"More than 1,000 healthcare workers from across the state signed an open letter urging proactive COVID-19 mitigation measures, including enforcing mask mandates in classrooms and expanding testing sites."
"Continued inaction by our hospital leaders and lawmakers will be viewed by HCWs as informed decision to ignore health and safety of the communities you serve and an attack on those sacrificing their health and safety to care for their community,"
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"The letter calls for lawmakers to establish indoor mask requirements, increase access to testing, provide free, high-quality masks to the public and increase funding for air filtration systems in schools and businesses.
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“Patients are waiting in the waiting rooms, sleeping on the floors, sleeping outside the hospital doors, and sometimes, we’ve had events where people are having cardiac arrest, or decompensating and getting very sick and even dying in the waiting rooms”
“Living with the virus” has failed. The wishful thinking, the regression to allowing biology to dominate society, the idea of normality of widespread disease has not worked. No way to justify the damage as health, economy and freedom are lost. Its advocates should reassess. 1/
Let us stop justifying the failure by claiming nothing else was possible, that we couldn’t have known, that we couldn’t have succeeded anyway. It is not becoming of our identities, it is not respectful of our ancestors, it is not a way to build our futures. 2/
Society, through medical systems, transportation systems, manufacturing, construction of homes, industries, cities, and scientific knowledge, links us in a shared destiny, MLK's "inescapable network of mutuality". Together, we transcend individual biological destiny. 3/
Context is missing and the information provided in this tweet is misleading: It takes time for people to progress to severe disease. Omicron cases in this study have an average observation period only of 5.5 days, compared to 15.8 days for Delta. 1/
The study quoted treats this using a dynamic statistical (Cox) model but this doesn’t fix the limited data availability, whose analysis is limited to 14 days after infection. 2/
Essentially all Omicron hospitalizations start less than 14 days before study ends, limiting observation of severe cases & mortality, which generally take longer—less than 1 in 10 expected Delta deaths occur during these 14 days (14 day mortality ~0.07%, Nov US mortality .85%) 3/
Emanuel, Osterholm, Gounder (EOG) propose that, in contrast to a zero COVID policy, we surrender to the pandemic, setting an acceptable level of deaths as policy success.
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In an accompanying article Michales, Emanuel, and Bright propose this can be achieved by improved vaccination, testing, surveillance, masking, ventilation and distancing.
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Survivors of SARS-CoV-2 frequently experience lingering neurological symptoms: impairment in attention, concentration, speed of information processing and memory.
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This long-COVID cognitive syndrome shares many features with the syndrome of cancer therapy-related cognitive impairment (CRCI).
Neuroinflammation, and dysregulation of hippocampal neurogenesis is central to CRCI.
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