Protecting the community: Essential workers, nursing homes, and the incarcerated

The COVID-19 pandemic continues, resurging across the US and in many other places. Different strategies have been adopted in different places, with varying degrees of success in slowing the spread of infection and death. This should provide us with information on what works well, and what strategies we should be adopting. For one example, family medicine colleagues in São Paulo, Brazil, report on their experience in nursing homes in the Royal Australian Journal of General Practice. They used public health management techniques including no visitors, rigid use of testing, recommended PPE and isolation, and others, as well as medical management and psychosocial management working with families and patients to help them through this process. They have had only 4 cases in the last 90 days (as of the November publication date), no people in isolation, and a low death rate.

 In Arizona, as in the US, case rates and mortality continue to rise.  We have more cases than ever, and fewer hospital and ICU beds. The state has chosen to address this issue by lifting restrictions on businesses, opening restaurants, bars, salons and gyms. Based on all evidence from everywhere, this is likely to further increase infections and deaths (“Health chief changes benchmarks so no Arizona business will be shuttered in pandemic”.)

Thie new policy is clearly in response to business owners concerned about their livelihoods and the probability that they will even survive. This is a real problem for them, and for us, in the horrific economic downturn that has accompanied the pandemic for most people (for major investors, however, the stock market has done well). Pima County, where Tucson is, has taken a more aggressive and restrictive approach; after more than 320 cases reported among county employees, including the chief health officer, it has furloughed 20% of the work force for 3 weeks. Of course, this will be an economic hardship for those people’s families.

Thus we have the situation where we know what to do to prevent increased infections and deaths, but have to also address the serious financial impact on regular people who lose their jobs and businesses and incomes. Sadly, efforts to reopen have been almost linearly associated with increased infection rates and deaths. The efforts taken by our Brazilian colleagues were effective in an important and high-risk, but ultimately limited, venue, that of nursing homes. The fact that the increased infection and death rate in our communities will take its greatest toll on the elderly and those with chronic disease, not those whose exposure to others in workplaces, schools, and meetings (although they are also at risk, and not immune) makes it even more complicated. The leadership at the federal level, sometimes inaccurately described as “lack of leadership” when in fact it is actively leading us in entirely the wrong direction, is making things much worse, and creating and exacerbating an incorrect understanding of the disease among many people.

Those who work in high-risk occupations, who cannot “phone (or Zoom) it in” but rather have to be present, most often among the lowest paid, those who live in multi-generational and multi-family households, are paying the highest price. These people are not only members of racial and ethnic minority groups, but those groups are far over-represented in their numbers. A recent article in the New York Times again makes the point that Black and Latinx people are hardest hit, not because of any genetic or biologic reason but because of their social and economic situation resulting from centuries of structural racism. Race, it is clear but requires repeating, is a social, not a biological construct. The negative impacts on health, income, longevity, education, and everything else is not from “race” but from “racism”; indeed, the only significance of “race” is that it is the basis for racism.

Now there is a vaccine (actually, two, maybe soon three, vaccines) and administration of them is rolling out, especially in the wealthy countries that have acquired most of the doses (of course, in the US the Trump administration jeopardized this by passing on an opportunity to acquire more doses of the Pfizer vaccine, and this was certainly not to help out the poor parts of the world!) The debate now moves to who should get it first and in what order. In most places in the US, priority is going to health care workers and nursing home patients, which makes sense. They are, respectively, the most likely to contract and transmit the infection and the most likely to die from it. And then? Who? Those with the highest risk or those with the best connections? In many hospitals we hear reports of the C-suite executives (the “front office”) being at the front of the line for vaccine, despite the fact that they do no health care. Nice of them to want to “model” behavior, but the vaccine should go first to those who see patients. The priority should be those who not only interact with the public, but who cannot do their jobs if they don’t actually show up for work, and among those, people who would be the worst off if they lost their jobs (and those who have already been laid off but might be able to come back and begin working again). The last would be those who can continue to work from home, or are retired without major health risks, and can continue to isolate themselves.

Another major group that is finally getting some media attention, even if it is unlikely to get much vaccine, is the incarcerated population. The AP reports that “1 in 5 prisoners in the US has had COVID-19, 1,700 have died”. This could be predicted; it is a group crowded together, unable to isolate, often with pre-existing conditions, and essentially without agency – they have to do what they are told. There are, broadly, two reasons for immunizing them. The first is human – they are human, and they are at very high risk, and they are already being punished; they should not be further punished by getting this disease. The second is practical; prisoners are not, actually, entirely separate from the rest of the population. In addition to guards and others who move between the inside and the outside, many prisoners are released; this is most especially true for jails, where the length of stay is short (usually awaiting a court appearance for those who cannot post bond), and thus is really part of the community from which inmates come – and go back to. Nathaniel Lash makes this case convincingly in the New York Times Sunday Review, “The coronavirus has found a safe harbor”. For example,

Cook County Jail was the site of the largest detected outbreak in the country early in the pandemic. In recent weeks, it has exceeded that — there were 340 active cases among inmates on Dec. 16. The population, meanwhile, has returned to levels typical before the pandemic, about 5,500 people.

We should have fewer people in jail.  It is outrageous that people are incarcerated because they cannot pay bond, overt discrimination against the poor, and cannot afford to support the very politically powerful bail-bond industry. This was true before COVID, and is more true now. ‘“There’s no question with a new peak in infections that we have to be decarcerating now,” said Dr. Emily Wang, the director of Yale School of Medicine’s Health Justice Lab. “If we don’t have larger-scale decarceration efforts, we won’t control Covid.”’ The answer is bail reform that corrects these inequities – vicious inequities with frequently fatal outcomes. But the opposition continues to cloak itself in the mantle of morality rather than greed, public safety rather than racism. ‘“We’re seeing the extent of the opposition to bail reform: They so strongly oppose it they will do it in the face of a pandemic,” said Andre Segura, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union in Texas.’

The US incarcerates more people than anywhere in the world, a lot for relatively minor drug offenses. This does not prevent crime, especially violent crime, and it continues to rise even as crime rates decrease. In 2020 it is out of control, it is inhumane, and it is a significant cause of the spread of COVID. 

We need to get the vaccine out there soon, especially to those at highest risk of both dying and transmitting it to others. Clearly, the incarcerated population must be included.

 

 

 

Health Workers and Our Wars

.
This guest column is by Seiji Yamada, MD, a family physician, Associate Professor of Complementary and Alternative Medicine at the University of Hawai’i John A. Burns School of Medicine, and one of my mentors. This essay is an expansion of the one that was published in the AAMC journal Academic Medicine, chosen as one of the five best responses to the question put forth by editor Steven Kanter “How can academic medicine respond to peace-building efforts worldwide?”. Dr. Yamada’s original essay, “Academic medicine should start at home”, is at http://journals.lww.com/academicmedicine/Fulltext/2009/11000/Academic_Medicine_Should_Start_at_Home.18.aspx

Health Workers and Our Wars

What is the responsibility of American health workers with regard to our nation’s wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan? As Americans, our primary responsibility should be to influence the actions of our own government. As health workers, our expertise is in the realm of morbidity and mortality, encompassing the direct effects of violence as well as the indirect effects arising from the collapse of health services, poor access to water and food, and damage to infrastructure, economies, and societies. Thus, we should monitor our government’s actions, apply the scientific methods at our disposal, apply the moral and ethical principles to which we subscribe, formulate and recommend policy, and disseminate our findings to the people. In a democracy, the citizenry would then determine the course of action.

During this decade, our nation has been responsible for invading and occupying two countries halfway around the globe—Afghanistan since 2001 and Iraq since 2003. In the case of Iraq, the invasion of 2003 was preceded by comprehensive economic sanctions, which hampered the rebuilding of its infrastructure after the Gulf War of 1991. The consequences included childhood deaths, mental illness, juvenile delinquency, begging and prostitution, as well as cultural and scientific impoverishment.[1]

In 2002-03, the American people were not convinced by the Bush administration that war on Iraq was justified. However, despite massive demonstrations against the war prior to its launch, the intellectual classes, the corporate media, and our elected representatives went along with the administration. Democracy failed us in this respect. Prior to the war, we health workers should have been recounting the health toll of the First Gulf War and the sanctions regime. With its onset, we should have been disseminating the images and recounting the narratives of casualties of the war.[2] As it progressed, we should have been acutely interested in the number of casualties caused by the war. The best estimates for deaths among Iraqis are those of the July 2006 epidemiological survey that reported 655,000 deaths as a consequence of war.[3] This study did not distinguish among civilians, military, and irregular combatants. While its authors have been criticized for breaches in the non-identification of participants, the study is nevertheless considered the most accurate estimate.[4]

Insofar as we have failed to pay attention to such findings, American health workers have failed its constituents.

At the mention of history or political economy, many health workers groan. We are not interested in politics, they say. But unreflective citizens repeat the blather that they are fed by the corporate media. We need advocate for the cause of health—in particular for the health of those whose voices are otherwise unheard, whose deaths are otherwise uncounted, unmourned, unopposed, and unorganized against. In order to do so, our analysis must be geographically broad and historically deep, as Paul Farmer urges us.

As the United States pulls its troops out of Iraq and sends them to Afghanistan, as our military wields drones called Predator and Reaper in Pakistan, we should concern ourselves with whether the cause of peace is thereby served by such acts. Our commander-in-chief is apparently now reflecting upon whether to double down (again) in Afghanistan and pursue counterinsurgency, as urged upon him by his general in the theater.[5]

Apparently, “counterinsurgency” no longer connotes Vietnam or Central America.[6] But the “clear and hold” strategy utilized late in the Vietnam War was characterized by indiscriminate shelling and bombing of villages[7] and ran concurrently with the Phoenix program of torture and assassination.[8] Extrajudicial killings in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan are now being carried out by the CIA by missile attacks by drones, with the deaths of many innocents.[9] Of 701 people killed in 60 attacks in FATA between January 2008 and April 2009, fourteen were suspected militants.[10]

The British and the Soviets failed in their attempts to militarily control Afghanistan, while inflicting untold casualties on the populace. The Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan proved to be its Vietnam. One would think that our own country would not repeat its mistakes in Vietnam, but our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan’s go on. As American health workers, we must concern ourselves with the morbidity and mortality caused by our own government’s actions. Let us get to work.

References

[1] Save the Children UK. Iraq sanctions: humanitarian implications and options for the future. Available at: (http://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/170/41947.html). Accessed July 21, 2009
[2] Yamada S, Fawzi MC, Maskarinec GG, Farmer PE. Casualties: narrative and images of the war on Iraq. Int J Health Serv. 2006; 36(2):401-15
[3] Burnham G, Lafta R, Doocey S, Roberts L. Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey. Lancet 2006; 368: 1421–28.

[4] Tapp C, Burkle FM, Wilson K, et al. Iraq War mortality estimates. Conflict & Health 2008;2:1-13.

[5] Filkins D. Stanley McChrystal’s long war. New York Times Magazine, Oct 18, 2009.

[6] Parry R. Bush’s death squads. In These Times, Jan 17, 2005. Available at (http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/1872/). Accessed Jan 23, 2005.

[7] Steinglass M. Vietnam and victory. Boston Globe, Dec 18, 2005. Available at (http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/12/18/vietnam_and_victory/). Accessed Sep 27, 2009.

[8] Chomsky N, Herman ES. The Washington connection and third world fascism. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1979.

[9] Mayer J. The predator war. New Yorker, Oct 26, 2009. Available at (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/10/26/091026fa_fact_mayer). Accessed Nov 15, 2009.

[10] Ahmad MI. Pakistan creates its own enemy. Le Monde Diplomatique. Nov 2009. Available at (http://mondediplo.com/2009/11/02pakistan). Accessed Nov 5, 2009.