The core organizing group is deciding who to organize with, and the main consideration is UFCW.

Good or no? Any other unions we should consider?

We're an independent retail store

All managers are bastards. Fuckers are causing injuries with malicious management tactics.

https://missiontothesun.bandcamp.com/

It’s a major wave now, with an estimated new 900,000 infections per day, as my friend Jay Weiland estimated based on the 2 sources of US wastewater data (definitely worth following him at X or Threads). The slope of rise of SARS-CoV-2 levels is still steep, so we haven’t yet reached the plateau. It’s already towered beyond 4 prior waves of the US pandemic.

State-of-the-Wave

It’s related to the variants KP.3 and KP.3.1.1, which together now account for more than half of new cases in the US. And KP.3.1.1 is on the move, overtaking KP.3 as shown by the new CDC data below. A big jump in the past 2 weeks.

Fortunately, the rise in levels of the virus, still going up in all 4 major US regions (most recent CDC data below) has not been linked with as much severe Covid (absolute increase) as was seen in prior waves, but compared to last week there was a relative increase of 25% of deaths and 12% increase in emergency room visits due to Covid. No matter how you look at it, this is not a benign wave, folks.

God's plan I guess. It's brunch time.

1 in 26 people have covid on the west coast. 1 in 29 in the South. The rest of the country soon to follow.

There is also a new variant appearing (KP.3.1.1), which has a significant mutation which allows it to escape immunity gained from previous variants. It's expected to add to and extend the current waves.

It's less deadly than before, thankfully, and new variants haven't seemed to cause as much of a problem as the first few waves, but the new normal is still several times worse than the worst flu season, if only because it's around and spreading significantly most of the year. It's pretty neat how we are living in a time where we can watch society get significantly worse in real time on multiple fronts, including the spread of disease! And by "pretty neat" I mean:

Good thing brandon ended the pandemic by getting rid of testing, otherwise it might look bad right now!

On average, there have been over 500 additional deaths a week involving CVD since the pandemic began.

While deaths from Covid-19 have fallen year-on-year since the beginning of the pandemic, the number of deaths involving CVD have remained high above expected levels.

Excess deaths involving CVD outnumber those involving all other individual disease areas since the beginning of the pandemic in England.

No doubt, the reasons for continuingly high numbers of excess deaths related to CVD in England are complicated. However, along with deaths caused by Covid-19 among people with heart and circulatory diseases, we think the following factors have played a role:

The longer-term impact of Covid-19 infection on the heart and circulatory system.

Extreme and continued disruption to GP and heart care services.

This fucking sucks.

I guess the CDC updated their page.

https://www.cdc.gov/ncird/whats-new/covid-19-can-surge-throughout-the-year.html

Many respiratory virus illnesses peak during the winter due to environmental conditions and human behaviors. COVID-19 has peaks in the winter and also at other times of the year, including the summer, driven by new variants and decreasing immunity from previous infections and vaccinations. You can protect yourself from serious illness by staying up to date with vaccinations, getting treated if you have medical conditions that make you more likely to get very sick from COVID-19, and using other strategies outlined in CDC's respiratory virus guidance.

If only we had a way to slow down or stop the spread of disease.

Someday, far onto the future, scientists will figure it out!

Around the world, a post-Covid reality is beginning to sink in: Everyone, everywhere, really is sick a lot more often.

At least 13 communicable diseases, from the common cold to measles and tuberculosis, are surging past their pre-pandemic levels in many regions, and often by significant margins, according to analysis by Bloomberg News and London-based disease forecasting firm Airfinity Ltd.

The resulting research, based on data collected from more than 60 organizations and public health agencies, shows that 44 countries and territories have reported at least one infectious disease resurgence that’s at least ten times worse than the pre-pandemic baseline.

The post-Covid global surge of illnesses — viral and bacterial, common and historically rare — is a mystery that researchers and scientists are still trying to definitively explain. The way Covid lockdowns shifted baseline immunities is a piece of the puzzle, as is the pandemic’s hit to overall vaccine administration and compliance. Climate change, rising social inequality and wrung-out health-care services are contributing in ways that are hard to measure.

We can explain it, covid takes a toll on our immune system, and we are constantly exposed to it and can catch it multiple times a year. No one in public office wants to acknowledge it because that would mean putting money and effort into infection control.

Feb 2022 is when they started transitioning from pcr's for everyone to home tests.

May 2023 is when they declared an "end to the public emergency" and ended the emergency and stopped requiring hospitals to test people.

This year they stopped requiring hospitals to report much of anything.

I guess this is just how it's going to be from now on, and we'll have to figure out what damage it's doing by analyzing excess death rates

BTW many parts of the US (Hawaii and SF, and my little town apparently) and world are experiencing a pretty sizeable covid surge at the moment. Most likely from the FLiRT variant, and there is also a different variant coming up called kp.3, so that's fun.

Although heart failure mortality rates fell between 1999 and 2012, the proportion of people dying from the condition in the US has increased in recent years, according to a study published in JAMA Cardiology. By 2021, the heart failure mortality rate was higher than in 1999, signaling that earlier improvements have been “entirely undone” over the past 10 years, the researchers wrote. The findings were based on death certificate data collected by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

**The accelerated increase in heart failure mortality rates during 2020 and 2021 suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic might have contributed to current trends. **Changes in how heart failure is diagnosed and coded as well as improved survival for patients with conditions such as ischemic heart disease, which predispose them to heart failure, might also have contributed to the uptick in heart failure mortality rates, the researchers wrote.

It's just a super infectious and rapidly mutating virus that can cause heart disease, nbd.

BTW, Rates of covid are increasing rapidly in many parts of the world, including my town. It was low for about two months, and now wastewater levels are spiking again.

The latest edition of the World Health Statistics released today by the World Health Organization (WHO) reveals that the COVID-19 pandemic reversed the trend of steady gain in life expectancy at birth and healthy life expectancy at birth (HALE).

The pandemic wiped out nearly a decade of progress in improving life expectancy within just two years. Between 2019 and 2021, global life expectancy dropped by 1.8 years to 71.4 years (back to the level of 2012). Similarly, global healthy life expectancy dropped by 1.5 years to 61.9 years in 2021 (back to the level of 2012).

The 2024 report also highlights how the effects have been felt unequally across the world. The WHO regions for the Americas and South-East Asia were hit hardest, with life expectancy dropping by approximately 3 years and healthy life expectancy by 2.5 years between 2019 and 2021. In contrast, the Western Pacific Region was minimally affected during the first two years of the pandemic, with losses of less than 0.1 years in life expectancy and 0.2 years in healthy life expectancy.

Short answer: Yes, covid increases your risk of cancer, but it's not a huge risk.

Longer answer: Covid, like HPV, messes with our cells ability to make the p53 gene, which among other things, helps our bodies destroy cancerous cells.

In mild infections low p53 levels lasted 16-24 weeks before returning to normal.

In severe infections low p53 levels lasted past 24 weeks and may not return to normal.

It took a long time to measure the impact of the HPV vaccine, and it will take a long time to meaure the impact of covid and vaccines.

The video compares it to the risk of getting HPV and the Epstien-Barr virus. However I don't think either of those viruses mutate the way covid does, or have the potential to reinfect you with a different variant every several months the way covid does. Also, all three viruses have shown the ability to persist in people's bodies, which increases the risk of cancers and other long term health effects.