A horrible side effect of the COVID pandemic is a shift of resources from the Before Times normal health/medical operations, tests and other actions used to combat ‘regular’ issues like childhood immunizations and other disease treatments to a fulll-throttle push to gain a handle on the coronavirus.
We could be in a world of hurt if this routine continues for much longer — kids get sick too quickly and shit-diseases we figured were eradicated due to vaccines — like measles and polio — will return probably with a vengeance.

I saw a headline about this a couple of days ago, but bypassed it for some other news-bait shit:

‘Menu of neglect’: the long-term health problems sidelined in US amid pandemic- scary figures on childhood immunizations, lead testing, STDs and addictions. By me and @JessicaGlenza https://t.co/KQfi3YKo2f

— Nina Lakhani (@ninalakhani) April 26, 2021

Story at the Guardian this morning:

“This is either the second or first worst pandemic in modern human history,” said Dr Howard Markel, a pandemic historian and pediatrician at the University of Michigan.
“We knew there would be repercussions and unintended consequences.”

Now, there is a “whole menu of neglect” to address as a national vaccine campaign allows people to slowly emerge from a year of lockdowns and social distancing.
“There is no historical precedent for this,” added Markel.

In the first few months of the pandemic alone, at least 400,000 children missed screenings for lead, a toxic heavy metal.
Doctors and nurses ordered 3m fewer vaccines for children and 400,000 fewer for measles specifically.

For the first time, clinics were forced to ration lab tests for sexually transmitted diseases as lab capacity and supplies were diverted to test for Covid-19.
Contact tracers were also redeployed from tracking chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis cases to finding people in contact with Covid-19 patients.

Data from one large commercial lab showed 669,000 fewer HIV tests were processed. Compared with 2019, the lab diagnosed nearly 5,000 fewer cases of HIV.
Delayed diagnosis can lead to people unwittingly transmitting the virus.

Last year, more than 87,000 Americans died of drug overdoses as substance abuse clinics shuttered — the highest death toll since the opioid epidemic began.
Some of those clinics never fully reopened, as funding dried up.

While some of these metrics have rebounded since the most severe lockdown in March and April 2020, most have failed to fully catch up as health services remain stretched due to ongoing Covid outbreaks and budget cuts.
Meanwhile millions of Americans have lost employer health insurance, slipped into poverty or had lives thrown into upheaval.

Importantly, experts warn that the pandemic is likely to widen health inequalities for those who already had disproportionately worse health — including racial and sexual minorities, the poor and the rural Americans.

“Just as this has accelerated all of the disruptive movements of American society, this has really exposed vulnerability based on poverty, poor access to healthcare, housing issues — the social determinants of health we’ve been talking about for years,” said Markel.

The abrupt arrival of COVID-19 and the shit its caused has f*cked the health-care apparatus stature in existence for a hundred years or more, and that ‘menu of neglect‘ has already pricked an uptick in deaths due to the overpowering stampede of pandemic scenarios and its corresponding medical needs.
Bad, baby, bad — via The New York Times last Friday:

A surge in deaths from the Covid-19 pandemic created the largest gap between the actual and expected death rate in 2020 — what epidemiologists call “excess deaths,” or deaths above normal.

Aside from fatalities directly attributed to Covid-19, some excess deaths last year were most likely undercounts of the virus or misdiagnoses, or indirectly related to the pandemic otherwise.
Preliminary federal data show that overdose deaths have also surged during the pandemic.

A New York Times analysis of U.S. death patterns for the past century shows how much 2020 deviated from the norm.

Since the 1918 pandemic, the country’s death rate has fallen steadily. But last year, the Covid-19 pandemic interrupted that trend, in spite of a century of improvements in medicine and public health.

In the first half of the 20th century, deaths were mainly dominated by infectious diseases. As medical advancements increased life expectancy, death rates also started to smooth out in the 1950s, and the mortality rate in recent decades — driven largely by chronic diseases — had continued to decline.

In 2020, however, the United States saw the largest single-year surge in the death rate since federal statistics became available.
The rate increased 16 percent from 2019, even more than the 12 percent jump during the 1918 flu pandemic.

In 2020, a record 3.4 million people died in the United States.
Over the last century, the total number of deaths naturally rose as the population grew. Even amid this continual rise, however, the sharp uptick last year stands out.

A nice video from Dr. John Campbell, a senior lecturer in Nursing studies at the University of Cumbria in the UK, on the terrible subject of ‘excess deaths’ and COVID:

Other than that, everything is just f*cking peachy…

(Illustration: Pablo Picasso’s ‘Self Portrait Facing Death‘ (June 30, 1972), was originally found here)