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Public Health

Reopening Schools: We Don’t Have To Descend Into COVID Hell

August 16, 2020 Steve Miller, Rosemary Lee and E.B. Shaw, HamptonThink.org. , , ,
With Corona virus cases spiking across the country, America is on the verge of forcing millions of people into extreme danger. Suddenly, everyone from CEOs, the President, state governors, and the corporate media are calling for schools to open “to save the economy”. No country has tried to open schools with the virus spreading like here in the US. We are currently in a massive wave of surging cases in 40 states. There are not enough tests or testing. How do you open schools if you can’t test and trace? There’s no way that you can keep a school safe from coronavirus if the virus is raging out of control in the community where the school is located.

Testing And Medical Insurance: A Profitable Disaster

August 15, 2020 Sara Founders, Workers.org. , , ,
In the midst of a capitalist crash and an out-of-control health crisis, two mega-industries that bear a heavy burden of responsibility for the health disaster are reporting soaring profits. “The nation’s leading health insurers are experiencing an embarrassment of profits,” reported the New York Times Aug. 6. “Anthem, Humana and United Health Group second quarter earnings are double what they were a year ago.” The U.S. has the world’s highest number of COVID-19 cases, over 5 million, and the highest number of deaths. In addition, millions of laid-off workers are losing health insurance.

Racism Is A Public Health Crisis

August 2, 2020 Christine Vestal, Pew Trusts. , , ,
Being black is bad for your health. And pervasive racism is the cause. That’s the conclusion of multiple public health studies over more than three decades. “We do know that health inequities at their very core are due to racism,” said Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association. “There’s no doubt about that.” More recently, research has shown that racial health disparities don’t just affect poor African Americans, but they also cross class lines, Benjamin said. “As a black man, my status, my suit and tie don’t protect me.”

Humanity Protests Against The Crimes Of Death

August 1, 2020 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. , , ,
On 23 July, World Health Organisation (WHO) Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced that the world now has 15 million people infected by COVID-19. ‘The pandemic has disrupted the lives of billions of people. Many have been at home for months’, he said. The trauma of the Great Lockdown is taking a serious psycho-social toll. ‘It’s completely understandable that people want to get on with their lives’, Dr. Ghebreyesus said. ‘But we will not go back to the “old normal”. The pandemic has already changed the way we live our lives.

Pandemic Worsens, Resistance Will Follow

July 28, 2020 John Clarke, Counterfire. , , ,
Two recent developments in the US seem to capture just how the destructive, profit-driven irrationality of capitalism renders it incapable of effectively containing the present global pandemic. On July 10, the US recorded a staggering 70,000 new coronavirus cases in a single day and Florida saw 11,433 cases, with 435 more people hospitalised. The next day, the reopening of “The Most Magical Place on Earth,” Disney World, began in that state. Admission tickets for the four theme parks are already sold out for the month of July.

Homelessness In The COVID-19 Era

July 27, 2020 Rajan Menon, Tom Dispatch. , , ,
The novel SARS-CoV-2 has roared through the American landscape leaving physical, emotional, and economic devastation in its wake. By early July, known infections in this country exceeded three million, while deaths topped 135,000. Home to just over 4% of the global population, the United States accounts for more than a quarter of all fatalities from Covid-19, the disease produced by the coronavirus. Amid a recent surge of infections, especially across the Sun Belt, which Vice President Mike Pence typically denied was even occurring, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that the daily total of infections had reached a record 60,000.

LA County OKs Coronavirus ‘Health Councils’ To Watch Worker Safety

July 23, 2020 Daily News. , , ,
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday, July 21, approved a proposal to facilitate worker-led “health councils” to monitor business compliance with public health orders. Supervisors Sheila Kuehl and Mark Ridley-Thomas co-authored the motion recommending that the county reach out to labor leaders and business representatives and quickly come up with effective ways to monitor compliance with mandates to wear facial coverings, install protective shields and disinfect workplaces. Essentially, the workers themselves would monitor conditions within their workplace, Kuehl said, noting recent reports of “devastating” coronavirus outbreaks.

Investigation Into The Erosion Of Public Health

July 4, 2020 The Associated Press and Kaiser Health News. , , ,
Local and state public health departments in the United States work to ensure that people have healthy water to drink, their restaurants don’t serve contaminated food and outbreaks of infectious diseases don’t spread. Those departments now find themselves at the forefront of fighting the coronavirus pandemic. But years of budget and staffing cuts have left them unprepared to face the worst health crisis in a century. KHN, also known as Kaiser Health News, and The Associated Press sought to understand the scale of the cuts and how the decades-long starvation of public health departments by federal, state and local governments has affected the system meant to protect the nation’s health. Six takeaways from the KHN-AP investigation.

Global Experts Alarmed At Signs US Has ‘Given Up’ Fight To Stop COVID-19

June 20, 2020 Julia Conley, Commondreams. , , ,
Global public health experts are looking on in "alarm and disbelief" as the U.S. economy reopens even as Covid-19 case numbers continue to rise in a number of states, with President Donald Trump signaling he has no intention of calling for more economic shutdowns regardless of the outcome. As The Washington Post reported Friday, newspapers across Europe have recently published articles and editorials expressing shock at the Trump administration's approach to the pandemic.  "U.S. Increasingly Accepts Rising Covid-19 Numbers," read a headline this week in the Swiss paper Neue Zürcher Zeitung. While images of Americans crowding onto beaches and other public places may have given the international community the impression that the public have grown impatient with social distancing, a survey by the Associated Press last month showed 83% of Americans were concerned lifting lockdown orders too quickly would lead to more coronavirus infections.

Health Workers March To Expose Racism As A Health Crisis

June 11, 2020 Hannah Weinberger, Crosscut. , , ,
Seattle, WA - Dr. Nkeirika Banda’s phone was vibrating. “I’m scared to check it,” said the HealthPoint family medicine resident. Her mom, who lives in Zambia, is a worrier — and Banda had just sent her family a photo from the intersection of James Street and Sixth Avenue, where she was supporting the Seattle’s Doctors for Justice rally against racism and police brutality. “So I obviously didn't tell her that I was coming [to the protest],” Banda said. Banda and thousands of other health care professionals gathered at 10 a.m. June 6 at Harborview Medical Center in solidarity with Seattle’s Black community.

Study: Emergency COVID-19 Measures Prevented More Than 500 Million Infections

June 9, 2020 By Edward Lempinen, Berkeley News. , , ,
“The last several months have been extraordinarily difficult, but through our individual sacrifices, people everywhere have each contributed to one of humanity’s greatest collective achievements,” Hsiang said. “I don’t think any human endeavor has ever saved so many lives in such a short period of time. There have been huge personal costs to staying home and canceling events, but the data show that each day made a profound difference. By using science and cooperating, we changed the course of history.”

Medical Workers Die-In To Protest Police Brutality

June 7, 2020 Ben Verde, Brooklyn Paper. , , ,
New York - Hundreds of medical workers at SUNY Downstate staged a die-in on Thursday to protest police brutality and the health disparities that affect black Americans.  Emergency medical residents and other hospital staff kneeled or lay on the ground for eight minutes and 46 seconds — the amount of time former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin knelt on the neck of 46-year-old George Floyd, killing him.  “I can stand here as a brown, female, immigrant physician with a loud voice — and I can do this because of the sacrifices made by black people a long time ago,” said Dr. Smruti Desai, an emergency medical resident. “It is our turn to fight for them.”  While hundreds of staff at the central Brooklyn hospital — which serves a predominately black patient population — kneeled or lay on the ground, speakers read aloud the names of victims of police violence.

Public Health Experts Say Pandemic Is Why Protests Must Continue

June 7, 2020 Shannon Palus, Slate.com. , , ,
There has been a lot of concern on how the protests over the past several days may produce a wave of coronavirus cases. This discussion is often framed as though the pandemic and protests in support of black lives are wholly separate issues, and tackling one requires neglecting the other. But some public health experts are pushing people to understand the deep connection between the two. Facing a slew of media requests asking about how protests might be a risk for COVID-19 transmission, a group of infectious disease experts at the University of Washington, with input from other colleagues, drafted a collective response. In an open letter published Sunday, they write that “protests against systemic racism, which fosters the disproportionate burden of COVID-19 on Black communities and also perpetuates police violence, must be supported.”

Protesting Racism Versus Risking COVID-19

June 4, 2020 Bill Chappell, NPR. , , ,
Mass protests that have erupted over police brutality toward black people in America are raising concerns about the risk of spreading the coronavirus. But some health experts, even as they urge caution, said they support the demonstrations — because racism also poses a dire health threat. Tens of thousands of people, masked and unmasked, have thronged the streets of Minneapolis, Atlanta, Louisville, Ky., and other cities in the week since George Floyd died after a white Minneapolis police officer kneeled on his neck. They are the largest public gatherings in the U.S. since the pandemic forced widespread shutdowns, and many local officials warned of a possible spike in new cases in one or two weeks.

Public Health, COVID-19 And Recovery

May 31, 2020 Tim Anderson, AH Tribune. , , ,
In all epidemics, there are some principles which determine how well communities and nations will respond, how long the crisis will last and how soon there will be recovery. We can already draw some lessons from the very big differences between particular countries in the COVID-19 pandemic, in particular why some wealthy nations like the UK and the USA are amongst the hardest hit. Although the numbers infected are still rising and the impact has not yet peaked, in most countries, we are entitled to ask: why have some countries controlled infections and minimized deaths better than others? This question, I suggest, leads us to consider principles of public health systems, of health planning and of broader social coherence.
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