5 min ambulance ride is $1,238.00?!

PLEASE SHARE: I am a teacher with Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance. I had a 5 minute city ambulance ride where a male EMT mocked me and said, “You probably have anxiety not covid.”

I already knew I had covid since this was my second time to the ER. I could barely breathe, but in between my gasps for air, I tried to say, “I know I have covid.”

For this 5 minute ride, where I was mocked by a sexist EMT, I was charged $1,238. But since I had covid, I was supposed to be charged $0.

This is our terrible for profit healthcare system in the USA.

Can people please retweet my tweet to @bcbsIL? Just click here:
https://twitter.com/sarah4justice/status/1273302676239986688?s=21

Huge bill & sexism

I am a teacher with Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance. I had a 5 minute city ambulance ride where a male EMT mocked me and said, “You probably have anxiety not covid.”I already knew I had covid since this was my second time to the ER. I could barely breathe, but in between my gasps for air, I tried to say, “I know I have covid.”For this 5 minute ride, where I was mocked by a sexist EMT, I was charged $1,238. But since I had covid, I was supposed to be charged $0.This is our terrible for profit healthcare system in the USA.Can people please retweet my tweet to @bcbsIL? Just click here:

https://twitter.com/sarah4justice/status/1273302676239986688?s=21

For those that have recovered from covid, don’t over do it because YOU COULD RELAPSE. Luckily, studies show that people are NOT contagious when they relapse.

https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/coronavirus/dallas-woman-battling-coronavirus-again/2389265/

I also wonder if it’s problematic that she donated plasma 8x. Maybe she was left with not enough antibodies?

[A second positive test after a negative result may mean the virus is simply taking its time leaving the body, doctors said, and is no longer able to infect others.

“It’s possible that people could shed remnants of the virus for some period of time. That doesn’t mean anything is wrong with them or that they are contagious,” said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville.

McKee said her doctors believe the virus went dormant after her first round of coronavirus, then reemerged.

While scientists still do not know the long-term effects of the virus, some experts have cast doubt that re-testing positive after having tested negative means that the person is still contagious, NBC News reported.

A study of 285 COVID-19 patients in South Korea who tested positive after having appeared to recover could not find evidence that the patients were still contagious, with viral samples unable to thrive in a lab.

“What we’re finding more and more is that the fragments of virus that are being picked up on these swabs weeks later are not able to replicate,” Dr. Ania Wajnberg, associate director of medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, told NBC News. “They’re not live virus.”]

Diet Can Fight Diseases Linked to Poor COVID-19 Outcomes

https://www.pcrm.org/news/blog/diet-can-fight-diseases-linked-poor-covid-19-outcomes

“The statistics are grim. The American Heart Association reports that “data from the outbreak in Wuhan, China, shows a 10.5% death rate among people with COVID-19 who also have cardiovascular disease, 7.3% for those with diabetes, 6.3% for those with respiratory disease, 6% for those with high blood pressure and 5.6% for those with cancer.” Earlier research found that 99% of people who have died from COVID-19 in Italy had cancer, diabetes, or lung disease, and 76% had high blood pressure.”

Race and covid mortality

Some of this I agree with and some of it I don’t. They don’t talk about how structural racism affects Covid deaths enough.

https://shotwell.ca/posts/2020-05-23-race-and-covid/

“In a recent interview, Linda Villarosa outlines the three major causes that she and other public health researchers have identified as causes for the huge racial gap in Covid mortality:

1) Proximity to the virus:
Black people live and work in environments where the virus is difficult to escape. They are more likely to work in essential services where it is difficult to engage in social distancing, and they are more likely to live in inter-generational homes in densely populated areas. All of this leads to more contact with the virus; more contact leads to more infection, and more infection leads to more death.

2) Racial bias in healthcare:
Black people receive worse healthcare than white people. Black patients are less likely to be believed by physicians, essential interventions are more likely to be delayed, and resources tend to be allocated to white patients. Naturally, if you get worse healthcare because of your skin colour, your outcomes are going to be worse.

3) Pre-existing conditions:
For a variety of reasons, Black Americans have higher rates of conditions that make Covid-19 more dangerous. Rates of diabetes, hypertension, and asthma are all higher in Black communities, which leads to higher Covid-19 mortality.

4) The vitamin D model
I’ve been very interested in vitamin D deficiency as a potential cause of Covid-19 mortality because it’s one of the best treatment candidates for widespread use. Unlike other potential therapies, we already have a lot of vitamin D clinical research data and we know that it’s safe to consume prophylactically. Vitamin D would also go a long way to explain why people of colour are dying at such high rates in the northern hemisphere where sunlight is currently scarce, but not in equatorial or southern parts of the world where sunlight is currently abundant. While skin colour is not the only factor that changes serum vitamin D, and race is a social category that’s only loosely related to skin colour, it is the case that in most northern latitudes people with darker skin (tend to have lower vitamin D)[https://nutrition.bmj.com/content/early/2020/05/20/bmjnph-2020-000096#ref-13] levels in the winter.

Mendelian Randomization
A recent study provides a strong argument that the missing factor is vitamin D. The study uses a technique called mendelian randomisation, which requires a bit of explanation: In the ideal world, we would answer the question of whether vitamin D deficiency increases your risk of dying of Covid-19 by controlling for vitamin D in the model, but we don’t have information about everyone’s vitamin D levels. Mendelian randomization is the idea that if you have information about something that you know is related to the thing you wish you had data on, then you can include that as a proxy. In this case we know that people with darker skin tend to have lower vitamin D levels than people with lighter skin, and that that probably gets worse as you move north. The intuition here is that the skin’s ability to synthesize vitamin D is less important in Florida than Wisconsin because intense UVB radiation is abundant for most of the year. So this study uses race + latitude as a proxy for vitamin D levels.

The rules of mendelian randomization are that the randomizing factor can’t be directly associated with the outcome, and it can’t be associated with other explanatory factors.

Conclusion
To reiterate, this argument is not to dispute the factors that Villarosa proposes. None of the papers about vitamin D and Covid challenge the idea that healthcare bias, pre-existing conditions, and proximity to the virus are major causes of excess mortality, and in fact all of the data supports that conclusion. What this does challenge is the idea that that’s the whole story. It seems like excess Covid mortality among people with darker skin is not completely explained by socioeconomics, location, or pre-existing medical condition. And if that’s true, it’s good news because it means that there may be something we can do about it. Vitamin D is a good candidate for that missing piece because it helps to explain why latitude would increase the racial gap in Covid mortality.

CPS’ plan is to save money, NOT to save lives

https://chicago.suntimes.com/education/2020/6/12/21289859/cps-health-guidelines-safety-coronavirus-schools-masks-temperature-checks

I had covid horribly for 60+ days and NEVER had a recorded fever. Majority of people, especially kids are asymptomatic. This is NOT acceptable.

We have immune compromised students and staff. This is CPS’ way of finding the cheap way out by NOT reducing our class sizes, NOT hiring full time nurses or social workers in every school, NOT doubling custodians to clean the schools, NOT tripling cleaning supplies (our soap was always watered down and we never received disinfectant) and not providing PPE.

Cps even cut most schools’ budgets this year. When students and families die of covid, blood will be on the mayor’s hands.

‪Also, educators in CPS have higher rates of illnesses, such as diabetes, than the USA population. This puts them at risk.‬

‪Black people in Chicago are most at risk of dying from covid, so our black educators are in the greatest danger with CPS’ terrible reopening plan

“Everyone will be required to wear face coverings. Schools will be given a limited amount of coverings for students and staff members at the beginning of the year.”

This plan is terrible. CPS already admits that they won’t provide enough PPE for teachers and students to ensure a safe reopening. They are treating us like we are guinea pigs in their “experiment.”

If you want to read more about how horrifying covid is, read my blog. I couldn’t walk more than 2 steps for weeks and went to the ER 3x: CovidTeacher.com