sonia | Siderea recommends: Mask up now (Reply)

siderea recommends: If for some reason you stopped masking everywhere, now would be an excellent time to resume masking, and use a N95/KN95 or better.

You may remember her excellent posts in 2018 telling us all about the flu pandemic 100 years before, and then in 2019 and 2020, keeping track of "novel coronavirus" news and giving good advice like "stock up on groceries and supplies, pandemics move slowly and then very very fast."

Her post is fairly long because it contains extensive quotes. One from a hospital administrator in Tulsa, Oklahoma saying that they're slammed with all the usual suspects (flu, RSV, Covid) plus a new mystery illness that acts like Covid but all tests are negative. Many schools and school districts, mainly across the southern US, are suspending classes or going remote because of illness.

Relatedly, Five years of the COVID-19 pandemic: An interview with Dr. Arijit Chakravarty by Benjamin Mateus at the World Socialist Web Site, December 30, 2024. Lots of concrete scientific information about Covid's effects and how we could have (could still!) handle it better.

This is a difficult virus from a public health perspective, but public health couldn’t have handled it worse. Although it remains a solvable problem, the way it was addressed has undermined the ability of public health to do anything useful at this point, given the current leadership and controls over public health as they stand. They are doing nothing except reminding us to wash our hands and not eat raw eggs.