How Covid-19 could make Americans healthier
…from Politico
[ Editor’s Note: Finally we see the emergence of some Covid reporting on a long deferred discussion, “Where do we go from here”? I would suggest starting with the Trump team’s fumbling the pandemic response ball during its pitiful behaviour during the initial briefings from the Obama transition team on the lessons the latter had learned.
Frankly, no one on the Trump team gave a crap about public health. There were no millions to be scammed, no power structure to be built for a partisan political advantage, and it was viewed as a graveyard for wannabe fast climbing political hacks.
Missing in the well done review below is any mention of how critical it is to quickly shut down all travel from a newly infected country, and that includes tourist and student repatriations. That error alone would doom any public health defense wall having time to to get up and running.
But the problem with the solution is that it creates new problems, like financially hitting the airlines, killing tourism and cancelling international conferences and events. Just look at the cruise industry with its ships that become floating passenger killers.
Any kind of worldwide approach on defending against the next pandemic has to deal with what role does government and the public at large have to play to provide support for those livehoods on the front lines before the hospitals see their first pandemic patient in their own country.
One thing is for sure, if plans are not made in advance as to exactly how to quarantine exposed people traveling home before they leave a pandemic will always spread quicker.
We have to have ready many plans for how to not make passenger planes and airports superspreader events as we saw in New York where American repatriates from Europe were packed in like sardines going through customs for connecting flights.
The US would have had a major challenge with even a competent White House, but with the Trump one, we can see now that we were doomed from the beginning. We had probably the worse person we could have as President, and we have paid a great price for it. Thus ends my cheery missive for today… Jim W. Dean ]
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First published … February 18, 2021
If you tried to design a weapon customized to exploit every weakness in the U.S. health care system, you might have come up with : the novel coronavirus.
The pandemic caused by that spiky virus, now in its second year, has rampaged across the country in part because our disease defense system — the critical but neglected discipline known as “public health” — has been so starved of resources for so long that it had been effectively dismantled before the coronavirus arrived. Without robust disease surveillance, stockpiles of emergency equipment and a skilled public health work force, we were all but defenseless.
…“This pandemic has really exposed the failures of our health care system,” said Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.), a physician who represents a heavily Latino district in southeastern California and who leads the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. “Our health care system is geared to take care of really sick people with really, really good and expensive technology,” he added. “What we are not good at is old-fashioned community health. Public health.”
…“Public health needs to be a strategy,” said Trish Riley, executive director of the National Academy for State Health Policy, “not a department.”
You can read the full article here.
Jim W. Dean is VT Editor Emeritus. He was an active editor on VT from 2010-2022. He was involved in operations, development, and writing, plus an active schedule of TV and radio interviews. He now writes and posts periodically for VT.
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Its not an attack on the world, it was an attack on China, and then Iran with biological weapons that are genetically stuck into a common cold virus so as the cold virus spreads, (with the clever addition of a “two week time release” of sypmtoms,) the cold virus spreads the bioweapon (SARS disquised as pneumonia)
Its not some evil high cabal trying to fuck up the world population and economy for their benefit, its about reckless US leaders (Trump, Pompeo) who positive they could get away with it,
and they have when Trump is only accused of “mishandling” the pandemic response, or the real problem is the health care system, which is true, the worst in the world unless you are a rich fuckface, but the health care system is not what caused it to happen in first place and destroying the health care system (and entire society) not the reason for it happening.
Democrats insiders now in power, as well as the Trump toadies are aware of the origins of the virus and so complicity is rampant…of course no one can ever speak the truth: The crime of attacking countries with biological weapons that spread way outside of the intended target and infects entire world.
Everything they say is bullshit, everything they do is a coverup, insider intelligence is placed here and there on purpose to steer everyone wrong. “by deception we fuck up the world and we dont care we dont have to”
Theodore Roosevelt said once… “no country could be strong whose people were sick and poor.”
I’ve had covid its real enough. The response to the pandemic is another thing all together.
In the never ending quest to make money, we seem to have forgotten that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Unfortunately the most money is made in symptomatic treatments.
The point of view that I take from the evidence that I have reviewed as expressed by the late soil scientist, William Albrecht, PhD, is as follows: “It’s not the overpowering invader we must fear but the weakened condition of the victim.”
Research based on that point of view has been forgotten, hidden away in unopened books. Since there is no way that I could help humans from my point of view, I have recently set out to help pollinators by increasing the ability of the soil to produce protein where the plants that the pollinators depend on are growing. The plants by their growth, and the pollinators by their behavior in responding to the nutritional value of the pollen produced by the plants demonstrate when the ability of the soil to produce protein is increased.
This approach is based on this statement by Albrecht: “Biotic strata other than man are gifted in assaying their food intake according to different plant species and different degrees of rock development into soil on which plants grow.”
Yes, when it comes to nutrition, there is only one dumb species.
Amen on that. Here at VT, prevention is almost a deity to us. We have to stay alive to keep working as we see no one coming along to pick up the reigns, due to a combination of not having the backgrounds and experience in the work, and there is absolutely no money in it. We see to waiting line at the door, but hope to stay in the saddle another decade at least.
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