New batch of Covid links
This is a dangerous time in the pandemic for people like me. Don’t forget us.
For the immunocompromised, covid fatigue poses a grave threat.
...I understand why anyone who is healthy, or better still, healthy and vaccinated, would be eager to let down their guard. Early data suggest omicron is less likely than other variants to lead to hospitalizations and deaths, particularly in immunized people. And who wants to live with pandemic restrictions for one second longer than they have to?
The problem with that calculus, though, is that it doesn’t account for everyone. As more and more people decide to just live with the virus, or even try to deliberately contract it to “get it over with,” the immunocompromised and other vulnerable populations are being forgotten....
Their neighbors called covid-19 a hoax. Can these ICU nurses forgive them?, from July 2021
For the nurses in the Appalachian highlands who risked their lives during the pandemic, it is as if they fought in a war no one acknowledges.
...Conspiracy theories about the pandemic and lies recited on social media - or at White House news conferences - had penetrated deep into their community. When refrigerated trailers were brought in to relieve local hospitals’ overflowing morgues, people said they were stage props. Agitated and unmasked relatives stood outside the ICU insisting that their intubated relatives only had the flu. Many believed the doctors and nurses hailed elsewhere for their sacrifices were conspiring to make money by falsifying covid-19 diagnoses....
When being unvaccinated means being locked out of public life
OSIGO, Italy - After many rounds of rules targeting the unvaccinated, the chamber musician’s new life is unrecognizable from the old. Claudio Ronco once performed all over Europe, but now he can’t even board a plane. He can’t check into a hotel, eat at restaurant or get a coffee at a bar. Most important, he can’t use the water taxis needed to get around Venice, his home for 30 years - a loss of mobility that recently prompted him to gather up two of his prized cellos, lock up his Venetian apartment and retreat with his wife to a home owned by his in-laws one hour away in the hills....
What lockdown took from my parents Covid restrictions stole their right to choose
In the uneasy, bright days of the first lockdown of 2020, my father remembered 1946, and his own father setting off on the train from Wallingford to London to debrief Admiral Dönitz, Hitler’s successor for the last days of the Reich.
I was impressed. I knew Henry was in Naval Intelligence, but not at this level. Was my grandad M, then?
‘Well,” said my father, “Not M. A few letters back from that. Maybe H. He could speak German, was the point.”...
(thanks to
lindahoyland for the link!)
Hospitals Are in Serious Trouble Omicron is inundating a health-care system that was already buckling under the cumulative toll of every previous surge.
...Here, then, is the most important difference about this surge: It comes on the back of all the prior ones. COVID’s burden is additive. It isn’t reflected just in the number of occupied hospital beds, but also in the faltering resolve and thinning ranks of the people who attend those beds. “This just feels like one wave too many,” Ranney said. The health-care system will continue to pay these costs long after COVID hospitalizations fall. Health-care workers will know, but most other people will be oblivious-until they need medical care and can’t get it....
...“We have a lot of chronically ill people in the U.S., and it’s like all of those people are now coming into the hospital at the same time,” said Vineet Arora, a hospitalist in Illinois. “Some of it is for COVID, and some is with COVID, but it’s all COVID. At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter.” (COVID patients also need to be isolated, which increases the burden on hospitals regardless of the severity of patients’ symptoms.)
Omicron’s main threat is its extreme contagiousness. It is infecting so many people that even if a smaller proportion need hospital care, the absolute numbers are still enough to saturate the system. It might be less of a threat to individual people, but it’s disastrous for the health-care system that those individuals will ultimately need....
The Worst of the Omicron Wave Could Still Be Coming A long descent from a peak in cases could exact a larger toll than even Omicron’s blistering ascent.
...What we can say is that the higher a wave crests, the longer and more confusing the path to the bottom will be. We need to prepare for the possibility that this wave could have an uncomfortably long tail-or at least a crooked one. “I do think the decline is unlikely to be as steep as the rise,” Saad Omer, an epidemiologist at Yale, told me....
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