#COVID-19 Masks

[covid-safer-hotties]

CDC voice: "I know I said we'd do something about covid if it got very high again, but we have real tough jobs to do, like removing the recommendations that children with head lice or watery diarrhea be sent home to prevent further spread of their illness."

[stephenist]

Source

CDC Wastewater Viral Activity Monitoring

BreatheTeq

[counterintuitivecomics]

WHY WE MASK: It's Not "Just A Cold": A Handy Scientific Guide to Surviving COVID-19 Together

Here, have a free science zine with a ridiculously long title! Endless thanks to my partner and fellow disabled artist, Kimball Anderson aka @earnestattempts, who helped through the entire year-long process with art edits and image descriptions (located in the alt text). Additional thanks to my friends Dupe and Caitlin, who gave me thorough copy-edits, and every friend who read drafts or listened to me rant about COVID-19.

Feel free to spread it far and wide! And hit me up if you're interested in printing &/or distributing free copies :D

Read WHY WE MASK with Endnotes - includes working URLS so you can read the scientific papers I cited for yourself. Plus links for all the other resources, and a full transcript.

Download WHY WE MASK - Free PDFs to read, print, and share! Any donations go towards print copies &/or local mask blocs.

Can't get enough free printable COVID zines? Check out @newlevant's excellent What's Up With COVID & How To Protect Yourself: 2024 Ed! It was a huge inspiration in the final stretch.

Extra pages under the cut:

[fox-bright]

Covid Update, USA, late December 2023: Buckle up, folks.

Takeaway from his (very informative) thread:

Wastewater counts are obscenely high right now, belying the official case numbers. Considering that we've stopped collecting or reporting most COVID data, wastewater is the best way we have to judge the actual infection rate now.

We are currently seeing ten million new infections a week, and can expect that to greatly increase within the next three weeks.

If you've stopped masking, please start again, for your own safety and the safety of your community. Many hospital systems are already trending toward being overwhelmed right now; let's do what we can to lighten their burden.

Avoid unnecessary gatherings where possible.

Ventilate your spaces well (this is a good time to build that Corsi-Rosenthal box you were thinking about! I made one, it's great).

And just from me, personally--now's a good time to reevaluate casual habits. I've been careless, again, about touching my face. Time for me to knock it off!

This is a period where we need to act with more care. Not a time to panic, but a time to be more cautious.

[there-are-many-ways-to-smile]

[infiniteglitterfall]

know someone who enjoys horror stories? share this one! it's true!

hahahahahahahahahaha aarrggghhhhhhhhhh 3,000,000 deaths due to COVID-19 last year. Globally. Three million. Case rates higher than 90% of the rest of the pandemic. The reason people are still worried about COVID is because it has a way of quietly fucking up your body. And the risk is cumulative.

I'm going to say that again: the risk is cumulative.

It's not just that a lot of people get bad long-term effects from it. One in seven or so? Enough that it's kind of the Russian Roulette of diseases. It's also that the more times you get it, the higher that risk becomes. Like if each time you survived Russian Roulette, the empty chamber was removed from the gun entirely. The worst part is that, psychologically, we have the absolute opposite reaction. If we survive something with no ill effects, we assume it's pretty safe. It is really, really hard to override that sense of, "Ok, well, I got it and now I probably have a lot of immunity and also it wasn't that bad." It is not a respiratory disease. Airborne, yes. Respiratory disease, no: not a cold, not a flu, not RSV.

Like measles (or maybe chickenpox?), it starts with respiratory symptoms. And then it moves to other parts of your body. It seems to target the lungs, the digestive system, the heart, and the brain the most.

It also hits the immune system really hard - a lot of people are suddenly more susceptible to completely unrelated viruses. People get brain fog, migraines, forget things they used to know.

(I really, really hate that it can cross the blood-brain barrier. NOTHING SHOULD EVER CROSS THE BLOOD-BRAIN BARRIER IT IS THERE FOR A REASON.) Anecdotal examples of this shit are horrifying. I've seen people talk about coworkers who've had COVID five or more times, and now their work... just often doesn't make sense? They send emails that say things like, "Sorry, I didn't mean Los Angeles, I meant Los Angeles."

Or they insist they've never heard of some project that they were actually in charge of a year or two before.

Or their work is just kind of falling apart, and they don't seem to be aware of it.

People talk about how they don't want to get the person in trouble, so their team just works around it. Or they describe neighbors and relatives who had COVID repeatedly, were nearly hospitalized, talked about how incredibly sick they felt at the time... and now swear they've only had it once and it wasn't bad, they barely even noticed it.

(As someone who lived with severe dissociation for most of my life, this is a genuinely terrifying idea to me. I've already spent my whole life being like, "but what if I told them that already? but what if I did do that? what if that did happen to me and I just don't remember?") One of its known effects in the brain is to increase impulsivity and risk-taking, which is real fucking convenient honestly. What a fantastic fucking mutation. So happy for it on that one. Yes, please make it seem less important to wear a mask and get vaccinated. I'm not screaming internally at all now.

I saw a tweet from someone last year whose family hadn't had COVID yet, who were still masking in public, including school.

She said that her son was no kind of an athlete. Solidly bottom middle of the pack in gym.

And suddenly, this year, he was absolutely blowing past all the other kids who had to run the mile. He wasn't running any faster. His times weren't fantastic or anything. It's just that the rest of the kids were worse than him now. For some reason. I think about that a lot. (Like my incredibly active six-year-old getting a cold, and suddenly developing post-viral asthma that looked like pneumonia.

He went back to school the day before yesterday, after being home for a month and using preventative inhalers for almost week.

He told me that it was GREAT - except that he couldn't run as much at recess, because he immediately got really tired. Like how I went outside with him to do some yard work and felt like my body couldn't figure out how to increase breathing and heart rate.

I wasn't physically out of breath, but I felt like I was out of breath. That COVID feeling people describe, of "I'm not getting enough air." Except that I didn't have that problem when I had COVID.) Some people don't observe any long (or medium) term side effects after they have it.

But researchers have found viral reservoirs of COVID-19 in everyone they've studied who had it.

It just seems to hang out, dormant, for... well, longer than we've had an opportunity to observe it, so far.

(I definitely watched that literal horror movie. I think that's an entire genre. The alien dormant under ice in the Arctic.)

(oh hey I don't like that either!!!!!!!!!) All of which is to explain why we should still care about avoiding it, and how it manages to still cause excess deaths. Measuring excess deaths has been a standard tool in public health for a long time.

We know how many people usually die from all different causes, every year. So we can tell if, for example, deaths from heart disease have gone way up in the past three years, and look for reasons. Those are excess deaths: deaths that, four years ago, would not have happened. During the pandemic, excess death rates have been a really important tool. For all sorts of reasons. Like, sometimes people die from COVID without ever getting tested, and the official cause is listed as something else because nobody knows they had COVID. But also, people are dying from cardiovascular illness much younger now.

People are having strokes and heart attacks younger, and more often, than they did before the pandemic started. COVID causes a lot of problems. And some of those problems kill people. And some of them make it easier for other things to kill us. Lung damage from COVID leading to lungs collapsing, or to pneumonia, or to a pulmonary embolism, for example. The Economist built a machine-learning model with a 95% confidence interval that gauges excess death statistics around the world, to tell them what the true toll of the ongoing COVID pandemic has been so far.

Total excess deaths globally in 2023: Three million.

3,000,000.

Official COVID-19 deaths globally so far: Seven million. 7,000,000. Total excess deaths during COVID so far: Thirty-five point two million. 35,200,000.

Five times as many.

That's bad. I don't like that at all. I'm glad last year was less than a tenth of that. I'm not particularly confident about that continuing, though, because last year we started a period of really high COVID transmission. Case rates higher than 90% of the rest of the pandemic. Here's their data, and charts you can play with, and links to detailed information on how they did all of this:

Here's a non-paywalled link to it:

https://archive.vn/2024.01.26-012536/https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-estimates

Oh: here's a link to where you can buy comfy, effective N95 masks in all sizes:

Those ones are about a buck each after shipping - about $30 for a box of 30. They also have sample packs for a dollar, so you can try a couple of different sizes and styles.

You can wear an N95 mask for about 40 total hours before the effectiveness really drops, so that's like a dollar for a week of wear.

They're also family-owned and have cat-shaped masks and I really love them. These ones are cuter and in a much wider range of colors, prints, and styles, but they're also more expensive; they range from $1.80 to $3 for a mask. ($18-$30 for a box of ten.)

[vaguegrant]

The sardonic, reductionist headline here could be "Scientists finally figured out why you get more colds in winter: bEcAuSe iT's CoLd!"—but the actual science involved here is both interesting, and potentially very relevant to everyday life and especially the immunocompromised:

It turns out the cold air itself damages the immune response occurring in the nose. [...] In fact, reducing the temperature inside the nose by as little as 9 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius) kills nearly 50% of the billions of virus and bacteria-fighting cells in the nostrils, according to the study published Tuesday in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. “Cold air is associated with increased viral infection because you’ve essentially lost half of your immunity just by that small drop in temperature,” said rhinologist Dr. Benjamin Bleier, director of otolaryngology at Massachusetts Eye and Ear and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School in Boston.

Want to avoid catching or spreading respiratory viruses like CoVid-19, RSV, influenza, or a common cold? Mask up, please, but also bundle up! Wrap up in a scarf, wear a balaclava, and just generally keep your face warm. There's no single magic solution, but that's not a reason to do nothing. Rather, it's a reason to take several simple precautions that help avoid the spread of disease and protect those around you. (I can't tell you how much "this isn't 100% effective so I shouldn't do it at all" frustrates me.)

Oh, and #knitblr? This is your time to shine.

[phoenixonwheels]

Just your regular reminder to those of you (that’s most of you) not masking because you’re “not high risk” and “don’t have a preexisting condition” that a covid infection is a preexisting condition and you are now high risk.

[ID: Tweet from LizWhatsHerFace @RealGayArbys “Look at this graph. If you're on infection number two or three, your risk of being hospitalized if you get Covid again is VERY heightened. And your risk of a lot of other bad stuff happening is higher too. You need to act accordingly. You likely don't know what number you're on.” Graph showing the impact of reinfections from Covid on hazard ratio from various conditions, US Veterans affairs population. Data comes from a 2022 study published in Nature titled "Acute and postacute sequelae associated with SARS-CoV-2 reinfection." As the study abstract states, the data shows that "First infection with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is associated with increased risk of acute and postacute death and sequelae in various organ systems."]

[tweedfrog]

I gotta say the Orwell quotes are getting way less snappy these days.

"the pandemic is over but covid is a leading cause of death" isnt as good of a soundbite as "war is peace freedom is slavery ignorance is strength"

[duchessathena]

wish more was being done to go against these mask bans popping up around the country. this is a complete violation of personal freedom especially as COVID is still ripping through the entire United States killing and disabling people. this is all just an excuse to expand the already large surveillance state.

[covid-safer-hotties]

[brightlotusmoon]

[thefirsthogokage]

The CDC is trying to limit the new COVID booster to only people 75+, pregnant people, and the immunocompromised.

We have two days (as of September 6th, 2023) to let them know this isn't acceptable.

(since there is some lack of visual comprehension in the comments, each picture has the link to the tweet just under the picture)

Under this first tweet is the link directly to the article Laurie put in her tweet and is quoting.

Direct link to the page to submit your comments: click here!

Please, PLEASE fill this out and boost this post!

For those of you getting mad at me in the comments and reblogs: saying vaccination is only recommended for groups IS a way to try to prevent people from getting vaccinated because EVERYONE NEEDS THE VACCINE! Everyone needs to know they should get the vaccine!

It's not that hard to figure that out.

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding did the original reporting on this. I put a link to his thread in one of the reblogs, and I'm not going to be your Google beyond saying that. Go to his Twitter. Go check out Friesein's tweet thread.

[odinsblog]

😷😷😷

[feminist-space]

ProjectN95 is shutting down

Tumblr Friends! ProjectN95 is unfortunately closing its doors on December 15th. They've done SO much to provide masks, respirators, PPE to healthcare workers and the public since 2020, and this is honestly such a loss of a non-profit organization. They've helped a lot of people over these years.

If you need quality masks/respirators, they're having a sale right now on ProjectN95.org. I definitely recommend checking them out sooner than later.

[fairysexualism]

tumblr just nuked @milf-adjacent's blog with zero warning, no explanation from staff or e-mail whatsoever. her blog has been a vital resource for documenting COVID-19, and she did nothing ban worthy. she seems to be another target of the transmisogyny being carried out by staff.