Category: Health

  • Four horsemen

    NYT: The four large countries where coronavirus cases have recently been increasing fastest are Brazil, the United States, Russia and Britain. And they have something in common. They are all run by populist male leaders who cast themselves as anti-elite and anti-establishment.

  • “The perfect virus for our times”

    Ian Betteridge writes about COVID-19: Never has a culture been less prepared for a pandemic, and never has a virus had a better chance to become endemic in a population. COVID almost seems tailor made to capitalise on every single weakness in our culture, from expert denial and anti-vaccine madness to our lack of experience…

  • The writers who want your granny to die

    Peter Geoghegan and Mary Fitzgerald in The Guardian on the “lockdown sceptics“: It is no surprise that so many professional contrarians are paid-up lockdown sceptics. They are products of our distorted media ecosystem, which invariably privileges heat over light. For them, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about –…

  • Cherries, condoms and coronavirus

    During the AIDS epidemic, some people who didn’t want to wear condoms claimed that it wasn’t because they were selfishly putting other people at risk; it was that the virus was so small that it could pass through microscopic gaps in the material condoms were made from, so there was no point in people wearing…

  • Ill communications

    When you’re trying to keep people at home over what’s likely to be a hot and sunny bank holiday weekend, it’s hard to imagine a worse headline than this. It’s from today’s Daily Mail (in England; the Scottish edition has Nicola Sturgeon saying the lockdown can’t be lifted yet). The Mail of all papers should…

  • It’s not me, it’s you

    I’m careful when I shop. I wash my hands thoroughly before I go out, I use liberal amounts of hand sanitiser before I go in, I wear a mask at all times, I try not to touch anything I’m not sure I’ll buy and I go crazy with the hand sanitiser again when I come…

  • Give me liberty and give me death

    Media Matters: Right-wing groups are using the same playbook against COVID-19 measures they’ve used to fight LGBTQ rights. …Influential right-wing and anti-LGBTQ groups have responded to stay-at-home orders put in place to protect Americans from the coronavirus by pushing for exemptions for churches and pastors, including by filing lawsuits, pressuring local and state governments, and…

  • Money keeps you safer than masks

    Yet more evidence that we really aren’t in this together: the Office for National Statistics reports that the Covid-19 death rate in England is more than double in the most deprived areas compared to the least deprived. In the most deprived areas the death rate is 55.1 deaths per 100,000 population; in the least deprived,…

  • This is not a lockdown

    It’s May Day, the day when we celebrate international workers’ day. But in England many workers have nothing to celebrate: what the papers call a lockdown isn’t stopping employers from forcing people to come in to work non-essential jobs. Caroline Molloy, in OpenDemocracy: we don’t actually have a lockdown. The government has allowed people to…

  • Hormone treatment for Covid-19

    I’ve mentioned before that coronavirus appears to be deadlier to men than to women, and that because of that difference some anti-trans bigots have been deliberately hounding trans people with the virus and wishing them dead. The trans women may get the last laugh, because it’s possible that the hormones they take are helping them…