Public Health

Universal SARS-CoV-2 Testing Is The Answer To Social Distancing

May 25, 2020 By Milton Packer, MedPage Today Educate! COVID-19, Physical distancing, Public Health, Reopen Economy

The U.S. has squandered its most important opportunity. Much of the nation implemented lockdowns or "stay-at-home" orders, which slowed the spread of the virus but had important social and economic consequences. The implementation of the lockdowns made perfect sense as an emergency measure, and it undoubtedly saved lives. However, the whole idea of imposing a lockdown is to buy time until the infrastructure for universal testing and the quarantine of infected people and their contacts can be implemented. This has simply not happened. As far as I know, there is no realistic possibility that the U.S. can implement universal testing, contact tracing, and selective isolation of high-risk individuals in the foreseeable future.

What We Know So Far: Dispelling The Myths About COVID19

May 18, 2020 Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, Clearing the FOG. Podcast COVID-19, Health Care, Public Health, Reopen Economy

As we get close to two months of quarantine to stop the spread of COVID19 and the government has failed to put in place both public health infrastructure to effectively control the pandemic and economic support to see people through it financially, pressure is building to end it. In addition to the protests against the restrictions on movement and businesses, people are starting to question the rationale behind measures such as wearing masks, quarantining and vaccines. This is being fueled by a few people who are pushing unsubstantiated claims that are causing confusion. We speak with Dr. Andy Coates, a practicing physician in Albany, New York who also teaches evidence-based medicine, about what we know so far about the new SARS-CoV2 virus that is causing COVID19.

We Don’t Have To Choose Between Our Health And The Economy

May 17, 2020 Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers, Popular Resistance. Newsletter COVID-19, General Strike, Public Health, Reopen Economy, Wildcat strikes

The United States is at a critical moment in the COVID-crisis. This week, the nation is likely to surpass 100,000 deaths and new hotspots in the south and midwest are developing. Forty-two states have either started “reopening” their economies or imminently plan to do so without putting in place essential public health measures to prevent the spread of the virus. As of May 7, more than half of the states that had either reopened or planned to do so (30 at the time) have seen an increase in case counts or positive tests. Public health experts are predicting another round of mass illness and deaths. President Trump, whose political future is tied to the pandemic and economic collapse, has been encouraging protests demanding the reopening of the economy.

Pandemic: Protecting Public Health And The Right To Free Speech And Assembly

May 16, 2020 By Norman Siegel and Steven Hyman, Law.com. Organize! Civil Rights, Free Speech, Protest, Public Health

New Yorkers are allowed and encouraged to go out in the street with masks and stay at least 6 feet apart, as long as it is to stand in line to go shopping or to sit in a park, but if they are adhering to those requirements and they say something about an issue of public concern (similar to what members of Reclaim Pride did) that speech will make the speaker subject to arrest on the specious basis that speech is a public health risk. Banning that speech/protest while permitting the same activity without speech is unconstitutional. The president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association recently wrote to the police commissioner stating that: “This week the mayor announced an end to public protests in the city….the SBA believes that such a sweeping prohibition against the rights embodied by the First Amendment is glaringly unconstitutional.”

Trump’s ‘Reopening’ Is A Red Herring

May 15, 2020 Sarah Lazare, In These Times. Educate! COVID-19, Public Health, Reopen Economy, Trump

When President Trump, Republican leaders, right-wing think tanks and billionaire CEOs aggressively push to send people back to work before the coronavirus is contained, this is not a “reopening.” It’s the opposite: an unraveling of the conditions that we need to safely and sustainably reopen our society. While the red herring of a “reopening” has dominated news cycles and Trump administration press conferences, the United States has moved ever further away from what we all desperately seek: a point at which this all ends, and it’s safe to go to the library, stroll maskless through a park, eat dinner with a loved one, and go to work without fear. The Right doesn’t own the “reopening” terrain—it has forfeited it by barreling down a road that leads to mass death, suffering, and more and more closures down the road.

To Re-Open Safely We Need A ‘Health Force’ Of Disease Detectives

May 14, 2020 By Sandy Smith-Nonini, PhD, Portside. Create! COVID-19, Pandemic, Public Health, Reopen Economy

Conservative governors are now openly at odds with epidemiologists as plans move ahead for more than half the states to loosen social distancing and permit many businesses to re-open this month despite none of them meeting White House Coronavirus Taskforce guidelines. Unlike re-openings in China, Hong Kong and South Korea where new cases fell rapidly after aggressive containment efforts, the United States, with nearly 1.4 million cases and over 81,000 COVID-19 deaths (as of May 11), must follow a different model. Many critics blame the Trump Administration’s laggard scale-up of testing for the dilemma. But studies of past emerging disease epidemics have taught us that testing alone will not prevent new outbreaks. To re-open the economy we must undertake the most massive effort to trace and isolate new infections in history.

Physicians Demonstrate Support For Targeted Health Department Director

May 4, 2020 Jane Morice, Cleveland.com. Resist! COVID-19, Ohio, Public Health, Reopen Economy

Columbus, Ohio - The Physicians Action Network held a socially distanced demonstration Sunday at the Ohio Statehouse, showing their support for Ohio Department of Health Director Dr. Amy Acton. The demonstration comes one day after another small group gathered outside Acton’s home in the Columbus suburbs, lamenting the state’s stay-at-home order and pushing for the state to re-open in full. About 25 physicians donned their scrubs and lab coats Sunday and stood a safe distance apart as a show of support for Acton, a video posted on the Physicians Action Network Facebook page shows. In the video, one masked physician - Anita Somani, an OB-GYN based in Columbus - notes that many doctors are in similar positions to those protesting the stay-at-home order that’s kept hundreds of thousands of Ohioans out of work for weeks. Not all doctors work in hospitals, and some own small businesses too.

A Federal Jobs Program For Contact Tracing

May 3, 2020 Dayton Martindale, In These Times. Create! COVID-19, Pandemic, Public Health, Worker Rights and Jobs

As of last Thursday, 26.5 million Americans had filed for unemployment in a five-week span, as businesses not deemed essential are scaling back or shuttering entirely. Yet perhaps the most essential work of all remains stubbornly undone. To safely reopen the economy without new waves of infection and death, virtually everyone who has written on the topic has been repeating the same urgent recommendation for months: The United States must ramp up testing, and with it employ a robust program of “contact tracing.” That is, we must reach out to those who test positive, determine who they have been in close contact with, alert these contacts that they may have been exposed, and ensure that these contacts are able to effectively quarantine. While technological tools play a role in this, providing personalized support will take people power.

Farewell To The God Of Plague

May 3, 2020 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Educate! China, Communisim, COVID-19, Public Health

Old diseases of plague and cholera have largely been overcome in China thanks to the improvement in the standard of living; but new ailments have arrived, and some of these have been devastating. The novel coronavirus is one of these, and it has been the author of the Great Lockdown. The first real evidence of the virus came to the doctors of Wuhan in late December; they reported it to their hospital administrators, who then told their national health commissions; within days, the Chinese government informed the World Health Organization. Weeks into the outbreak, the government shut down Hubei Province, including the city of Wuhan, and mobilised both state resources and public action to break the chain of infection.

Coronavirus Shakes The Conceit Of ‘American Exceptionalism’

April 25, 2020 Calvin Woodward, AP News. Educate! American Exceptionalism, Hospitals, Pandemic, Public Health

Washington, DC - What if the real “invisible enemy” is the enemy from within — America’s very institutions? When the coronavirus pandemic came from distant lands to the United States, it was met with cascading failures and incompetencies by a system that exists to prepare, protect, prevent and cut citizens a check in a national crisis. The molecular menace posed by the new coronavirus has shaken the conceit of “American exceptionalism” like nothing big enough to see with your own eyes. A nation with unmatched power, brazen ambition and aspirations through the arc of history to be humanity’s “shining city upon a hill” cannot come up with enough simple cotton swabs despite the wartime manufacturing and supply powers assumed by President Donald Trump.

How China Broke The Chain Of Infection

April 18, 2020 By Vijay Prashad, Weiyan Zhu and Du Xiaojun, Independent Media Institute. Create! China, COVID-19, Pandemic, Public Health

On March 31, 2020, a group of scientists from around the world—from Oxford University to Beijing Normal University—published an important paper in Science. This paper—“An Investigation of Transmission Control Measures During the First 50 Days of the COVID-19 Epidemic in China”—proposes that if the Chinese government had not initiated the lockdown of Wuhan and the national emergency response, then there would have been 744,000 additional confirmed COVID-19 cases outside Wuhan. “Control measures taken in China,” the authors argue, “potentially hold lesso[n]s for other countries around the world.” In the World Health Organization’s February report after a visit to China, the team members wrote, “In the face of a previously unknown virus, China has rolled out perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history.”

The United States Is Where COVID-19 Deaths Are Being Under-reported

April 7, 2020 Margaret Flowers, Popular Resistance. Educate! China, COVID-19, Deaths, Pandemic, Public Health

When the COVID-19 pandemic started, China responded quickly by reporting the novel disease to the World Health Organization and taking steps to identify and study the virus. Within a matter of weeks, it was clear that the virus was a serious public health matter. China then mobilized its resources and took an aggressive public health approach to contain the spread and care for those who became ill. For this, the US chastised China, calling it "authoritarian" and "draconian," instead of learning from the success of China. So far, China has controlled the virus, keeping the total number of cases below 82,000 and the number of deaths in the low 3,000's. Today, they are easing the quarantine, opening businesses back up and slowly returning to normal activity. The World Health Organization sent a mission to China that commended the government for its actions.

Public Health Experts: Single-Payer Systems Coping With Coronavirus More Effectively Than For-Profit Model

March 20, 2020 By Jake Johnson, Nationofchange.org Educate! Coronavirus COVID-19, Public Health, Single-Payer

As the coronavirus pandemic places extraordinary strain on national healthcare systems around the world, public health experts are making the case that countries with universal single-payer systems have thus far responded more efficiently and effectively to the outbreak than nations like the United States...

No Need To Wait For Pandemics: The Public Health Case For Criminal Justice Reform

March 18, 2020 By Peter Wagner and Emily Widra, Prisonpolicy.org Create! Coronavirus, COVID-19, Criminal Justice, Pandemic, Public Health, Reform

The United States incarcerates a greater share of its population than any other nation in the world, so it is urgent that policymakers think about how a viral pandemic would impact people in prisons, in jails, on probation, and on parole, and to take seriously the public health case for criminal justice reform.

We Need Strong Public Health Care To Contain The Global Corona Pandemic

March 14, 2020 Staff, Vivasalud.be Create! Coronavirus, COVID-19, Health Care, Public Health

The corona virus (COVID-19) outbreak has spread from China to over a hundred countries in less than two months. As of March 10th, confirmed cases were above 100.000 and deaths over 4.000. Now is the time to take stock and to assess the responses of different countries to the outbreak so far.

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