Steve Yun posted:

https://x.com/mtshastawriter/status/1776628243690651683?s=46

good to know the authorities haven’t changed

Pittsburgh Fentanyl Cloud posted:

Found this while digging through some old photos. 5/1/2020

Animal-Mother posted:

"There are weeks where nothing happens. Then there are days where years of lockdowns happened."

The Oldest Man posted:

Here we started pro sports again before schools (and I think public parks?) were open

Just a totally hosed upside down-rear end society

quote:

The week Mike Brown was killed, I had just started a new job as a columnist for the British newspaper the Guardian. I wasn't supposed to travel or do much on-the-ground reporting for this job, particularly as I was about to start a full-time, funded PhD job a month later. But an editor heard I had gotten to know the St. Louis region while covering Michael Johnson and told me to get on a plane to cover the uprising.

Before heading to the airport, I asked one of the HIV prevention experts I’d come to know what I should be looking for in this town of Ferguson. And they told me their colleagues had recently been in the Canfield Green Apartments because there had been new HIV transmission in the area and that Ferguson was located in St. Louis's heavily Black “North County,” which suffered from higher rates of HIV and AIDS than other parts of the region.

Learning this zapped me with the sharpest physical sensation I've ever had in my life as a reporter and scholar, while helping me to understand something about life in America: Of course, the HIV folks knew the area where Michael Brown was killed, I thought. Wherever you find police violence and racism in the United States, you're bound to find Black people living with viruses and dying of disease. Though I didn't yet know the term, this was the first time I was beginning to see the manifestation of the viral underclass.

quote:

One day in August 2020, I logged into the New York Times’s coronavirus tracker, which, among other factors, displayed how many COVID-19 cases could be traced to institutions. Besides a pork-processing plant in South Dakota and a chicken plant in Iowa, fifteen of the seventeen institutions on that date with a thousand or more coronavirus cases traced to them were jails or prisons. Six of them were located in California, three in Florida, two each in Ohio and Arkansas, and one in each in Tennessee and Illinois, including Chicago’s Cook County jail. The governors who could have reduced these incarcerated populations with pardons to stop the largest clusters of COVID-19 in the nation were Republicans and Democrats alike. The viral danger had nothing to do with whether a state was “red” or “blue.” And if one were to trace the responsibility for the deadliest institution of them all on that day–San Quentin State Prison in California or about twenty-five hundred people had tested positive for coronavirus and twenty-five had died of it–it would lead to the door of Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom.

That very same month, more than 350 fires raged out of control among across the state Newsom governed. While ash fell on Oakland, non-profit organizations and mutual aid networks struggled to get N95 masks to vulnerable people before the smoke triggered asthma attacks or other lethal breathing problems. But the masks were already in short supply due to COVID-19. The same day Cal Fire told the press it had no way to treat all the flames burning throughout the state, because for years it had been relying upon incarcerated firefighters to smother such blazes. These workers earned as little as a dollar per hour, and their criminal records kept them from becoming firefighters once they were released. And because California's prisons were among the most powerful COVID-19 hotspots in the nation, so many firefighters were sick or under quarantine that there weren't enough available to fight the hundreds of fires. It was a moment in which America's twin epidemics of incarceration and COVID-19 entered into a three-way race with the global pandemic of the climate crisis.

This was a disaster of the Democrats’ making. Governor Gavin Newsom, a darling of Gay Inc. since he’d supported same-sex marriages as mayor of San Francisco in 2004, slowly began releasing some incarcerated firefighters in the summer of 2020. But he could have done so months or years earlier. Many of them were eligible to be firefighters for the same reasons their release dates had been moved forward: their model behavior. If Newsom had released them before COVID-19 spread in prisons, when activists had first begged them to, they could have gone home to their families where they would have been far less at risk than in prison. If he had then pardoned them, they could have been called to duty not as enslaved workers–people convicted of crimes are legally enslaved under the Thirteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution–but as crisis-ready firefighters

But Democratic policy in the Golden State had long been in to incarcerate people needlessly. In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that California had to reduce its dangerously overcrowded prisons by granting early release to people convicted of non-violent offenses. Then-California attorney general Kamala Harris sued in 2014 to stop these court-mandated releases. By using cheaply paid, enslaved firefighters, California was saving one hundred million dollars a year, and Harris's office argued that it would be too “dangerous” to let these firefighters go–not because they would pose a danger to their communities, but because it would be a “difficult firefight season” without enslaved labor.

Rochallor posted:

https://x.com/luckytran/status/1776360226205143547

(The CDC thinks) bird flu is airborne

U-DO Burger posted:

quote:

That very same month, more than 350 fires raged out of control among across the state Newsom governed. While ash fell on Oakland, non-profit organizations and mutual aid networks struggled to get N95 masks to vulnerable people before the smoke triggered asthma attacks or other lethal breathing problems. But the masks were already in short supply due to COVID-19. The same day Cal Fire told the press it had no way to treat all the flames burning throughout the state, because for years it had been relying upon incarcerated firefighters to smother such blazes. These workers earned as little as a dollar per hour, and their criminal records kept them from becoming firefighters once they were released. And because California's prisons were among the most powerful COVID-19 hotspots in the nation, so many firefighters were sick or under quarantine that there weren't enough available to fight the hundreds of fires. It was a moment in which America's twin epidemics of incarceration and COVID-19 entered into a three-way race with the global pandemic of the climate crisis.

Teenage Riot posted:

Where's that picture of a sign that said something like "be safe, Covid is here" in the foreground with the whole forest on fire in the background, somebody has to have it saved

Pittsburgh Fentanyl Cloud posted:

that rules, the covid-19 pandemic has paved the way for the acceptance of Homo Economicus as the man of the future

Why Am I So Tired posted:

Why Am I So Tired posted:

Crazypoops posted:

It's so awesome that every year on this planet is

Pittsburgh Fentanyl Cloud posted:

Found this while digging through some old photos. 5/1/2020

Why Am I So Tired posted:

Why Am I So Tired posted:

ColdBlooded posted:

Still a lockdown, the server is wearing a mask.

U-DO Burger posted:

I recently finished reading The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide, and I cannot recommend it enough to this thread. The author is Dr. Steven Thrasher, a journalist and scholar who had been covering the policing and criminalization of HIV for years and years prior to the start of the COVID pandemic. He does a fantastic job explaining how society structures itself to foist the disease burden onto the downtrodden, and the book is a much easier and accessible read than Necropolis or Health Communism.
...

Nocturtle posted:

Also interesting to read people from over a century ago essentially arguing that cholera is mild and doesn't require any sort of mitigation.

CGI Stardust posted:

that quote from a major British newspaper about how "fear of cholera will kill more people than cholera itself"

U-DO Burger posted:

I recently finished reading The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide, and I cannot recommend it enough to this thread. The author is Dr. Steven Thrasher, a journalist and scholar who had been covering the policing and criminalization of HIV for years and years prior to the start of the COVID pandemic. He does a fantastic job explaining how society structures itself to foist the disease burden onto the downtrodden, and the book is a much easier and accessible read than Necropolis or Health Communism.

It’s a very personal book. Dr. Thrasher fills it with personal anecdotes, and the stories of the people he’s met, the people he’s reported on, and the people he has been romantically involved with. The stories are riveting and heartbreaking. Each chapter builds upon the last, and the people introduced in Chapter 1 are relevant and talked about throughout the entire book. I’m really impressed with how the book is able to cover so many angles of disease and capitalism without feeling like it’s jumping all over the place.

This section from Chapter 1 had me snapping to attention because I hadn't made this connection yet:

Here’s an excerpt from chapter 7, “Cages: The Liberal Carceral State”, that shows just how perfectly this book belongs in CSPAM:

The book covers a ton of ground, just check out that chapter list:

ACT I: BLAME
1. Mandingo: Racism
2. The Inifinte Weight of Zero: Individualized Shame
3. Parasite: Capitalism

ACT II: LAW AND ORDER
4. Guilty Until Proven Innocent
5. From Athens to Appalachia: Austerity
6. Borderlands: Borders
7. Cages: The Liberal Carceral State

ACT III: SOCIAL DEATH
8. One in Two: Unequal Prophylaxis
9. Disability as Disposability: Ableism
10. Ride-Along: Speciesism

ACT IV: RECKONING
11.Release: The Myth of White Immunity
12. Compound Loss: Collective Punishment
Epilogue: Why Am I “Me” and You are “You”?

I checked it out from my library and was so taken by the writing that I bought my own copy to read whenever. Check it out sometime, fellow goons.

fake edit: we should have book recommendations in the OP imo. I think books like Necropolis, Health Communism, and The Viral Underclass are all really good tools for helping people understand the dynamics of disease and capitalism.

Shiroc posted:

Also knowing that somehow this study will turn into “and that’s more evidence of covid being over” instead of “oh poo poo our best treatment might not work as well as we want?”

icantfindaname posted:

Anyone know how to change your residential and mailing address in test2treat? Last I used it I lived in a different state, the blacked out is the old address, and I see no way to change it, and pressing the submit button I fear will send it to that address

icantfindaname posted:

Paxlovid was nice while it lasted

https://x.com/zeynep/status/1775851011489370337?s=46&t=XyUS8LjqSBeKD9e9B1aSGg

icantfindaname posted:

Paxlovid was nice while it lasted

https://x.com/zeynep/status/1775851011489370337?s=46&t=XyUS8LjqSBeKD9e9B1aSGg

Nocturtle posted:

Personally think the post-COVID infection stroke rate is more relevant than the time until you stop feeling sick, which raises the question why Pfizer didn't bother measuring it in their own study.

Pyrolocutus posted:

https://twitter.com/BNOFeed/status/1776711232529076703

icantfindaname posted:

Paxlovid was nice while it lasted

https://x.com/zeynep/status/1775851011489370337?s=46&t=XyUS8LjqSBeKD9e9B1aSGg