Public health folks probably should have spoken out more when people in parks/beaches were shamed (not by public health people always! But still) even into May and June. I personally would never risk a pool party but went to a protest myself. But both do risk transmission chains.
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Replying to @zeynep @gregggonsalves and
Plus, personally, I think it's unconscionable that we did not let people visit their dying relatives with whatever PPE they could personally muster, if or a few minutes, or with the promise of quarantine afterwards. We did that to break transmission chains, I get it but...
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Replying to @zeynep @gregggonsalves and
I think there is something to the current complaints, and there was an issue not always with what many public health people were saying, but perhaps what they weren't saying (or being heard) as loudly, that harm-reduction was a viable message, that it was always about trade-offs.
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Replying to @zeynep @gregggonsalves and
Then I agree that the argument that racial justice is a public health emergency, that outdoors is low-risk, followed by extensive discussion of harm-reduction (masks/drums) and call to limit/ban tear-gas, kettling, indoor detention etc. is valid. But that holds for other things.
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Yes, and many, many of us, including
@JuliaLMarcus@EpiEllie have been talking about how to do harm reduction across the board, not just for protests!2 replies 0 retweets 8 likes -
Replying to @gregggonsalves @JamesSurowiecki and
I know! I linked to it, and added mine to my piece on protesting during a pandemic. I loved the other pieces, too. But I think it's fair to say that there wasn't as loud an attempt to provide harm-reduction guidance on broader range of activities. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/06/i-cant-breathe-using-tear-gas-during-pandemic/612673/ …pic.twitter.com/FoxCBXFR0S
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Replying to @zeynep @gregggonsalves and
It's not that the harm-reduction framework was absent, but it wasn't as loud as it should have been; we didn't stand up as much as we could against the beach/park other scolding; did not produce enough detailed guidelines on for a broader range of activities.
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Replying to @zeynep @gregggonsalves and
“as loud as it should have been” is the problem but it stems from the fact that public health practitioners have generally not been part of the national conversation before the pandemic. We are slowly being listened to but now people complain they didn’t hear what we said before.
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Without a way to have our voice heard, we could tweet as much as we wanted about the benefits of getting outdoors & being in parks (and we did tweet about it) but “noise” comes from others listening and amplifying. It’s not really something we can control.
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Is it not crazy that entire regions (in Spain and Italy, I believe) forbid people from going outside for weeks? There was never any reason to think that going outside, by itself, was a risk factor, correct?
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I think early on, given the situation in Lombardy, and lack of solid evidence, extreme caution was warranted. But as the evidence emerged, there should have been gradual piloting of relaxations. It's hard, though, for authorities to do that. Public health people would have.
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