The existential challenge of Long Covid, US excess deaths, UK long term sickness, Pandemic revisionism, and more
Bonus! This is the official one year anniversary issue!
Welcome to the latest issue of the Covid-Is-Not-Over newsletter! The first “regular” issue that I put together was back on February 21, 2023. So this is the anniversary issue. One year strong, 45 issues, 681 subscribers. Let’s get to 1000 by the end of 2024!
Covid is not over. That’s the theme of this issue. As you can all imagine, I do a lot of searching on Google to find the articles I feature. A year ago I could easily find 5 to 10 mainstream media stories on Covid in Ontario. At least 10 more on the rest of Canada, and countless stories on the rest of the world. General stories, many per day. I have hundreds of links from the last year that I haven’t used. Yes, I keep all those candidate links I find every day. I only use 10-15 per week, but I find dozens that I don’t use.
Fast forward a year? I’m lucky if I find one to two on Covid in Ontario most days. About the same for the rest of Canada. And certainly nowhere near as many for the rest of the world. Covid isn’t over, that’s what we all know, deep in our hearts and minds. We see it out there, in the wastewater, in what’s happening in the hospitals, in what’s happening in our networks of family and friends.
But more and more it’s disappearing from public consciousness. For most people, Covid is over.
I’ll keep looking for stories, I’ll keep featuring, I’ll keep helping us all understand what’s really going on.
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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.
Long Covid is one of the world’s biggest challenges / John Snow Project
Governments keen to reopen economies listened to those who gave optimistic assessments of this novel pathogen and who said that once the virus was no longer a novelty for our immune systems, repeat infections would be unlikely to cause harm. We now know this is not the case, and data from around the world is starting to show that Long Covid is more prevalent in people who have had a higher number of infections. We repeat our call for leaders to recognise the scale of the problem facing us and to act to prevent further harm.
As evidence mounts of the toll taken by SARS-CoV-2 reinfection, we join Drs Al-Aly and Topol in calling for a comprehensive approach to reducing the number of COVID-19 infections, using the broad public health strategy and tools they suggest to lower the risk of exposure to SARS-CoV-2 in everyday life. We also echo their call for more investment in research and therapeutics to help the millions around the world already affected by Long Covid.
While we wait for governments to recognise the severity of the problem and the need for action, we recommend people do whatever is reasonably possible to reduce the severity and number of SARS-CoV-2 infections they experience over their lifetime. Click here for advice on how to reduce your risk.
Covid death toll in US likely 16% higher than official tally, study says by Melody Schreiber / The Guardian
The Covid death toll in the US is likely at least 16% higher than the official tally, according to a new study, and researchers believe the cause of the undercounting goes beyond overloaded health systems to a lack of awareness of Covid and low levels of testing.
The second year of the pandemic also had nearly as many uncounted excess deaths as the first, the study found.
More than 1.1 million Americans have died from Covid, according to official records. But the actual number is assuredly higher, given the high rates of excess deaths. Demographers wanted to know how many could be attributed to Covid, and they drilled down to data at the county level to discover patterns in geography and time.
COVID-19 deaths during core pandemic years were likely under-counted / University of Minnesota
The study found:
There were 1.2 million extra deaths attributed to natural causes during the pandemic's first 30 months in the U.S.
Nearly 1 in 7 excess deaths were not attributed to COVID-19.
These excess natural-cause deaths were closely related to COVID-19 surges, but often preceded them, meaning deaths at the beginning of COVID-19 surges were often misattributed.
The gap between official COVID-19 deaths and excess natural-cause deaths was biggest in the U.S. South, the West, and non-metropolitan counties. These may be areas where death reporting systems need the most improvement.
Data analyst Greg Travis speaks on COVID pandemic-related excess deaths in the US by / World Socialist Web Site
One point that Travis wanted to emphasize is the class character of these deaths. He emphasized that while the demographic of 18 to 44 represents the “blue collar” workers who are constantly exposed through their work to the virus, the percent of excess deaths among those that are 45 to 75 years of age has declined almost to baseline. Travis calls this demographic more representative of “the managerial class,” such as “factory superintendents, upper-level corporate management, newspaper editors, the publishers of fancy magazines like New Yorker and The Atlantic, as well as healthcare administrators and tenured academics. For them, indeed, the pandemic is over.”
Evidence for the impact of the pandemic on the working class has been documented in a few studies that dared to address this issue, including the drastic decline in their life expectancy, although these studies are often couched in racial terms to cover for the class nature of society that the pandemic has exposed. Travis’ graphics offer some support for these conclusions, but would require analyzing county-level data and documentation on the social aspects of these excess deaths that the CDC data fails to capture.
After 29 million deaths, it seems the world has learned nothing by Gonzalo Fanjul / EL PAÍS English
We are running the risk of establishing a dangerous precedent. The most worrisome part of Covid-19 response evaluations in many countries is not the circus of lies, abuse and incompetency that have been uncovered, but rather a surprising disinterest in learning from our mistakes. And in this, Spain is no exception. Although the State Public Health Agency — meant to organize preparedness and response actions, among other functions — will soon be rolled out, the government has so far failed to approve a Global Health Strategy to determine our priorities in this essential debate, as the EU and several neighboring countries have done. In Spain’s Parliament, the issue seems to have lost all electoral sex appeal: of the 459 health-related initiatives in 2023, less than a dozen made direct reference to preparedness for future health risks. Meanwhile, the evaluation of the country’s National Health System’s pandemic response by independent experts, which was commissioned in 2021, took a year and a half to arrive and wound up being shelved for eight months, only to be published in December 2022, to no apparent impact on public debate.
Record long-term sickness bodes ill for UK economic growth by Larry Elliott / The Guardian
Britain has a sick economy and it is getting sicker. The clear message from last week’s raft of economic data is that the UK is being held back by the growing number of people not able to work because of long-term illness.
There are many theories about why the trend is worsening. Possible factors include long Covid, delays in NHS treatment as waiting lists grow longer, poor workplace practices, stress and the impact of austerity. …
This matters, and not just for those who would be working if their circumstances were different. This high level of long-term illness helps explain why the UK’s workforce is 700,000 smaller than its pre-Covid level, why the labour market is so tight and why the economy is flatlining.
Jane Gratton, deputy director of public policy at the British Chambers of Commerce, said: “Businesses are growing increasingly concerned about higher levels of inactivity and its economic impact. It is impacting on growth and inflation. Wages are rising because of skills shortages. This has an effect on both employers and individuals.”
Teacher absences driving $18M public school board deficit: Officials by Heather Rivers / The London Free Press
Since the COVID pandemic began in 2020, educator absences have become a major issue across the province including in the Thames Valley board, which employs 14,000 people.
Trustee Marianne Larsen suggested the board should do more to assist staff taking extended leaves.
“What have we done and what do we intend to do to support the wellbeing of our staff so they’re not taking days off?” she said. “So we can start to decrease the need for supply teachers over the long term?”
Reactivated TB is a Bellweather for Covid's Immune Harm by Anthony J. Leonardi / Easy Chair
People have fervently denied Covid harms immunity beyond the extent of what a common cold may do. They conveniently ignore mountains of evidence of viral reactivation in the acute phase, greater risk of Herpes reactivation, and some, scoff at the heightened risk of reactivated TB.
Working from home can bring big health benefits, study finds by James Tapper / The Guardian
Working from home allows people to eat more healthily, feel less stressed and have lower blood pressure, according to a large-scale review of academic literature on post-pandemic workplaces.
Yet remote workers are also more likely to eat snacks, drink more, smoke more and put on weight, the study found. And employers who believe that people working from home are lazy should think again – they are less likely to take time off sick, tend to work longer hours and to work evenings and weekends.
COVID: there’s a strong current of pandemic revisionism in the mainstream media, and it’s dangerous by Lukas Engelmann, Dora Vargha / The Conversation
In the UK, this embellishment of the historical record is currently under way. Commentators write with glee against proponents of the now-infamous zero COVID strategy, turning the retrospective humility of public health advocates into misdirected stories of moral and political culpability.
Scanning the unsparing tone of such opinion pieces and the scathing judgment of prominent social media posts, it is as if they are asking for a few public health scholars, rather than government mismanagement, to shoulder the moral, economic and human toll of the missteps since February 2020.
As the rights and wrongs of shielding and segregation are raked over, and as the lockdown sceptics believe their long-held concerns were justified given the rising mental health concerns, the risk is not for an extreme public health intervention to lose popular support – lockdown was at best the least worst option.
The real risk is that this false allocation of culpability, in hand with misremembering of the past, continues to erode a principle of solidarity at the heart of public health.
It is the voices of those lost to the pandemic, of those most vulnerable to the virus, past and present, of those most affected by the debilitating effects of long COVID and of those advocating for a pandemic response based on principles of equity, that are written out of this increasingly popular, populist and revisionist picture.
New CDC Guidelines: Work 'til you Drop by Julia Doubleday / The Gauntlet
Of course, one would think that the obvious violation of basic worker rights- the rights to safety and health- would motivate the unions and leftist organizers to take action. But they too, have been drowned in a sea of normalizing propaganda, the crux of which is the demonstrably false claim that nothing can be done to reduce or control the spread of COVID. Nothing except vaccinations- which most Americans have failed to keep up with.
Biden’s CDC no more believes or promotes “the science” than Trump’s before him. COVID is a virus, not a supernatural phenomenon beyond all human understanding. Like all viruses, it can be controlled and reduced with proper infection control protocols. Like all viruses, it can be eliminated from indoor air rapidly with high quality ventilation and filtration. Like all viruses, it cannot infect more hosts when the sick isolate and are paid to stay home from work.
The CDC’s desire to eliminate isolation is yet one more step toward disappearing the virus from public consciousness, because a government that isn’t fighting COVID-19, isn’t losing to COVID-19. If COVID is everywhere, COVID is nowhere. If the other kids at school all have a permanent cough, maybe my kid’s permanent cough is “normal”. So as hospitals remain overwhelmed, staffing shortages worsen, economies buckle, disability and long-term illness hits new records, kids miss school and workers lose their livelihoods, we’ll continue to do nothing more than turn to each other and wonder why.
COVID patients 4 times more likely to develop chronic fatigue: CDC research by Lauren Sforza / The Hill
COVID-19 patients are at least four times more likely to develop chronic fatigue than those who have not been infected, according to a new study published by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The researchers used electronic medical records from the University of Washington for their analysis and followed more than 4,500 adults for about 11 months after COVID-19 infection between February 2020 and February 2021. The researchers then compared the results with more than 9,000 adults who did not have a COVID-19 infection.
Do COVID Infections Impact Mental Health? by Devon Frye / Psychology Today
Now, new data is shedding light on how COVID affects mental health. A systematic review published this month in the journal BMC Psychiatry takes a careful look at the long-term mental health effects of COVID-19. In the analysis, Iranian public health researchers pooled the data from hundreds of studies that used validated assessment tools for depression, anxiety, and sleep disorders to quantify mental health disorders among patients with long COVID.
It's urgent - we must do something about vaccine hesitancy by Alessandro Siani / Cosmos
With new global pandemics also predicted to emerge with climate change, vaccines will likely play a key role in mitigating their most devastating impacts.
But troublingly, vaccine hesitancy appears to have increased since the COVID-19 pandemic, and it’s not just COVID vaccines that are subject to this hesitancy, but vaccines more broadly — even those that have been successfully used for decades and led to the near-eradication of some infectious diseases.
The UK Health Security Agency warned that urgent action should be taken to curb the re-emergence of measles outbreaks caused by the decline in MMR (Measles, Mumps, Rubella) vaccine coverage in some communities.
The increase in vaccine scepticism presents a real challenge for healthcare organisations and national governments as they attempt to incorporate a climate resilience lens into their public health plans.
Vaccination, testing, clean air: COVID hasn’t gone away – here’s where Australia needs to do better by Stephane Bouchoucha, Matt Mason, Peta-Anne Zimmerman, Sally Havers / The Conversation
In Australia, more than 50,000 infections have been reported so far in 2024. And this is likely to be a significant underestimate, as we are testing much less than we used to. As of February 1 there were 287 outbreaks in residential aged care homes, and people are still dying from the virus.
Although we’ve come a long way since earlier in the pandemic, as we enter its fifth year, COVID continues to have negative effects on individuals, health services and society at large.
To reduce the impact on health services and the community, the Australasian College for Infection Prevention and Control, of which we are on the board of directors, is calling for ongoing infection prevention and control strategies in Australia. These include supporting people to access vaccination and testing, and cleaner air in shared indoor spaces.
What Are We Even Doing: Very Bad Takes on the Pandemic!
Are We Thinking of Virus Symptoms Wrongly? | Psychology Today Canada
Red Deer ER uses tarps secured with duct tape to create more space for patients
Oakland schools allow COVID-positive students to attend class | KRON4
Older, immunocompromised people may get COVID-19 vaccine dose in spring, NACI says
COVID-19 Outbreaks Still a Threat for Senior Care Communities (masks not mentioned)
Donald Harrison, Jr. with Dr. John. Indian Red.
Congrats on one year, that's huge!
Thanks so much for putting together this newsletter!