Miscellany: Human rights & healthcare mask mandates, Failures of journalism, and more
Immune dysregulation and lingering viruses too
Welcome to the first post-Twitter/Substack War issue of the newsletter! We came out of it relatively unscathed, with the biggest impact being a slightly lower than expected number of views on the last issue. What with all the fuss, I have checked out the new Substack Notes feature. It’s pretty interesting, but still not that much presence by the Covid-aware community that I could find. Twitter is much better for that, at least so far, so I’ll be staying there for the foreseeable future. Or until Leno Skum sinks the ship completely.
This issue is a selection of recentish articles I’ve found useful and interesting. I hope you also find them interesting and useful within your own extended networks of family, friends and colleagues. I’m still working slowly on a post about the failures of academia in the Covid era, so that will come eventually. I’m also working on something about the abandonment of mask mandates in healthcare settings.
First up, here’s a database of mostly peer-reviewed scientific articles on Covid.
A note: a couple of times below there’s some bolding I’ve added to the text to highlight the main point.
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Human Rights Commissioner troubled by end of mask mandates in healthcare settings / British Columbia’s Office of the Human Rights Commissioner
For three years now, my Office has been engaged in ongoing work providing a human rights perspective on COVID policy decisions, including policy guidance on mask wearing, vaccination status policies, and a public inquiry into experiences of hate during the pandemic. Our work has also included direct advocacy with B.C.’s public health officials about the need to prioritize the human rights of marginalized people, and I continue to call on our public health officials to employ a human rights analysis when making public health decisions. My role is not to make public health decisions; it is to shine a light on how those decisions may disproportionately impact certain marginalized communities. This week’s removal of universal masking directives in healthcare settings does not uphold a human rights centered approach to public health.
Three Years Later, Covid-19 Is Still a Health Threat. Journalism Needs to Reflect That by Kendra Pierre-Louis / Nieman Reports
The New York Times is not alone. Outlets like The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and NPR, to name just a few, have amplified voices and arguments that helped create a narrative that not only pathologizes those who remain cautious about the disease, but also fails to adequately convey the risks associated with Covid such that many people are unwittingly taking on potentially lifelong risks.
In the process, we’ve failed at our field’s core tenets — to hold power to account and to follow the evidence. Our failures here could last a generation. As reporters, it’s our responsibility to accurately represent the needs of diverse perspectives and avoid an ableist bias that diminishes the real and lasting health concerns not only of those who are keenly at risk but those who are cautious about repeatedly catching a virus that scientists are still grappling to understand.
COVID-19 and Immune Dysregulation, a Summary and Resource by Andrew Ewing / WHN
The prevalence of acute COVID-19 infections has been incredibly high, resulting in far-reaching effects to humanity. Reinfections are becoming increasingly common, damaging the immune system, and leaving it weakened before subsequent infections occur. During this time, including the possibility of viral persistence with evidence from numerous studies, the immune system is not as strong and is more susceptible to other pathogens.
SARS-CoV-2 causes immune dysfunction through several direct and indirect mechanisms, including the killing of important categories of innate and adaptive immune cells. The rate of renewal of blood cells in an individual is a factor in determining how transient or severe the damage is.
Going long: Viruses linger with lasting impact by Diane Mapes / Fred Hutch Cancer Center
While some of the associations between viruses and long-term chronic conditions have been known for years, others, like the link between EBV and MS, are just coming to light.
And just as COVID-19’s high death and hospitalization rate among the most vulnerable spotlighted the country’s longtime health disparities, long COVID may be shining a light on viruses’ propensity to linger once they latch onto us.
And researchers are moving on it.
“There’s most definitely a lot to be learned about viruses still,” Boonyaratanakornkit said. “The hottest areas of research are EBV and long COVID.”
Traditional values closely linked to following COVID-19 precautions, except in US | CIDRAP by Stephanie Soucheray / CIDRAP
In the US, social conservatives were outliers
"Across a wide range of countries, people who endorsed traditional cultural values—a position that often underlies socially conservative political philosophies—were more likely to report taking strict COVID-19 precautions, despite the opposite pattern being observed in the U.S.," said study author Theodore Samore, a UCLA doctoral student in anthropology in a press release.
The authors of the study explained that those who value tradition are more likely to also practice threat avoidance, and were thus more eager to take COVID-19 precautions. The effect was seen in different regions worldwide, with the strongest effect seen in China, India, the Philippines, Chile, and Italy.
Why focusing on COVID deaths undercounts the health harms of the pandemic – new research by Philip Clarke, Jack Pollard, Mara Violato / The Conversation
More than three years into the COVID pandemic, both the virus and the measures taken to control its spread have affected people’s lives across the globe. But how can we fully quantify these effects?
While we have estimates of how many people have died from COVID globally (which currently run at just under 7 million), its broader effects – including mental health deterioration due, for example, to the anxiety of getting infected or the isolation of lockdowns – have received less research attention.
In a new study we’ve attempted to quantify how the COVID pandemic has affected global health using an international survey of the general public.
Roger Daltrey is doubtful The Who will 'ever come back to tour America' by Melissa Ruggieri / USA Today
“Touring has become very difficult since COVID. We cannot get insured and most of the big bands doing arena shows, by the time they do their first show and rehearsals and get the staging and crew together, all the buses and hotels, you’re upwards $600,000 to a million in the hole. To earn that back, if you’re doing a 12-show run, you don’t start to earn it back until the seventh or eighth show. That’s just how the business works. The trouble now is if you get COVID after the first show, you’ve (lost) that money.”
COVID-19 a leading cause of death in children and young people in the US by Ryan O'Hare / Imperial News
COVID-19 was the underlying cause of death for more than 940,000 people in the US, including over 1,300 deaths among children and young people aged 0–19 years.
These are the findings of a new study, led by researchers at the University of Oxford, and including researchers from the Department of Mathematics and MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College London, which published in the journal JAMA Network Open.
Until now, it had been unclear how the burden of deaths from COVID-19 compared with other leading causes of deaths in children and young people, so the researchers investigated this using data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention databases.
Covid Is Still Deadlier for Patients Than Flu by Jason Gale / BNN Bloomberg
Covid-19 isn’t “just a flu,” with a study of hospital patients finding that the virus was still 60% deadlier than influenza last winter.
Greater immunity against the coronavirus, better treatments, and different virus variants lowered Covid’s mortality risk to about 6% among adults hospitalized in the US last winter from 17-21% in 2020, researchers at the Clinical Epidemiology Center of the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System in Missouri found. That was still much higher than the flu’s death rate of 3.7%.
Covid-19 was the third leading cause of death in Australia last year by / The BMJ
Covid-19 became Australia’s third leading cause of death in 2022, after ischaemic heart disease and dementia, according to an analysis.
There were 20 200 more deaths in 2022 than would have been expected if the pandemic had not happened, with a total excess mortality of 12% for the year, found a review of excess deaths by Australia’s Actuaries Institute’s covid-19 mortality working group.
“This analysis shows the distressing grip covid-19 had on Australia during 2022. In the space of just one year, the number of deaths significantly increased in our country,” said Elayne Grace, chief executive of the Actuaries Institute.
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!
Thank you for your work. While Rome burns and our governments fiddle away, we need people like you to bring the truth into the collective consciousness.