I’m sorry but I can’t let this go. I wondered out loud the other night about the ethics of not preventing transmission of a novel virus in children. Then these heat maps brought to light that less privileged kids are the ones that are by far most exposed by this calculated risk.
And honestly, any doctor that advocates for opening schools in unsafe circumstances with uncontrolled community transmission needs to take a hard look at these heat maps first and consider checking the bias afforded to them by their privilege.
This is an example of how “socio-economic determinants of health” happen.
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It’s come to my attention that some leaders of Western countries, and @francoislegault, still haven’t understood that herd immunity is achieved through vaccines, not infection, and are dangerously subjecting their citizens to Great Barrington ideology. A thread. 🧵
Some background on The Great Barrington Declaration. GBD proposes a focused approach “to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk.”
I can see why this ideology is attractive to politicians, among others. Not only can people at “minimal risk” live their lives normally and run the economy, they’re also framed as silent heroes that are exposing themselves in order to protect “the herd.” How noble.
Oh this makes me sad. A wonderful hospital where patients are no longer safe. Most of their covid patients caught it at the hospital. Because it’s *airborne* !!!! Why isn’t a situation like this being treated like an emergency? Get engineers in there! Give HCWs appropriate PPE!
This hospital is located in the east.
So to recap, there’s:
-⬆️ transmission in schools
- which = ⬆️ community transmission
- which = ⬆️ sick adults & HCWs
- which = a hospital with several outbreaks
- which = more sick patients & HCWs
- which is a risk Legault is willing to take
Excellent thread on @profSBVA’s study. I think the most important thing she did here was look at different areas of Montreal individually. This is so important. She showed us the glaring inequity of the “calculated risk” to open schools in unsafe circumstances.
We’ve known since the first wave that covid doesn’t affect us all equally. Lower socioeconomic and racialized neighborhoods are disproportionately affected. Montreal and Toronto both put out reports about it.
It turns out that school openings in the second wave have also worsened the pandemic unequally, disproportionately affecting those same neighborhoods that got the worst of it in the first wave.