9 thoughts on “C-19 Chat Post – June 6 2022”

  1. I meant to post that my dentist was telling me that she ended up getting shingles after/from covid.

  2. TK I just saw your post from last night. I’m very happy you are negative and that the folks you know are recovering

  3. Monkeypox was first diagnosed in monkeys in 1958 and the first human case dates to 1970.

    Joshua, is that 12-year gap considered typical of most diseases from animals to humans?

  4. Vicki, thanks for the re-post. Omicron-specific vaccines are in the pipeline, I believe, but not yet in later stages of development.

    I think you’re making a wise decision to hold off for your next booster until August. I’m doing the same. In my case, it also has to do with the fact that I recently got Covid. I’ve had it twice.

    Philip, great question, and I don’t have an answer on zoonotic transfer of disease to humans. Monkeypox is behaving differently from what is the norm. Clearly, something is happening to make it far more transmissible. The UK confirmed 77 more cases today. Other countries are similarly finding dozens more cases – a lot of it is community transmission. The U.S. isn’t testing much at all. I suspect that we have hundreds of cases, if not more, at this point. We’re so darn slow at doing anything public health related.

    We do a terrific job in cancer research and drug development. We lead the world. This is great. But, we neglect many other parts of healthcare; public health, in particular. It’s underfunded, not `sexy’ enough (very few wow! moments), and, frankly, ignored by many, even in academia. This is sad, really. Public health is still a very important field in all European countries.

  5. Public health is a vast field. It includes simple things like sanitation, water supply, and proper hygiene. It extends to immunizations, vaccinations (like Covid-19, but encompassing way more than that), and preventive care (eg, tackling obesity, cardiovascular disease and diabetes). It also addresses leading causes of population-wide mortality, such as vehicular and gun deaths, suicide, opioid and drug overdose fatalities, infant and maternal mortality, etc …

    I find it frightening that 28% of Americans polled say Americans just have to accept mass shootings as a price to pay for living in a free society. 15% of those who said this were Democrats; 44% Republican. It’s hard to unpack this. First, it implies that free societies, by definition, allow for unfettered access to guns. That’s a very questionable premise. Second, and even more worrisome, it implies that many Americans are surprisingly accepting of preventable deaths. We’ve seen this during the Covid-19 pandemic. And, as I’ve said many times before, we’ve seen this with HIV, opioids, infant mortality, and many other public health crises. There’s a sizable segment of the U.S. population that’s okay with our low life expectancy numbers (lower than all of our peers, by a wide margin), and would rather have that than public health measures adopted to help prevent preventable deaths.

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