Article: The Human Cost of Failing to Name COVID ‘Airborne’ - The Tyee

[ahimsa]

[please move if this is the wrong place]

The Human Cost of Failing to Name COVID ‘Airborne’

Article mentions ME/CFS:

One month into this cycle, she started reading in earnest about possibilities. It reminded her a lot of her teenage self’s recovery from mononucleosis, which took about 18 months. Going through medical school she had had a single lecture on myalgic encephalomyelitis, or ME, formerly known as chronic fatigue syndrome, and had never even heard of postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, or POTS. But going through her symptoms, these two syndromes correlated with her symptoms pretty well. And the new entity of long COVID, which the medical world was just beginning to comprehend.

I only skimmed this, have not read further.

 

[BrightCandle]

There was a bit of a twist to this morning in the late spring of 2020, however. Dr. C wasn’t going in wholly unprotected, as surgical masks were provided to protect her from the patients, and vice versa.

difficult to know why the word “airborne” is avoided so consistently, but the impact is clear: without that word, occupational health and safety requirements can be evaded.

There is a reason healthcare workers are the most impacted by Long Covid, and its a lack of appropriate PPE for airborne spread. Health and safety standards were not followed and are still not being followed. The lack of standards is why all healthcare remains unsafe, especially those who were worsened by Covid and know the science showing worsening condition on repeated infections.

This results in the very strange situation of walking through hospital wards under renovation and seeing construction workers in full PPE (including an N95 respirator to protect them from construction-related aerosols) while health-care workers wear either inadequate medical masks or no masks at all.

Trades people have their own silicon half masks with P100 filters and are more than happy to wear them. My GP on the other hand can't fit an FFP3, they clearly have never used one and moans about it and fidgets with it.

Dr. C hasn’t worked as a physician since stopping three months after the onset of her illness. She is upright for only one to two hours per day.

The infection she passed on to her wife also lingers as long COVID, though her symptoms are less severe. Imagine the challenges of running a household with kids with two parents needing caretaking.

Disability from long COVID is also rampant among health-care workers, but again, data is sparse in Canada. A recent U.K. analysis found that as many as 40 per cent of health-care workers in that country have had long COVID.

Dr. C knows there is no going back to a time before her workplace-acquired long-COVID disability. She wishes she could have been fully informed of the risks, and methods of preventing infection. She dreams of a future where all health-care workers are fully informed about airborne transmission and the risks of long COVID, and are provided with the right PPE.

Its definitely a fever dream because its unlikely to happen anytime soon, medicine takes a long time to get over its delusions regardless of who they hurt!

In Canada, government data shows that in the week ending March 8, 2026, 34 per cent of COVID patients in hospital acquired the virus while in hospital.

 

[Kalliope]

This was a very good and thorough article. Thanks for sharing, @ahimsa !

 

[rvallee]

Dr. C knows there is no going back to a time before her workplace-acquired long-COVID disability. She wishes she could have been fully informed of the risks

If it has simply been an issue of not being informed, it would be bad enough, but the truth is that this was both covered up and the product of genuine incompetence, leading to people being explicitly misinformed about it.

This would be equivalent to construction workers having to do work with asbestos and being assured that there was no risk, that they did not need to take even the normal precautions involved in less dangerous materials. It should be considered criminal, people were explicitly misled about the risks, but health care is a special little boy that doesn't have to tell the truth when it's inconvenient.