This is one of the best articles explaining our current situation. It's good because it illustrates how we could end up in such a long term mess but seeming without any resistance. I
t would be interesting to read an article like this explaining all the lies they told us along the way.
Something else I am interested in is that it seemed like they (within one week) swapped out news of Covid and replaced it with news of the Ukraine war. I'd like to know if that really did take place in that short time period.
What's your actual proposal? Specifics, please - and estimates of the cost of what you want to happen vs. the benefit you think it will provide.
(in context of a globally endemic, highly transmissible, mostly mild virus that often shows no symptoms, for which tests often give false negatives, for which current vaccines rarely prevent infection or transmission)
I wrote an article about the measures taken for super-rich people at DAVOS earlier this year, and that's a great place to start. The most critical thing we need to do is introduce new standards of indoor air quality, meaning better ventilation, HEPA filtration, and CO2 monitoring. Kids in schools are routinely subject to CO2 levels above 2, 3, even 4 thousand ppm right now, even though CO2 levels above 1000 ppm is shown to slow cognitive processing. HEPA filters remove not only viruses, but bacteria, fungus, pollution, allergens, dust, and more - a wonderful thing to help keep kids healthy and learning!
Cleaning indoor air is no different from having good food safety standards or water filtration. We ABSOLUTELY have the tools to do it, the government simply doesn't want to spend the money to keep people safe. Far UVC is another new technology-zaps germs in the air- that is being explored. They're still studying how safe it would be for long-term day to day use, but for now, implementing it at things like parties, conferences, weddings, and other large gatherings would be awesome.
Next, real public education - instead of constant lies and misinformation- about how COVID can harm you, meaning honest communication about post-COVID organ damage and risk of heart attacks and strokes, explaining that Long COVID can be highly debilitating, is a risk of each infection, and can quite literally ruin your life. This public health education also needs to include very VOCAL explanations of what, exactly, airborne means, and why surgical masks are not sufficient to protect you, why social distancing doesn't work, why an empty room can still have COVID in the air if it's not well ventilated, etc.
Then, FREE and I mean FREE vaccines, treatments, high quality masks for all who want them and tests, and I mean home-PCR quality tests like Luciras. Reinstate quality monitoring and reporting and keep people informed of surges instead of trying to bury the information as much as possible. Also, prioritize new, ACCURATE, cheap home tests so people can stop rolling the dice on our as-of-now pretty likely to give false negative RATS. Also, universal paid sick leave is a given and should never have been controversial. Do you really want to go to a restaurant and have a sick person wait on you? Do you want your Uber driver to have the flu? Do you want your coworker to be hacking up a lung next to you in the conference room. Oh! and related: the normalization of remote work for any job that can be done remotely. This also saves transit costs, has a tremendous ecological benefit, allows for more flexibility for moms and disabled people, opens up downtown space for housing, and modernizes an antiquated system.
Lastly, full airborne infection control in hospitals and healthcare settings is a given and obvious. It's a legal and ethical obligation for medical practitioners not to harm vulnerable patients. Yes, that includes high quality respirators in healthcare. I would also advocate masking required on airplanes as people are cheek to cheek for hours and frankly it's just gross. Other than that, I actually am not advocating full mask mandates all the time everywhere for everyone. I think if people have the information - that each COVID infection leads to a high risk of long-term health problems, and that continues to compound- AND we have universal clean air that drastically reduces the transmission of each infected person, leading to bringing down the social burden of COVID overall significantly- we will see lots of voluntary masking, drastically reduced cases, and much lower risks for one-way masking in public.
In terms of cost/benefit, it's not any different from climate. You can refuse to get off fossil fuels because it's "expensive" but the cost of not getting off fossil fuels in terms of disasters, shortages, migration, destruction and extinction are quite literally incalculable. If you believe the science, you know that continuing apace will ultimately destroy habitability of this planet. With COVID, as you can see in the Canadian study cited above but also other studies like the ones done by Dr. Al-Aly, people are at higher and higher risk of disabling illness with each infection. Mass disabling the population to the point you no longer have workers is infinitely more expensive than just uhhhhhhhh making ventilation less shitty and testing people for disease. And of course, costs like constant illness leave, staff shortages, flight delays, skyrocketing medical debt, homelessness, workforce reduction, inflation, etc, will continue to worsen. We live in a time of very fantastic technological possibilities, and our failure to control this speaks only to our lack of ambition and imagination, not to our technical limitations.
This is one of the best articles explaining our current situation. It's good because it illustrates how we could end up in such a long term mess but seeming without any resistance. I
t would be interesting to read an article like this explaining all the lies they told us along the way.
Something else I am interested in is that it seemed like they (within one week) swapped out news of Covid and replaced it with news of the Ukraine war. I'd like to know if that really did take place in that short time period.
More articles please Julia!
What's your actual proposal? Specifics, please - and estimates of the cost of what you want to happen vs. the benefit you think it will provide.
(in context of a globally endemic, highly transmissible, mostly mild virus that often shows no symptoms, for which tests often give false negatives, for which current vaccines rarely prevent infection or transmission)
I wrote an article about the measures taken for super-rich people at DAVOS earlier this year, and that's a great place to start. The most critical thing we need to do is introduce new standards of indoor air quality, meaning better ventilation, HEPA filtration, and CO2 monitoring. Kids in schools are routinely subject to CO2 levels above 2, 3, even 4 thousand ppm right now, even though CO2 levels above 1000 ppm is shown to slow cognitive processing. HEPA filters remove not only viruses, but bacteria, fungus, pollution, allergens, dust, and more - a wonderful thing to help keep kids healthy and learning!
Cleaning indoor air is no different from having good food safety standards or water filtration. We ABSOLUTELY have the tools to do it, the government simply doesn't want to spend the money to keep people safe. Far UVC is another new technology-zaps germs in the air- that is being explored. They're still studying how safe it would be for long-term day to day use, but for now, implementing it at things like parties, conferences, weddings, and other large gatherings would be awesome.
Next, real public education - instead of constant lies and misinformation- about how COVID can harm you, meaning honest communication about post-COVID organ damage and risk of heart attacks and strokes, explaining that Long COVID can be highly debilitating, is a risk of each infection, and can quite literally ruin your life. This public health education also needs to include very VOCAL explanations of what, exactly, airborne means, and why surgical masks are not sufficient to protect you, why social distancing doesn't work, why an empty room can still have COVID in the air if it's not well ventilated, etc.
Then, FREE and I mean FREE vaccines, treatments, high quality masks for all who want them and tests, and I mean home-PCR quality tests like Luciras. Reinstate quality monitoring and reporting and keep people informed of surges instead of trying to bury the information as much as possible. Also, prioritize new, ACCURATE, cheap home tests so people can stop rolling the dice on our as-of-now pretty likely to give false negative RATS. Also, universal paid sick leave is a given and should never have been controversial. Do you really want to go to a restaurant and have a sick person wait on you? Do you want your Uber driver to have the flu? Do you want your coworker to be hacking up a lung next to you in the conference room. Oh! and related: the normalization of remote work for any job that can be done remotely. This also saves transit costs, has a tremendous ecological benefit, allows for more flexibility for moms and disabled people, opens up downtown space for housing, and modernizes an antiquated system.
Lastly, full airborne infection control in hospitals and healthcare settings is a given and obvious. It's a legal and ethical obligation for medical practitioners not to harm vulnerable patients. Yes, that includes high quality respirators in healthcare. I would also advocate masking required on airplanes as people are cheek to cheek for hours and frankly it's just gross. Other than that, I actually am not advocating full mask mandates all the time everywhere for everyone. I think if people have the information - that each COVID infection leads to a high risk of long-term health problems, and that continues to compound- AND we have universal clean air that drastically reduces the transmission of each infected person, leading to bringing down the social burden of COVID overall significantly- we will see lots of voluntary masking, drastically reduced cases, and much lower risks for one-way masking in public.
In terms of cost/benefit, it's not any different from climate. You can refuse to get off fossil fuels because it's "expensive" but the cost of not getting off fossil fuels in terms of disasters, shortages, migration, destruction and extinction are quite literally incalculable. If you believe the science, you know that continuing apace will ultimately destroy habitability of this planet. With COVID, as you can see in the Canadian study cited above but also other studies like the ones done by Dr. Al-Aly, people are at higher and higher risk of disabling illness with each infection. Mass disabling the population to the point you no longer have workers is infinitely more expensive than just uhhhhhhhh making ventilation less shitty and testing people for disease. And of course, costs like constant illness leave, staff shortages, flight delays, skyrocketing medical debt, homelessness, workforce reduction, inflation, etc, will continue to worsen. We live in a time of very fantastic technological possibilities, and our failure to control this speaks only to our lack of ambition and imagination, not to our technical limitations.