by Lisa Schnirring / CIDRAP
More than a year after COVID-19 hospitalization, many patients have worse cognitive function than those who weren't hospitalized, a symptom that comes with reduced brain volume and brain injury markers on blood tests, according to a new study, the largest of its kind in the United Kingdom.
The multicenter study from the COVID-CNS Consortium included 351 patients who were hospitalized for COVID and 2,927 matched controls. The researchers, led by a team at the University of Liverpool and King's College London, published their findings yesterday in Nature Medicine. …
One of the most striking findings was that post-COVID deficits in hospitalized patients look similar to 20 years of normal aging. The team also found that people who had been hospitalized with COVID had reduced brain volume in key areas and abnormally high levels of brain injury proteins in their blood.
The team saw the greatest deficits in people who had the most severe infections, had post-acute psychiatric symptoms, and had a history of encephalopathy.
What if schools could prevent sick days, teacher shortages and lost IQ points? A new COVID safety course lights the way by Hayley Gleeson / ABC News
Once apprised of the health risks, course participants are taught about evidence-based tools schools can use to reduce viral transmission. These are not outlandish or burdensome interventions, but common sense steps like encouraging teachers and students to stay home if they're sick; improving indoor air quality with ventilation and filtration — with air conditioning systems, air purifiers and good old-fashioned open windows; and promoting mask wearing particularly in high-risk settings like crowded indoor gatherings or bus trips.
A better approach to mitigate the risk of airborne infections in workplaces by Raymond M Agius / Occupational Medicine
The development and application of a national strategy to individual workplaces would rely heavily on a range of disciplines from microbiology to engineering. However, implementation in workplaces would be driven mainly by occupational health professionals such as hygienists and physicians as they have long-standing competencies and experience in applying control measures for airborne hazards [3] ranging from asbestos and crystalline silica to Legionella and Mycobacteria. The COVID-19 pandemic taught us that the uncritical application of fallacious public health guidance resulted in a lack of protection for workers [5,17,22] as well as others in workplaces such as patients [13] whose airborne exposure is inextricably linked to that of workers. Occupational health standards of control tend to be higher [17] than those in a public health context and can contribute to the good practice of infection control and public health [22] as part of the collaboration between specialists in all these disciplines. Occupational health specialists should be able to advise employers on aspects of employers’ legal obligations including with reference to those in workplaces who are not workers [12] as well as on adjustments relating to susceptible individuals that may be needed to comply with Equality legislation [12,14].
A ‘let them rip’ attitude towards the mitigation of the risk of common airborne infections in the workplace is unacceptable in terms of law, good occupational medicine practice and public health. A proactive strategy underpinned by a better paradigm is urgently needed for the benefit of society and especially to protect those vulnerable through significant exposure or those susceptible for reasons such as co-morbidity. Even if the will to do what is needed at a national level remains lacking, forward-looking workplaces and other stakeholders should still take proactive steps to mitigate the risk of airborne infection. Thus they would fulfil the duty of care to workers and others as well as improve the resilience and productive potential of workplaces.
What Repeat COVID Infections Do to Your Body, According to Science by Erica Sloan / SELF
You might be thinking, “Aren’t I more protected against COVID and less likely to have a serious case after having been infected?” Part of that is true, to an extent. In the first couple years after COVID burst onto the scene, reinfections were generally (though not always) milder than a person’s initial bout of the virus. “The way we understand classic immunology is that your body will say to a virus [it’s seen before], ‘Oh, I know how to deal with you, and I’m now going to deal with you in a better way the second time around,’” says Ziyad Al-Aly, MD, a senior clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine and the chief of research and development at the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System.
But any encounter with COVID can also cause your immune system to “go awry or develop some form of dysfunction,” Dr. Al-Aly tells SELF. Specifically, “immune imprinting” can happen, where, upon a second (or third or fourth) exposure to the virus, your immune cells launch the same response as they did for the initial infection, in turn blocking or limiting the development of new antibodies necessary to fight off the current variant that’s stirring up trouble. So, “when you get hit an [additional] time, your immune system may not behave classically,” Dr. Al-Aly says, and could struggle with mounting a good defense.
Pair that dip in immune efficiency with the fact that your antibody levels also wane with time post-infection, and it’s easy to see how another hit can rock your body in a new way. Indeed, the more time that passes after any given COVID infection, the less of a “competitive advantage” you’ll have against any future one, Richard Moffitt, PhD, an associate professor at Emory University, in Atlanta, tells SELF. His research found that, while people who got sick initially during the delta phase were less likely to get reinfected during the first omicron wave (as compared to folks who were infected in a prior period), that benefit leveled off with following omicron variants.
There’s also the fact that no matter how your immune system has responded to a prior strain (or strains!) of the virus, it could react differently to a new mutation. “We tend to think of COVID as one homogeneous thing, but it’s really not,” Dr. Al-Aly says. So even if your body successfully thwarted one of these intruders in the past, there’s no guarantee it’ll do the same for another, now or in the future, he says.
Notes from the Field: Support for Wastewater Monitoring and Influence on Protective Behavioral Intentions Among Adults — United States, July 2024 by Rieza H. Soelaeman, Danielle Kleven, Jena Losch, et al. / MMWR
What is already known about this topic?
Wastewater monitoring has expanded since 2020, providing data for several infectious diseases.
What is added by this report?
In a survey of public support, U.S. adult residents (74.6%) strongly or somewhat support wastewater monitoring, with nearly all (95.3%) stating they would take steps to protect themselves if wastewater monitoring data indicated disease transmission in their area.
What are the implications for public health practice?
Making infectious disease wastewater data readily available helps keep the public informed and can facilitate early adoption of protective health behaviors. Presentation of these data should be accompanied by clear public health interpretations.
How Not to Prevent a Pandemic by Jessica Wildfire / The Sentinel Intelligence
Missouri recently reported the first human case of bird flu in the U.S. By that, health officials mean the first person "with no known animal contact." Since then, we’ve learned that two healthcare workers there likely became infected but weren’t tested. According to Helen Branswell at Stat News, “This makes the second time that possible cases… have come to light well after the fact.” And yet, the CDC continues to insist that “the risk to the public remains low.”
This is not how to prevent a pandemic.
Covid-19 : A risk assessment too far? by David Osborn / Patient Safety Learning Hub
In this blog I describe the biggest abuse of the health and safety system in living memory. It relates to the misuse and abuse of ’risk assessment’, the very cornerstone of workplace health and safety. I explain how this left hundreds of thousands of healthcare workers (HCWs) at risk of catching Covid-19 as they provided close-quarter care to infectious patients. In turn, this paved the way for onward transmission to other patients, healthcare colleagues and their own families at home.
Risk assessment, when used correctly by responsible, properly trained and competent people is a powerful weapon in the armoury of tools available to protect workers against injury, disease and death as they go about their work. However, as I will discuss, in the wrong hands, used by people lacking in basic health and safety competencies who may have misplaced objectives and motivations, it can be a very dangerous thing indeed.
Romanian doctors blamed for health crisis fuelled by the ruling class “forever COVID” policy by Andrei Tudora / World Socialist Web Site
At the beginning of August, prosecutors ordered the arrest of Mirela Păiuș and Maria Miron, two young doctors from the hospital’s ICU unit, charging them with conspiracy and murder. An intense media campaign was started by the prosecutors, with details from the case either leaked or read directly by the state office. The two doctors were paraded in handcuffs, and their full names and images were published in the press. Private conversations with family members in which they grapple both with the seriousness of the cases and with the threat of prosecution were “leaked” and misused in the media. A parallel campaign was started on far-right social media channels, connecting the critical care doctors to pandemic conspiracy theories.
Prosecutors have singled out the case of a 54-year-old with a complex pathology, who they claimed was intentionally killed by a reduction of the norepinephrine level. As numerous experts in the field have since explained, the reduction in that case would have been correct. The two doctors were arrested for 30 days on August 8, but released on August 20 by an appeals court.
Health providers came out in solidarity with the arrested doctors. A wildcat strike by workers on the Pantelimon ICU unit, who threatened to resign, was stopped by a visit of the health minister, who falsely promised to support them. In reality, the PSD politician is hiding behind the police case, vowing to “respect the investigators’ findings” in what is a “purely criminal case.”
Summer Catch Up
The Risks of Killing a COVID Early Warning System | The Tyee
My Most Dangerous ER Experience and How My Advocate Saved My Life
Nearly half of COVID-19 survivors in Africa experiencing Long COVID symptoms, study suggests
ARE YOU SERIOUS? COVID-19 HASN’T GONE AWAY? - John Snow Project
Intersection of long COVID and disability highlighted in CDC study | Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Ethnicity, race and health equity: 3 lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic
The latest wave of COVID-19 and Biden’s destruction of public health - World Socialist Web Site
"You Have To Live Your Life" debunks popular myths and misperceptions about COVID-19
"Y'all Masking?" hashtag goes viral on X, showing maskers they are not alone
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.
Feeling apocalyptic? Maybe something a little more on the extreme side? Neurosis. The Doorway.