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Public Health

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.

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

May 25, 2020 By Milton Packer, MedPage Today , , ,
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. , , ,
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. , , , ,
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. , , ,
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. , , ,
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. , , ,
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. , , ,
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. , , ,
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. , , ,
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.
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