Covid Hegemonies, lung & organ damage, Covid kills children, and more
Welcome to my Covid-is-not-over Substack newsletter. What I’ll be bringing you here on a fairly regular basis are some key readings that I’ve been discovering — basically resources to help us all understand what’s going on with Covid. Globally, nationally in Canada, locally in Ontario and Toronto.
My focus is definitely going to be general interest articles from mainstream and alternative media that will help explain the effects of the Covid pandemic on all of us. If I have a particular interest in what I’m sharing, it to find things that the Covid-aware could share with not-so-Covid-aware family, friends and colleagues to help them get past the overwhelmingly and disturbing social consensus that the pandemic is over.
Most of the items I share will be recent at the time I’m sharing, but I’ll be using a fairly loose definition of “recent.” I’ll be aiming for 5-10 items, once or twice a week as a publishing schedule, but I’m also not going to worry about that. I tried something similar on my blog with a This Week in Covid series, but that didn’t seem to get that much traction. So time to try something new.
Let’s get started!
Rethinking COVID hegemony by Blair Williams / Croakey Health Media
COVID Hegemony, then, can be understood as the normalisation of widespread infection achieved by those with power through coercive persuasion, to gain our consent and even approval. Divorced from realities of widespread transmission, the media, politicians and certain experts have been pushing for a “return to normal”, to “live with COVID” and to move away from “COVID exceptionalism”.
Our governments and mainstream media have persuaded Australians to accept increasing morbidity, mortality, and the erosion of our public health systems using four key strategies.
COVID's aftermath: Persistent organ damage at 1 year, lung abnormalities at 2 by Mary Van Beusekom, MS / CIDRAP
In a study in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, British researchers assessed organ impairment in 536 long-COVID patients still reporting extreme shortness of breath, brain fog, and poor health-related quality of life (HRQoL) 1 year after diagnosis. Of all participants, 13% had been hospitalized at symptom onset, and 32% were healthcare workers. …
A team led by researchers in Wuhan, China, monitored 144 COVID-19 pneumonia patients released from the hospital from Jan 15 to Mar 10, 2020, who underwent chest computed tomography (CT) scanning at admission and still had symptoms 2 years later. Of all participants, 78% had severe COVID-19, 4.2% had been critically ill, and 19% had developed acute respiratory distress syndrome.
COVID-19 is now a leading killer of children by Orac / Respectful Insolence
This brings me to a bit of data, specifically a study that was published a week ago in JAMA Network Open, Assessment of COVID-19 as the Underlying Cause of Death Among Children and Young People Aged 0 to 19 Years in the US. Let’s just say that, as Dr. Howard and I (and many others) have been arguing all along, COVID-19 is at least a comparable threat to children as any other prepandemic vaccine-preventable child infectious disease. …
I can almost hear my “urgency of normal” colleagues twitching and saying, “So what? That’s still a small number of deaths relative to the number of children who have had COVID-19.” Perhaps, but I’ve never found the argument that, hey, it “wasn’t that many dead children” to be a particularly persuasive argument. I’m funny that way.
Opinion: Treating kids as invulnerable is treating them as disposable by Blake Murdoch / Calgary Herald
Parents often believe in a societal fiction that children will just be OK and will live healthy lives. This can help cope with the anxieties of raising children.
The truth is, there is no guarantee children will be OK. When you take off the rose-coloured glasses and look at life for what it is, there are no guarantees at all. As grief counsellors often point out, death is a natural part of life. However, death can be hidden and ignored in our society, in favour of a sort of blissful ignorance. But if your child ever becomes seriously disabled or dies, you come to understand how utterly meaningless many of the things that you previously found important were. …
We fundamentally do not know the extent of the long-term damage continual reinfection with COVID will cause to children, and the data we have so far are upsetting. What are we willing to risk? Are we OK with more children contracting diabetes? Are we OK with many more children developing highly disabling orthostatic intolerance? How about chronic fatigue, cognitive impairment, sleep disorders and heart problems?
Indoor air quality should be monitored in public places, says Chris Whitty: England’s chief medical officer and colleagues call for push to understand health impacts of indoor pollutants by Ian Sample / The Guardian
Prof Chris Whitty said monitoring indoor air quality should become standard practice in public spaces and called for urgent investment to help establish records of pollutants that accumulate in homes, offices and public buildings.
While efforts to improve outdoor air quality have driven down emissions of particulates, nitrogen dioxides and sulphur dioxide, indoor air quality has largely been neglected. In buildings, air can be contaminated with fine particles from wood burners and cooking, and with noxious gases, cancer-causing chemicals, and pathogens such as viruses, bacteria and molds, all of which contribute to health problems.
My Blog has a bunch of COVID Information posts you can find here:
Around the Web: Women in Science May Suffer Lasting Career Damage from COVID-19
Around the Web: Scholarly Communications in the Age of the Coronavirus
Around the Web: COVID is airborne so enough with the bullshit hygiene theatre
Around the Web: COVID-19 is airborne and hygiene theatre is the wrong response
The COVID Information Series: The COVID-19 Pandemic Is Not Over!
The COVID Information Series: Dear Joe Biden, The COVID-19 Pandemic Is Not Over!
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