Forgotten lessons of disease control, Rampant Covid, Maybe we could reduce disease, and more
Bonus burniest burn of all time
Welcome to the latest issue of the Covid-Is-Not-Over newsletter! We’re 43 issues in and 673 subscribers strong!
The first regular issue was February 21st, 2023, so we’re coming up on the one year anniversary in a couple of issues. There’s nothing special planned for the anniversary, just more of the same. Links and resources to help us all understand the current state of the pandemic. Maybe some of the things I’m linking will be helpful in sharing through all of our networks of family and friends to increase awareness.
There’s no real theme this week. Or if there is, it’s failure. Failure to learn, failure to protect, failure to care, failure to speak up, failure to extend compassion, failure to build a better world.
Which brings me to the burniest burn of all time. Don’t be like Matthew.
See you all next week.
If you can make it to the end, there’s some musical chicken soup for the soul.
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The Forgotten Lessons Of Infectious Disease Control by Nate Bear / Do Not Panic
The belief that modern medicine, not public health measures, determine the control of infectious disease, was, and remains, fully in charge at the societal level.
We were led to believe the world had changed for 18 months, when in reality it had changed forever.
Because vaccines, especially since covid, have become a prized object in the culture war, it has become controversial to state an historical fact: infectious diseases of the past were defanged by public health measures, not pharmaceutical ones.
Our public health institutions need to relearn this lesson, or learn it for the first time. And do it quickly.
Because every day the burden of covid grows, for individuals, families and for societies. It is now hobbling economies, with Germany falling into recession due to worker sickness.
Vaccines and treatments should be the last line of public health defence, not the first.
If you make them the first, as our governments are now doing for covid, they will fail quickly, and they will fail repeatedly.
How much more failure is necessary before public health authorities return to doing the job they were set up to do?
Rampant COVID Poses New Challenges in the Fifth Year of the Pandemic by Megan Bartels / Scientific American
Scientific American: How would you describe the overall state of COVID at this point in the pandemic?
Maria Van Kerkhove: COVID’s not in the news every day, but it’s still a global health risk. If we look at wastewater estimates, the actual circulation [of SARS-CoV-2] is somewhere between two and 20 times higher than what’s actually being reported by countries. The virus is rampant. We’re still in a pandemic. There’s a lot of complacency at the individual level, and more concerning to me is that at the government level.
Lack of access to lifesaving tools such as diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines is still a problem. Demand for vaccination is very low around the world. The misinformation and disinformation that’s out there is hampering the ability to mount an effective response. So we feel there’s a lot more work to do, in the context of everything else—[we no longer have a] COVID lens only, of course, but using masks for respiratory pathogens that transmit through the air is a no-brainer—plus vaccination, plus distancing, plus improving ventilation. People are living their life; we’re not trying to stop anyone from doing anything, but we’re trying to work with governments to make sure they do that as safely as possible.
We don’t know everything about this virus. Even in year five, there’s still a lot of research that needs to be done. …
SA: Do you have any predictions for COVID in the coming year?
MVK: We don’t do predictions—what we do is we plan for scenarios. Our concern is a variant that’s highly transmissible, that is more severe and that has significant immune escape, which [would mean that people would] really need to get revaccinated right away. And that’s one of the scenarios that we plan for, which is why systems have to be in place that you can scale up or scale down.
And of course, the worry is complacency. The worry is reduced fiscal space, mental space and political space to talk about COVID in the context of everything else. I am not suggesting that the world drop what it’s doing and focus [only] on COVID. That is not what WHO is suggesting. We’re saying, “Please don’t drop the ball.” The virus is here. It’s evolving. it’s killing. It’s causing post-COVID conditions [also called long COVID]. And we don’t know the long-term effects. It’s a virus that is here to stay.
Santé : et si on réduisait la maladie plutôt que d’ajouter des lits et du personnel? by Mélanie Meloche-Holubowski / Radio-Canada
Translated: Health: what if we reduced disease rather than adding beds and staff?
Minister Dubé's dashboard is useful for analyzing the management of the system, but he must also have a disease dashboard. We need to have quantified data on the disease in Quebec and to have a plan to reduce the disease.
What are the diseases of greatest concern? How many people are in the health care system because of these illnesses? How can we reduce them? What indicators are needed to reduce them?
We need to have a Minister of Health who is able to tell us how many sick people we currently have and to give us a plan to reduce illnesses in Quebec in a short, medium and long term vision.
Many countries, including Denmark, France, Belgium, have this type of plan. Not Quebec.
Why So Quiet about Long COVID? by Andrew Nikiforuk / The Tyee
Canada shares this great burden. According to a recent Statistics Canada survey, more than two million Canadians reported suffering from the symptoms of long COVID as of June. That’s seven per cent of the adult population. More than half report no improvement in their condition over time. More than one in five Canadians battling long COVID on average took 24 days off from work or school.
Al-Aly also highlighted one of the key findings of that little-cited Canadian survey and even shared a graph from the study showing that reinfections heighten the risk of long COVID.
“Even if people managed to emerge unscathed after the first infection, they may get long COVID after reinfection,” warned Al-Aly. …
Canadians might want to ask who with power is paying attention to the plague of long COVID in this country.
Privatization schemes advanced by governments amid deepening health care crisis across Canada by Niles Niemuth / World Socialist Web Site
The health care crisis has been deepened by the profits-before-life approach to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic which has been adopted at every level of government, resulting in millions of infections and nearly 58,000 official deaths. Life expectancy fell for three years in a row between 2020 and 2022 in Canada, with COVID being the third leading cause of death. Since the onset of the pandemic in early 2020, hospitals have been repeatedly overwhelmed by waves of illness and a “tripledemic” of COVID, flu and RSV.
The crush of patients combined with underfunding has contributed to a surge in burnout among healthcare workers and the closure of emergency rooms due to staff shortages. According to the Ontario Health Coalition emergency rooms and emergency centres in Ontario closed 1,199 times in 2023 due to a lack of staff.
The growing crisis in Canada’s health care system has been used by all provincial governments to justify further privatization. The funneling of an ever greater share of public funds into private coffers has been justified with the lie that this will reduce wait times for basic care and medical procedures.
In fact, as health experts have warned and various studies have demonstrated, the profusion of private for-profit health care clinics has only served to draw personnel and government funding away from the public system, exacerbating staff shortages and lengthening waitlists for urgently needed, even lifesaving, procedures.
Insomnia common months after even mild COVID-19 by Stephanie Soucheray / CIDRAP
According to the results of a new survey given to Vietnamese patients and published in Frontiers in Public Health yesterday, 76% people who reported mild COVID-19 infections in the previous 6 months said they now experience insomnia, with 22.8% of those respondents saying their insomnia is severe. …
Study participants who saw an increase in depressive or anxiety symptoms following COVID were most at risk for insomnia. Participants with high depression scores (odds ratio [OR], 3.45; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.87 to 6.34) or anxiety scores (OR, 3.93; 95% CI, 2.52 to 6.13) had more than triple the odds of developing insomnia.
Correlations between insomnia, depression, and anxiety were strong to moderate in the study, the authors said, suggesting a role for pharmacologic treatment of insomnia following COVID-19.
COVID-19 behind thousands of excess US deaths, analysis shows by Stephanie Soucheray / CIDRAP
A new study from researchers at Boston University School of Public Health and the University of Pennsylvania shows that a substantial proportion of excess mortality numbers counted as deaths from natural causes during the COVID-19 pandemic were actually attributable to the novel coronavirus. …
"Contrary to prior literature which indicated that these gaps were mostly limited to the early months of the pandemic, we found nearly as many excess deaths reported to non-COVID-19 natural causes in the pandemic’s second year as the first year," the authors concluded.
Substantial health and economic burden of COVID-19 during the year after acute illness among US adults not at high risk of severe COVID-19 by Amie Scott, Wajeeha Ansari, et al. / BMC Medicine
Our data suggest that the health and economic burden of COVID-19 stretches well beyond the acute phase of illness, even among younger individuals without preexisting conditions whose acute infection did not merit hospitalization. Understanding the nature and extent of post-COVID conditions, as well as the unique populations at risk, is critical to evaluating the true societal cost–benefit of interventions such as COVID-19 vaccination and treatment.
Emergency rooms are not okay by Kristen Panthagani and Katelyn Jetelina / Your Local Epidemiologist
We are slowly coming down from a peak in respiratory illness. This past winter was a real test. How will our hospitals—the safety net of our society—fare, given the combination of:
Year 4 of a pandemic with a new threat to our repertoire,
A recent surge of respiratory viruses,
An aging population, and,
A massive infrastructure problem decades in the making.
The answer is in—our hospitals are overwhelmed. And it has now reached a crisis point. It is killing people.
Emergency medicine doctors across the country have been sounding the alarm. Americans are noticing it too. In a recent poll, nearly half of Americans said they avoid the ER—avoid critical care they need—given the wait times.
Here’s what is happening on the front line and how to fix it.
Sicknote Britain: Numbers long-term ill hits another record high of 2.8m in the wake of Covid by James Tapsfield / Daily Mail
The number of Brits off long-term sick has hit a new record high in the wake of Covid.
Some 2.813million people were in the category in the three months to November, according to revised official figures.
That is a dramatic increase on the 2.1million who were in the same situation at the start of the pandemic - with ministers and health experts struggling to work out how to address the problems.
Guest column: Take more action to ensure clean air in Ontario schools by Chris Paswisty / Windsor Star
Bottom line: we need to change the way we think about indoor air quality in schools and the funding we put into it.
A solution is required. The Ontario opposition NDP bill, Improving Air Quality for Our Children Act, is a good start. The Act calls for measuring and reporting indoor air quality levels in schools, mandatory installation of CO2 monitors in all classrooms, and the development of an air quality action plan.
This plan would trigger steps to be implemented when CO2 levels approach or exceed the maximum threshold. If the legislation passes, data would become available to understand current indoor air quality levels and how much investment is needed to provide safe and clean air in our schools across Ontario.
There is no dispute that our schools should be a healthy and safe environment for our most precious and vulnerable population. Government and all stakeholders need to work together to implement the necessary measures to monitor and install the proper air ventilation and filtration systems.
Our children deserve better.
Governments have been steadily dismantling the COVID surveillance system, but is that a backward step? by Casey Briggs / ABC News
If you've tried to look up the number of COVID cases in your area recently, you may have found it a frustrating exercise.
The reporting frequency in states and territories has been slowing down, from daily to weekly, and now fortnightly or monthly.
On top of that, what do the numbers even mean now? And how many are being missed?
It's been a long time since we were asked to get a PCR test at the slightest sign of a tickly throat.
Now, the vast majority of cases are going undiagnosed or unreported.
That degradation in data quality is visible for everyone to see, and it's no surprise: it would've been a big ask for us to keep up the COVID surveillance effort of 2020 and 2021 forever.
Likewise, behind the scenes governments have been steadily dismantling many other elements of a surveillance system that we were so reliant on in the emergency period of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Some public health experts think it's a shame that we're apparently returning back to the pre-pandemic ways we handled respiratory disease, after we've learned so much.
Why California and Oregon Broke With the CDC by Juliette Kayyem / The Atlantic (archived copy)
Recently, California surprised the public-health world by easing the state’s recommendations for asymptomatic people who test positive for COVID. The state previously urged them to isolate for five days to avoid infecting others. In a January memo, though, California Public Health Officer Tomás Aragón declared that “there is no infectious period for the purpose of isolation or exclusion.”
This policy change in the nation’s most populous state—which followed a similar move by Oregon last year—represents a remarkable break from the CDC, the federal agency whose recommendations have guided public-health policies since the coronavirus first arrived in the United States. Four years after the pandemic began, three years after vaccines gave Americans the option of protecting themselves, and a year after the Biden administration let the official public-health emergency lapse, the CDC still calls for five days of isolation even in asymptomatic COVID cases.
CDC hides replies referencing the Senate HELP Committee's Long COVID Hearing by Julia Doubleday / The Gauntlet
What happened next was less reassuring for advocates. Many COVID-informed doctors, researchers, patients, and allies began urging the CDC to go further; to relay information about Long COVID, and to encourage, not just vaccination, but stronger mitigation tools like high-quality masks and air filtration.
The CDC, paid for by our tax dollars and ostensibly charged with relaying public health information, began hiding the replies.
Hiding Dr. Javidan’s reply was particularly indefensible; it stated, “Notice how the Long Covid expert protects against Long Covid. ‘How do we prevent long covid? The best way is to prevent covid in the first place.’” Attached was an image of Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, a prominent Long COVID researcher, testifying before the Senate HELP Committee in a tan KN-95 mask and extolling the importance of prevention.
“Several people alerted me that the CDC had hidden my comment,” Dr. Javidan told me, speaking on the experience. “This was alarming, considering the factual, helpful, and civil nature of the comment.”
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.
What Are We Even Doing: Very Bad Takes on the State of the Covid
The big idea: should we go to more parties? | Friendship | The Guardian
Have your cold or flu symptoms lingered this winter? Doctors explain why.
COVID, flu and RSV cases flooding hospitals in US after holiday gatherings - CBS Philadelphia
Florida State Surgeon General Calls for Halt in the Use of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines
Furious Brits turn back on idyllic Spanish city as it introduces 'ridiculous' mask rules
Ranee Lee and Robi Botos, A Beautiful Sight.