3 ms·
How cute - you think that "long covid" is something specific to covid-19. One thing that covid-19 has shown is that the public health community hasn't bothered
by anamax 5y ago
How cute - you think that "long covid" is something specific to covid-19.
One thing that covid-19 has shown is that the public health community hasn't bothered to work on flu since the 1940s, even though it kills 35-75k Americans a year and has so for decades if not longer.
You remember the flu. It's an essential part of the "you have to give us lots of money so we're ready for something like the Spanish flu" and yet, when covid-19/sars2 came long (a couple of years after sars1), "we" didn't know anything useful about coronavirus transmission.
One of the "Spanish Flu" stories told by the public health community is that one of the major outbreaks happened when a city had a parade to celebrate "beating" the flu. So, guess what the public health community said was a good thing during height of the pandemic. (To be fair, only the parades and demonstrations that the PHC liked were safe.)
Of course, the public health community's first instinct is to lie. They started with "masks aren't necessary for ordinary people" and then pivoted even though there was no new data either way. (And there's also the whole "vaccines can't be delivered in a year" thing.)
Note that the pre-Covid recommendation from WHO was no masks and no general lockdowns, but instead, "protect vulnerable subpopulations", which we knew at the beginning. Contrast that with what the public health community talked about. And no, there wasn't new data.
- briffle 5y agoI firmly believe that the whole "masks aren't necessary for ordinary people" was not based in any science at all, but because they were next to impossible to find, and they didn't want a panic. In my midsize town, with a 600 bed hospital, people (staff, patients, etc) were walking through the ER, and stealing whole boxes of N95 masks off of shelves. The hospital had to move them all to locked cabinets along with the addictive painkillers. They were almost completely out, and not able to get any more. There were literally states/hospitals organizing a purchase (at insane prices) only to have the feds come and seize the masks and end up with nothing.
- anamax 5y agoYes, medical folk wanted to get masks for medical folk (some of whom even know how to wear them) but "they didn't want a panic" is self-deception. They may have wanted that effect but that was not the likely result of such an announcement. That's because the public health community has been incompetent at best and typically self-defeating at messaging for decades. Unfortunately, pretty much everything other than self-evident statements out of the public health community has been good reason to think that the exact opposite is the right response. In this case, "don't panic" was best interpreted as "things are likely to go south, so urgent action is probably a good idea". "hey, don't hoard masks, we don't have enough for medical personnel" would have been more effective. As to the feds seizing masks, that was mostly the public health community doing the seizing.