Rising excess deaths, Summer waves, Laying blame, Banning mask bans, and more
Is a Covid safe community even possible in the Who Cares era?
Welcome to the latest issue of the Covid-Is-Not-Over newsletter! With June right around the corner, I’ll be taking a break from regular issues for a month or so starting the fourth week of June. I’ll be scheduling a few “Summer Bonus” issues during the break, but more on that between now and then.
And speaking of the pandemic, we’re still in the middle of it. The recent low levels of Covid -- the light at the end of the tunnel -- are illusory, an imminent summer wave more of an oncoming train rather than a sign that we’re near the other end.
Not convinced?. Three hundred plus deaths a week in the US, surging infections in “Western Pacific, Southeast Asia, and Eastern Mediterranean” and the US too. The recent news is rather ominous.
A couple of articles not quite about Covid but close enough are The Who Cares Era on dansinker.com and Systems are crumbling – but daily life continues. The dissonance is real at The Guardian. Both are worth reading, but the Dan Sinker one really resonated with me.
And lest you thinking I neglected the WTF element for this week, submitted for your approval are It takes more than a pandemic to make good handwashing habits stick at CBC News and a classic example of the evergreen “don’t worry be happy” theme in the mainstream with ABC News’ Another COVID-19 variant is rising abroad. Doctors say there's no need to panic. Twilight Zone indeed.
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Top Articles Everyone Should Read on Covid
What COVID-19 Does To The Body (Sixth Edition, December 2024) / Pandemic Accountability Index
ANSWERED: Is COVID-19 Harmful to Children? A Compilation of Peer-Reviewed Medical Research / Pandemic Accountability Index
Immunity Debt: The Conspiracy Theory Elevated to Popular Pseudoscience That Is Making Children Sick / LIL_Science
"You Have to Live Your Life:" Responses to Common COVID Minimizing Phrases
Simple things you can do to avoid COVID by Lucky Tran / Aranet
COVID Incubation Period: Key Facts and Guidelines by Sarah Hudgens / Health
Calm-mongering: Fine-tuning the potential emotional impact of risk is not the same as managing it by Arijit Chakravarty and T. Ryan Gregory / Monkeys on Typewriters
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
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
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
A TALE OF TWO TECHNOLOGIES: Far-UVC light disinfection and mRNA vaccines are both potent life saving technologies. In the fight against Covid-19, one was thrust into the limelight, while the other languished in the shadows by Nicola Jane Boyd / Matters of Perspective
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.
'A national scandal': US excess deaths rose even after pandemic, far outpacing peer countries by Mary Van Beusekom / CIDRAP
Excess deaths in the United States kept rising even after the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, with more than 1.5 million in 2022 and 2023 that would have been prevented had US death rates matched those of peer countries, estimates a Boston University (BU)-led study today in JAMA Health Forum.
The data show a continuation of a decades-old trend toward increasing US excess deaths, mainly among working-age adults, largely driven by drug overdoses, gun violence, auto accidents, and preventable cardiometabolic causes, the researchers say.
"The US has been in a protracted health crisis for decades, with health outcomes far worse than other high-income countries," says lead and corresponding author Jacob Bor, ScD, said in a BU news release. "This longer-run tragedy continued to unfold in the shadows of the COVID-19 pandemic."
Why are more than 300 people in the US still dying from COVID every week? by Mary Ketakos / ABC News
More than five years after the first cases of COVID-19 were detected in the United States, hundreds of people are still dying every week.
Last month, an average of about 350 people died each week from COVID, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
While high, the number of deaths is decreasing and is lower than the peak of 25,974 deaths recorded the week ending Jan. 9, 2021, as well as weekly deaths seen in previous spring months, CDC data shows.
COVID is back in a big way: Over 350 people are dying from the coronavirus in the U.S. each week, says CDC data / The Economic Times
COVID is still around, and it is still deadly for a lot of Americans. The CDC says that the virus is killing multitudes in the U.S. each week, even though there are vaccines and treatments available.
Experts say that a lack of vaccinations and missed treatment opportunities are two of the main reasons why these deaths keep happening.
There’s a new COVID variant driving up infections. A virologist explains what to know about NB.1.8.1 by Lara Herrero / The Conversation
The evidence so far suggests NB.1.8.1 may spread more easily and may partially sidestep immunity from prior infections or vaccination. These factors could explain its rise in sequencing data. …
Reports suggest symptoms of NB.1.8.1 should align closely with other Omicron subvariants.
Common symptoms include sore throat, fatigue, fever, mild cough, muscle aches and nasal congestion. Gastrointestinal symptoms may also occur in some cases.
Is a Covid Safe Community Even Possible? by Michael Campi / Way Past What the F**K
To apply the “gold standard” to a community, we would have to strictly enforce limits and standards on incoming members, we would have to have access to testing devices, the ability to trace the contacts and movements of all members, we would have to have treatment available for people who got sick, we would have to enforce masking, we would have to have access to air purification in indoor spaces, and the members would have to be willing to accept the known dangers and abide by the rules.
Doesn’t that sound like fun?
If we look around at the people that we interact with on a daily basis, we could probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of people who would be likely candidates for our imaginary group.
We would have to tell people that one of the costs of admittance is to cut ties with family members, friends, and acquaintances who are not willing to adopt the protocol.
It would have to be extremely insular, and most likely self-reliant to avoid contact with the outside world, and then there would be the outside world.
Where do I lay the blame? Even if systems are ultimately at fault, the people in my life have let me down / M (is) Living with Long Covid
I won’t point the finger at the general unmasked society around me. I recognize that being angry at everyone and trying to change everyone is quioxotic. But I certainly will point the finger (in my head, and on this blog of mine) at the friends and family and colleagues and neighbors and doctors that interact with me regularly. They should know better. In fact, I think they do know better. I think the same could be said of the friends, family, colleagues, neighbors, and doctors of the millions of Americans who are currently suffering from Long Covid. Add all those people together, and that’s probably quite a substantial portion of the population of the United States that could be doing things differently, but doesn’t want to. [I also recognize that Covid Cautiousness takes significant financial privilege and am not talking about people who cannot afford to do so regularly and consistently. If you need masks, you can find your local mask bloc here! You can get free rapid tests in bulk here.]
Price says I shouldn’t be blaming these people - my ire should rather be directed toward systems, institutions, and other higher-level forces - but I can’t help but blame them. They possess the truth, but they refuse to act on it. They prefer pleasure and ignorance to reality and effort. I did too once. Now I’m paying the price.
It’s a dangerous precedent to take out the personal responsibility aspect of epidemiology and public health. When it comes to Covid, absolving the individual has made it such that we (as a society) don’t even think twice about how our actions may change our neighbor’s life - permanently. Though millions of Americans unnecessarily died and millions more have been unnecessarily disabled thanks to ineptitude, greed, racism, eugenics, and classism, and I will never forgive the government for handling the pandemic how it has, it’s become far too easy to (figuratively) wash one’s hands of any personal responsibility toward the fellow humans we share the air with.
Illinois could become the first state in the country to ban mask bans. Here’s how we created the bill to do it by Megan E. Doherty / The Sick Times
Our bill, The Protective Medical Equipment Freedom Act (HB3853), is an essential and timely measure that safeguards civil liberties and advances public health protections:
It will prevent discrimination against individuals who choose to wear protective medical equipment, ensuring that no one is denied service, employment, or access to public spaces because of health precautions taken for themselves, their families, or their communities.
Neither operators of places of public accommodation nor public officials can infringe on this right, which includes protection from any pressure to remove their mask or not wear it in public.
The only person who can remove the mask is the person wearing it.
People can’t be forced to disclose their health status or other protective information.
With oversight from the Illinois Attorney General, this bill includes clear protections against discrimination, retaliation, and harassment, ensuring compliance and accountability through meaningful penalties. The Attorney General would be responsible for creating reporting mechanisms while investigating violations.
Now is the time for scientists to stand up against Trump’s repressive agenda by Daniel Malinsky / The Guardian
Scientists are drawn to the work we do for many different reasons, but I would venture that for most of us there is an underlying goal of advancing humanity – whether that is by finding cures to disease, new technology or more abstractly by pushing the boundaries of human knowledge so that future generations are better off. All of that is at risk if we remain “neutral” or “apolitical” at the wrong moment in history. Though there is a plausible argument for erring on the side of “apolitical” in normal times, to ensure trust and guard against undue politicization of scientific work, the argument stretches thin and breaks down given our current political environment and apparent slide toward fascism. Our scientific research itself must remain free from prejudice and aimed wherever the truth may lead, but the work before us is not only scientific research. We must also work to preserve the conditions of life that make both science and society flourish. In these times that means that scientists have a duty to dissent.
DARVO as Public Health Policy: How Politicians Blame Americans for Health Failures While Creating the Very Conditions That Make Health Impossible by Zeest Khan / Long COVID, MD
DARVO - Denial, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender - isn’t just a pattern of abusive behavior, it’s increasingly a political tool. It allows those in power to escape responsibility by blaming the very people harmed by their policies. And it's being deployed at the highest levels of government to undermine the American public’s health, dignity, and agency.
So what can we do?
We stop accepting the blame. We reject the shame. And we turn toward one another.
It’s more important than ever to lean on trusted sources and supportive communities. The system may be shifting around us, but we are not powerless. When we rely on people who have our best interests at heart, whether it’s medical professionals, advocates, or peers who’ve walked this road before, we get smarter. We get stronger. We learn how to navigate around the barriers and still access what we need.
Republicans' New Vaccine Restrictions Codify a False Healthy/Unhealthy Dichotomy by Julia Doubleday / The Gauntlet
This is where we get into the media’s complicity with the narrative Republicans are deploying to limit vaccine access. For years, the media has claimed that “COVID is over” for the community at large; only at-risk individuals need to prioritize measures to protect themselves. This vaccine policy simply follows that rubric. It pushes the logic that at-risk individuals (which, in reality, comprises everyone) are the only ones who are under threat from COVID, and that they can simply chose to protect themselves with their lone vaccination.
Even without the introduction of this anti-science policy, the media and the two-party embrace of the you-do-you approach to the pandemic had already decimated vaccine uptake. As of April, only 23% of adults had taken this year’s shots. That means that even without restrictions, most people had already arrived at the conclusion the Trump administration is now imposing: it’s only a problem for others, not me.
Doctors fear ‘devastating consequences’ for pregnant people after RFK Jr order on Covid-19 boosters by Jessica Glenza / The Guardian
The Society for Maternal Fetal Medicine (SMFM), experts on high-risk pregnancy, said in a statement that it “strongly reaffirms its recommendation that pregnant patients receive the Covid-19 vaccine”, and that the vaccine is safe to receive at any time during pregnancy.
In a statement, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) said it was “concerned about and extremely disappointed”.
“We also understand that despite the change in recommendations from [health and human services], the science has not changed,” said Dr Steven J Fleischman, ACOG president. “It is very clear that Covid-19 infection during pregnancy can be catastrophic and lead to major disability, and it can cause devastating consequences for families,” said Fleischman.
Long-COVID symptoms in young kids can vary by age by Stephanie Soucheray / CIDRAP
The most common long-COVID symptoms described by caregivers among infants and toddlers were trouble sleeping, fussiness, poor appetite, stuffy nose, and wet cough. Preschool-aged children were more likely to have a dry cough and daytime tiredness or low energy, the authors said. In total, 74% of preschoolers with probable long COVID reported a dry cough.
These symptoms differ greatly from those commonly seen in older kids and teens who have long COVID. Older school-age children are more likely to report neurologic symptoms, while adolescents are more likely to have a change or loss in smell or taste, pain, fatigue-related symptoms, according to accompanying patient page published in JAMA Pediatrics. Teens are also more likely to report post-exertional malaise.
Extra Readings from a Busy Week
How older adults adapted to health care challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic
Please stop letting RFK Jr. make vaccine policies. His new COVID plan is deadly. | Opinion
‘Corrupt’ medical journals have to change, RFK Jr. says, or the NIH will publish in-house
The FDA is circumventing key roles and procedures for licensure and use of Covid vaccines
FDA requires Covid vaccine makers to expand warning about risk of rare heart inflammation | CNN
Vaccine Integrity Project says new FDA rules on COVID-19 vaccines show lack of consensus, clarity
New COVID vaccine policy limits choice, could raise risk for younger groups
Trump's team cited safety in limiting COVID shots: Patients, health advocates see more risk
The Last of Us Science Adviser Says COVID Changed How We View Zombie Stories | Scientific American
Trump pardons former Army officer court-martialed for refusing COVID shot, rules
Artemis. Tiny Desk Concert.
We have TB in NH and nobody cares. Last year from February to August there was someone with contagious tuberculosis in a daycare in Manchester, they told us about it in October.
I find it hard to believe that no one was infected, yet we never heard about it again.