Tag: Pandemic

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Coronavirus Update From New York City: April 7, 2022

I hope that all of my readers are safe, regardless of where you are.

I had a close brush with COVID-19 last week when I learned that I came into contact with someone who tested positive. Things were therefore a bit nervy for a few days because of worries that I would test positive, and in the process inconvenience both my own life and that of my immediate family. Thankfully, my tests have come back negative, so somehow, some way, I remain COVID-free. While I know I have taken a more cautious approach to the pandemic than many, it still remains somewhat of a mystery to me how I have been able to remain COVID-free to this point. Regardless, I am grateful that at least for now, I have dodged this virus.

Where I live, which is New York City, is seeing the BA.2 subvariant of the Omicron variant spreading. This is happening after we experienced some rapid declines in case counts between mid-January and mid-February, as the Omicron surge was subsiding. I don’t know if it’s time to panic quite yet, especially as it seems like there is a lot yet to learn about this subvariant. However, with medical experts continuing to urge vaccinations as the best way to protect yourself against BA.2,[1] it is rather unfortunate that my city exempted certain groups of people (local performers and athletes) from workplace vaccine requirements. After all, all this policy seems to have done as far as I can tell is muddle messaging around how important vaccinations are and empower the anti-vaccine crowd–the last things we need at a time when we need more people getting vaccine shots and boosters.

Speaking of certain requirements being loosened, a part of me wonders how much this increase is due to how transmissible BA.2 is and how much the increase has been due to the loosening of certain restrictions in recent weeks. As I reported in my COVID update post at the beginning of last month, some pandemic restrictions were being loosened here in New York City, so I can’t help but wonder if we’re now seeing the results of letting go of the pandemic before the pandemic is letting go of us.[2]

Those are the updates from my little corner of the world. As always, I welcome updates from others!

[1] https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/5-things-to-know-omicron

[2] Here’s my COVID update post from last month: https://blindinjusticeblog.com/2022/03/03/coronavirus-update-from-new-york-city-march-3-2022/

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American Health Care and Responding to the Long-Term Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic

With the Omicron variant having settled down, it seems like the “health care system” (putting that phrase in quotes because, in the words of a former journalist by the name of Walter Cronkite, I believe it is “neither healthy, caring, nor a system”[1]) can perhaps take a bit of a breather, at least until the next variant. If there is another catastrophic variant, that is, and I hope there won’t be one.

Yet, even if there isn’t another variant, health care systems around the world, including the one in the United States, will in a way be responding to the long-term impacts the pandemic has had on people for years, if not decades, to come. And I am concerned about the American health care system not giving people with said impacts the sort of health care that is required.

But first of all, who are the people with these long-term impacts?

Some of us will possibly be COVID long-haulers who will need physical health care. We are learning more about the long-haulers as we go along, but it may turn out that some will end up with long-term or even permanent impacts that will affect their daily lives due to neurological conditions,[2] among other things. Regardless, the long-haulers are a population that will be dealing with long-term impacts from COVID, quite possibly, long after the pandemic ends.

However, many more of us will be people who need mental health care of various kinds due to the emotional trauma that the circumstances of COVID have caused. A wide range of populations will need this mental health care in some way, shape, or form, ranging from family members who lost loved ones due to the pandemic, to hospital workers who have emotional trauma from working in hard-hit hospitals, to people whose personal economic fortunes turned completely upside down due to the pandemic and never recovered. Dealing with the effects of trauma can be lifelong, and as such, dealing with the effects of COVID-related trauma may also be lifelong.

I have no idea how many people will need COVID-related physical health care and how many will need COVID-related mental health care after the pandemic, but I’m guessing that it will be a sizeable number of people in the United States—perhaps in the hundreds of thousands, and perhaps even in the millions. What I do know is that there will likely be a lot of people who will need one or both things, and that if preparations are not made for that long-term reality now, people are going to be hurt quite badly (physically, emotionally, and otherwise) by how poorly prepared our health care system is, by how American health care has a nasty tendency to leave people either uncovered or undercovered for so many basic needs.

Nor do I know what preparing for such a reality may look like, as I am not a health care expert. Frankly, I’m not even sure if a lot of health care experts know what preparing for such a reality may look like, either. I’m not even sure if it’s possible for a health care “system” as broken as the one in the United States—a “system” where millions are uninsured, where millions more are denied coverage for so many basic needs, and where the politicians that could change this would rather keep the status quo then actually fix these problems—could ever be truly prepared for the potential enormity of caring for scars, both physical and emotional, that come from this pandemic. Possibly not. But if it is possible, those preparations need to happen, and happen now.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/74350-america-s-health-care-system-is-neither-healthy-caring-nor-a

[2] https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/boston-doctors-explain-long-covid-and-neurological-symptoms/2509459/

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Coronavirus Update From New York City: February 3, 2022

I hope all of my readers are remaining healthy and safe, regardless of where you live.

I thankfully continue to remain COVID-free. I am grateful for that because, to be honest, even among those I know who have “mild” symptoms, there can still be certain symptoms that linger for quite a few weeks after they first test positive. For example, I know of people who, even though they have mostly recovered from the virus, still have lingering coughs that they are so incredibly tired of. Even “mild” COVID is no fun, albeit it is nothing compared to landing in the hospital with the virus.

Where I live, cases continue to decrease, and the number per cases per 100,000 people is at its lowest level since right before the holidays. Such numbers (as well as numbers when it comes to the percentage of people testing positive) is still relatively high compared to where we have been at most other points of this pandemic, but it is relatively low compared to where we were at the peak of the Omicron surge.

Also important is the fact that hospital and ICU admissions are on the decline now. While such statistics are lagging indicators relative to the number of people who test positive, what has made this pandemic so scary on so many occasions is how it has had the ability to completely overwhelm hospitals with patients. In the case of where I live, hospitalizations were higher with this variant than with COVID last winter, though ICU admissions were lower than they were past winter.

Given the rate at which things are slowing down, in terms of the rate of infection, I will be scaling back my COVID update posts to about once a month again. The pandemic isn’t over so I’m not ready to end these posts entirely, but it seems like an appropriate time to scale my posts back again because there may not be too much for me to report for a little while.

That is pretty much it, as far as updates are concerned on my end. As always, I’m interested in hearing how others are doing.

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Highlighting the Lack of Care for the Immunocompromised During the COVID-19 Pandemic

It’s quite something that the pandemic started to get going in New York nearly two years ago, and yet I am still talking about it. Wow.

Anyway…

Just a couple of days before I published my previous regularly-scheduled Monday blog post, a bit of a firestorm erupted in the disability community when CDC Director Rochelle Walensky made a rather callous-sounding comment about people with comorbidities when replying to a question about whether we need to think about how we live with this virus: “The overwhelming number of deaths, over 75%, occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities, so really these are people who were unwell to begin with, and yes, really encouraging news. In the context of Omicron, this means not only to get your primary series, but to get your booster series, um, and yes, we’re really encouraged by these results.”[1]

The anger stemmed from the fact that Dr. Walensky regarded the high percentage of deaths coming from people with all these comorbidities being “encouraging news.” The most charitable view of this quote, in the context of the question asked, is that people with multiple comorbidities—some of the most vulnerable among us health-wise—are an afterthought when it comes to thinking about health policy in relation to the pandemic. I saw many who took an even less charitable view than what I did here. Regardless, in the aftermath of what she said, the anger resulted in a hashtag that went viral on social media: #MyDisabledLifeIsWorthy.

However, Dr. Walensky’s comments do not exist in a bubble. It’s only a microcosm of a larger issue: the lack of care for the immunocompromised during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Consider the fact that the main health policy for everyone, including those with compromised immune systems, is to get vaccinated, even though there is evidence that the vaccines are less effective for the immunocompromised than for others. Even in a study published a couple of months ago—before the more recent Omicron variant, which is better at evading vaccines than previous variants—it was showing that the vaccines were less effective for the immunocompromised than for the rest of the population.[2] Mind you, even for the immunocompromised, getting vaccinated is better than not getting vaccinated, but the study shows that vaccines have not provided the same level of protection to that population as to the rest of us. And yet the main health guidance, including for the immunocompromised, is to simply get vaccinated.

Then there’s the fact that there is a big push from some of our leaders to go back to work or school, even for the immunocompromised, amid this current Omicron surge in many parts of the country. Considering that vaccines are less effective for the immunocompromised than for the rest of us, and considering the push to get everyone to work and school (even said immunocompromised people) on top of all of that, it all sounds like a recipe for putting the lives of a whole group of people at risk, just for the sake of fulfilling the desire of certain other people or groups of people to get back to school or work. The lack of accommodations I have seen for those who are immunocompromised amid a pandemic that makes many of them so vulnerable, when it comes to schooling and work, goes to show the lack of care so many of us have for that population of people.

It would be all too easy, though, to simply point our fingers at government officials far away from where we are sitting and not look at ourselves and how our own actions can show a lack of care for the immunocompromised with this pandemic. Especially with this extremely contagious Omicron variant, every time we don’t mask up when we are in a crowd (a cloth mask by itself is not enough, by the way[3]), every time we only bring our masks up to our noses, and every time we make the decision to force our immunocompromised friends into a situation where they have to encounter large crowds are times we do not show adequate care for that population. The people I saw on a New York City subway train a few months ago who refused to wear masks even when begged to wear one by a fellow train rider who said that she was immunocompromised due to cancer came across as every bit as uncaring to such populations as Dr. Walensky did with her comment.

All these things I talk about show a complete lack of care for those who are immunocompromised during the COVID-19 pandemic. But what is the alternative?

The answer to this question, for me, is another question: What if our public health policy centered around doing all we can to protect the immunocompromised? It sounds like an action centered on protecting one particular group of people, but if one thinks about it, by doing all that we can to protect one of the populations most vulnerable to getting seriously ill or killed by COVID-19, we would, at least in some of our policies, be doing all we can to protect all populations from that same fate, by extension. Perhaps that is the approach to take, instead of the current approach to many things, which is to leave people with various health conditions off to the sides. An approach that, I must point out, is leading to hospital rates nationwide being the highest it has been in this entire pandemic.[4]

[1] You can large a large portion of the clip where Dr. Walensky said this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hVPz-A8auw

[2] https://www.breastcancer.org/research-news/covid-19-vaccines-less-effective-in-immunocompromised-people

[3] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2022/01/05/cloth-masks-not-effective-omicron-covid/9091574002/

[4] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59960949

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Coronavirus Update From New York City: January 13, 2022

As has been the case with the Omicron variant, things continue to change rapidly where I am living.

At this time last week, cases were increasing quite rapidly in New York City. It now appears as if we have potentially reached our peak in terms of cases here in New York. I hear that this is the case for some other major metropolitan areas on the East Coast of the United States. Albeit, it’s an extraordinarily high peak, but a peak nevertheless. The hope is that we can now start to recover from Omicron, and see cases start to decrease.

That doesn’t mean that we are out of the woods in New York City–far from it. With the number of people testing positive and falling ill with this, so many of the essential services have slowed down significantly. We’re still having issues here in New York with things like mass transit running at reduced schedules, EMTs continuing to face staffing shortages, and more. Given that the rate of the virus’s spread has compromised or outright crippled many essential services, all of us as individuals need to slow the spread–in other words, not doing things like going to parties and crowded bars maskless (even if you are vaccinated).

On a personal level, I am still healthy, and I am grateful that I am working from home again for the time being. Without going into too much detail, let’s just say that if I weren’t working from home, I would’ve been exposed to COVID. And, knowing how contagious the Omicron variant is, there’s a decent chance I would’ve tested positive for it and have brought it home to the rest of my family. None of that is the case, however, because I am working from home. Hopefully I can continue to avoid this, though some infectious disease experts are suggesting that everyone is probably going to be exposed to Omicron at some point.

My social life is, unfortunately, mostly confined to a bunch of boxes on Zoom (or some other virtual media platform). However, it sure beats the alternative right now, which is to risk catching or spreading the virus to someone else, particularly someone vulnerable like an immunocompromised person or someone who is under the age of 5.

So, that is how I am doing. I hope others are healthy!

Please note that I will not be publishing a blog post next Monday.