Latest news on the coronavirus, which has killed millions during a pandemic.
3 min readSep 1, 2021
- Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic last year, almost 500 retail and meatpacking workers have died from Covid-19, according to the United Food and Commercial Workers International labor union. Yet many workers whose colleagues got sick and even died during the depths of the pandemic are rejecting their employers’ pushes to get vaccinated. From Walmart to the meat giant Tyson Foods, an increasing number of companies have rolled out vaccination mandates for corporate staff members or all employees. But efforts to encourage workers to get vaccinated — and recent vaccination mandates — have caused rifts and pushback among workers, leading some companies to stop short of requiring vaccinations for front-line staffers.
- COVID-19 is putting intense pressure on caregivers at many hospital emergency departments. A typical day in the ED at University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC) in Jackson means that all COVID-19 designated rooms are occupied, and more patients — either known COVID-19 positive or unknown — keep arriving to get care. Kendall McKenzie, M.D., chief of emergency medicine at UMMC, says it’s a “logistical challenge of finding a space” to start treating new patients. “Those are the most anxiety-provoking times,” he said. “You want to limit that person’s exposure to patients and employees, and to be as safe as possible, but there are physical limitations when we are so full.”
- Research by Imperial College London suggests effective test, trace, and isolate systems could reduce the reproductive rate of SARS-CoV-2 by 26%.1 Yet different countries have had wildly different levels of success with their systems.
- Measuring “success,” however, is hard. Systematic reviews of test and trace systems worldwide often struggle to provide a definitive answer.2 “It all depends on the outcome measure,” says Jay Patel, a researcher at the University of Edinburgh’s Global Health Governance Programme. Different countries have different goals for their pandemic strategy. Some, such as New Zealand, have pursued as close to a zero covid strategy as possible, while in the UK the test and trace system has been used to try to keep cases at a level that is manageable for the NHS. Slovakia decided to test its entire population of 5.5 million people3 and to require those who tested positive to download an app that prompts you at any time of the day to show your face to prove that you are isolating.
- The virus started spreading at a couple of funerals. Those individuals who attended the funerals went back into their neighborhoods, homes, and churches, and more people were infected. It hit like a bomb. Within a week, three people died in one day. All three had the same symptoms, so we had them tested and all came back positive. Ever since then, every day there’s someone dying with this virus. Recently, five people died in one day. I’m getting called different times of the night to go out and work a case, to try to figure out what happened prior to that person dying. Did the person have a fever? Were they coughing? Were they aching? Were they having difficulty breathing? So many phone calls are coming in now that it’s overwhelming. I’m getting very little sleep now.
- Women workers are on the front lines of the fight against COVID-19. Nearly 80 percent of healthcare workers and 83 percent of workers who provide social assistance, including child care and emergency services, are women. And women-dominated occupations, such as nurses, flight attendants, and personal care aides, are among the most vulnerable to getting sick and spreading it to others. Women are also in the position to suffer the most in an economic recession. Even in good times, women are the most economically vulnerable, comprising nearly 60 percent of workers in low-wage occupations. Low-paid women workers have very little in the way of savings, which means it is much harder for them to weather economic shocks, especially when they are likely to be supporting a number of dependents.
