WTF!?! I mean, masking in all patient care settings is simply a smart policy, even if COVID was well and truly gone. Gah, so dumb.
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The Government of Japan has announced that they are relaxing the guidelines on the wearing of masks. From March 13, the wearing of masks (regardless of whether indoors or outdoors) will be a matter of āpersonal discretion.ā If public opinion surveys are any indication, a good 50-60% of the population will continue to wear masks, but I imagine that the summer heat and humidity will bring that number down quite a bit.
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She should bring it up with this guy:
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Damn. Positive self-test result. Going to get a PCR tomorrow.
This morning, in a meeting, our head of department said that it felt awkward when last week, the mask mandate dropped in our workplace, āwhich was like the literal small Gallic villageā.
Yeah. About this, bossā¦
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At 75 sheās in a very high risk group.
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āEbbsā
GTA - Greater Toronto Area
Wastewater is about the only semi-reliable indicator left here. That said, we shall see if our recent drop in hospitalization and death rates is sticky. I think the warm weather has helped. Our Sunday trip into Toronto saw about 25% of people masking, and at our local 
Cultural Center and MSS Regional Office itās about 90%.
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Lucky that you still have that data. Our county wastewater monitoring appears to have been discontinued as of Jan 1, so we have no reliable local indicators left. Hospitalizations fell by 40% here last week, but the same weekās death rate shows thatās because about half of them died.
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From that Seattle Times article:
Rates of newly diagnosed diabetes, high blood pressure and elevated cholesterol were higher in the 90 days after COVID infection than the period before, according to a study of almost 24,000 patients during the period of omicronās dominance from researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, and vaccination appeared to help reduce these risks.
ā¦
Through the omicron era, new diabetes diagnoses were nearly three times as common among unvaccinated people after infection than during the pre-infection period. High blood pressure, cholesterol and elevated levels of other blood fats were almost twice as common after infection among the unvaccinated. Among vaccinated people who got COVID, the risk of diabetes remained about the same before and after the infection, while the risk for other diseases decreased.
So thatās a bit more hopeful, for those of us whoāve been able/willing to receive vaccinations, at leastā¦
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Although anecdotal, we have seen a dramatic increase in newly diagnosed diabetes in my practice. Canāt say anyone has tried to corrolate with covid cases, but it is not a stretch to see a connection.
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Iām sorry to hear that, and really hope there isnāt a connection. Given Big Pharmaās track record, I get the feeling their reaction to this news will beā¦different. Those companies can prove me wrong by promoting development of cures more than treatments, though.
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We really are on the verge of a functional artificial pancreas. Itās just a software question, and reliability question, at this point. Still, it sucks for the kids to suddenly have their whole future changed.
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This story, posted already under the World Politics thread (Haaretz articles) and the Vulnerabilities thread (Guardian articles) has a Coronavirus angle as well! (Iāll link to the source page hereā¦)
The āTeam Jorgeā group, run by an ex-
special forces guy, Tal Hanan, runs an army of around 30,000 fake social media accounts using their Advanced Impact Media Solutions software (AIMS). It seems they were brought in to meddle when a 
lab got some bad press after being accused of being bad at their jobs:
In the UK, in Fall 2021, AIMS avatars took a hard line against the UK Health Safety Agency. The agency had launched an investigation into a laboratory accused of providing some 43,000 false negative Covid test results to its patients.
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Might be worth asking your doc about their voting habits.
I donāt know that I can fully express how outraged I am by these findings. I have consistently maintained that education can overcome ideology. I am apparently very wrong.
For physicians, things were considerably different. Here, the lines were largely straight and flat from very liberal to moderates, indicating that these physicians all had similar opinions on the value of these three medicines. But then the graph changed moving from moderates to the conservative end of the spectrum. This indicates that, among experts, the political polarization is one-sided. In other words, the opinions of liberal MDs look like those of moderate MDs, while the opinions of conservative MDs are difficult to distinguish from those of non-experts.
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