Image source, Clifford Rodrigues/V's Punjabi Grill
The restaurant says some people have since returned to the restaurant to eat since they received their vaccination
23 March 2024, 07:08 GMT
A restaurant that was transformed into a vaccination centre during the pandemic has said it is still getting back on its feet.
One of the owners of V's Punjabi Grill, Clifford Rodrigues, said business had seen a decline in the four years since the first lockdown.
V's Punajbi Grill in Gravesend used an outdoor marquee to help deliver vaccines.
Mr Rodrigues said some people had returned to the restaurant to eat after receiving their vaccination there.
Raj Chopra, the other co-owner, turned the restaurant into a vaccine centre after his father, Jagtar Chopra, became unwell with Covid in December 2020.
The centre opened in January 2022 and they delivered vaccines to 10,000 people.
Mr Rodrigues said it had been difficult to recover since the lockdowns.
He said: "It has taken a long while to recover from the last few years.
"Things had been beginning to look good at the end of last year but then it has declined at the start of this year.
"It has been difficult to attract new customers, but if you have a product of real quality then people will bring new people to you."
Image source, Clifford Rodrigues/V's Punjabi Grill
The centre opened in January 2022 and they jabbed 10,000 people
He added that some people had less money to spend now than they did before the pandemic.
Some businesses can rely on e-sales and web sales, but food is where the money is. If people are not buying food, then it is difficult to survive in this game, he said.
(Photo by Don Arnold/Getty Images) Getty Images
The CDC recently eliminated isolation periods for people ill and likely infectious from Covid. Their Healthcare Infection Control Advisory Committee drafted guidelines weakening infection precautions, particularly regarding masking. Fortunately, after a wave of public criticism, the guidelines were sent back to HICPAC for revision.
People are increasingly left to their own devices to protect themselves against infection. So, what can you do? Mask and improve ventilation. Uniformly, wearing a well-fitting, effective respirator, such as an N95 certified by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health or an elastomeric respirator, is the top recommendation. KF94 masks, the Korean standard, are preferred by many because, while not quite as protective, they use ear loops rather than over-the-head straps and dont fit as tightly. KN95s meet the Chinese standards, but there were more problems with counterfeiting. Project N95 was a nonprofit I (and many) relied on because they carefully vetted their products. They have maintained a list of previously vetted products on that site, although they are no longer supplying masks.
In terms of ventilation, there was a useful webinar recently, Indoor Air and Infectious Disease Transmission, from the University of Toronto. It is now available online. I turned to speaker Sarah Haines, Ph.D., an expert there in building engineering, for more information. Her strongest recommendation was to add a portable air cleaner to your workspace, if possible. The Clean Air Delivery Rate, or CADR, is sometimes listed and might influence your product choice.
Haines noted that the CDC recommends schools have five air changes per hour. She suggested that parents might check with the school maintenance and inquire how often the system is tested or monitored to ensure it is working properly. Also, ask what kind of filters are being used. MERV13 is considered ideal now, but not all systems can handle it. The most thought-provoking point that Haines raised was, How do we rectify this by increasing these air exchange rates, but also making sure that our energy usage doesn't go up? Because contributing a large amount of CO2, will almost certainly add considerable heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the biosphere.
Jonathan Rosen, an industrial hygiene consultant, furthered the discussion of how an individual might assess the safety of their environment. Rosen reiterated that a problem with HICPAC is their initial decision that surgical masks are equivalent to respirators, noting that CDC has published documents and supported research for decades that show that that's absolutely incorrect. It flies in the face of federal standards that require respirator manufacturers to do testing. Rosen is not a fan of the CDCs dropping isolation, either. The first step around TB that I learned was early identification and isolation. That was our motto. And it should be the motto around any infectious disease.
Rosen emphasized some of the practical difficulties in assessing buildings. So if you're a small business or even a health care facility, where are you going to get the resources? Where are you going to get the expertise to evaluate your current ventilation? Rosen said, If you're a healthcare administrator, or union leader, you can be trained to do some elemental things, but that you really need an expert to be involved. One small thing an individual can do to improve ventilation is to make sure [exhaust] fans are set to the On position, not automatic, so that they are running continuously.
Chang-Yu Wu is the Chair of the Department of Chemical, Environmental and Materials Engineering at University of Miami. He added another perspective on what people might focus on to improve safety. Its advantageous to employers to make a safer work environment. Wu noted, If their employees are out sick, and they lose productivity, that's something they want to avoid. He said considerable research shows that improving ventilation reduces lost time from sick days.
CO2 monitors can be a valuable proxy for how good the ventilation is in a given space. Some businesses (e.g., restaurants and concert venues) had monitors that prominently displayed CO2 levels. Quartz magazine interviewed Yuguo Li, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Hong Kong, who strongly favored the idea that governments mandate real-time monitoring and display of CO2 levels. They also note that Belgium is the one country that enacted a law that requires public indoor spaces (gyms, restaurants, etc.) to display the levels. Wu noted that masks and CO2 monitors are considered socially acceptable in some parts of Europe and much of Asia.
Clearly, masking for the public good and prominent displays of CO2 levels, are not the case here in the U.S., where You do you increasingly seems to be the norm. Perhaps businesses might look more closely at the economic benefits of improving ventilation to retain staff and productivity.
A report from the University of Southern California last year suggested that the economic toll of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. will reach US$14 trillion by the end of the year. The toll is twice the size of that of the Great Recession of 2007-2009 and 20 times higher than the costs of the 9/11 terrorist attacksand this was without taking long Covid into account.
Richard Corsi, co-inventor with Jim Rosenthal of the Corsi-Rosenthal box, a DIY air filter, and now dean of engineering at the University of California Davis, also helped address the issue of cost and benefits with figures that are easier to relate to. Corsi said, We could put a CR Box in EVERY public school classroom in the United States at a cost of $160M/year. Thats less than one Venti American coffee per student per year (or 0.024% of the average cost of educating a child each year in the US). In doing this calculation I have used a bulk discount for filters, which lowers the cost of a CR box by about 35%. We could do the same with HEPA air cleaners at about twice the price - 1 Grande Mocha Cookie Crumble Frappuccino per student per year. He estimated the costs would be a bit higher for offices but still relatively low cost, given improved employee performance.
The best thing we can do to reduce risk? Let in fresh air.
Open the window to make the air flow
getty
In helping assess your risk, Corsi directed me to his Safe Air Space Estimator, which looks at factors such as room size, masking, and whether an infected person is a low or high emitter. Its quite interesting to use, adjusting the parameters listed below the graphic.
Even 20 years ago, a study showed that the risk of infection from airborne pathogens could be estimated by measuring the CO2 concentration and that increasing outdoor air supply can prevent transmission of respiratory infections. Have we learned nothing?
I am an Infectious Disease specialist and author ofResilience: One Family's Story of Hope and Triumph over Evil and of Conducting Clinical Research, the essential guide to the topic.
I survived 25 years in solo practice in rural Cumberland, Maryland, and now work part time. I especially love writing about ethical issues, and tilting at windmills as I advocate for social justice. When not slaving over hot patients, I can be found playing with photography, friends dogs, or in my garden. Follow on Twitter @drjudystone
News Release
Wednesday, March 20, 2024
NIH supported study shows that the virus that causes COVID-19 can damage the heart without directly infecting heart tissue.
SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, can damage the heart even without directly infecting the heart tissue, a National Institutes of Health-supported study has found. The research, published in the journal Circulation, specifically looked at damage to the hearts of people with SARS-CoV2-associated acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), a serious lung condition that can be fatal. But researchers said the findings could have relevance to organs beyond the heart and also to viruses other than SARS-CoV-2.
Scientists have long known that COVID-19 increases the risk of heart attack, stroke, and Long COVID, and prior imaging research has shown that over 50% of people who get COVID-19 experience some inflammation or damage to the heart. What scientists did not know is whether the damage occurs because the virus infects the heart tissue itself, or because of systemic inflammation triggered by the bodys well-known immune response to the virus.
This was a critical question and finding the answer opens up a whole new understanding of the link between this serious lung injury and the kind of inflammation that can lead to cardiovascular complications, said Michelle Olive, Ph.D., associate director of the Basic and Early Translational Research Program at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), part of NIH. The research also suggests that suppressing the inflammation through treatments might help minimize these complications.
To reach their findings, the researchers focused on immune cells known as cardiac macrophages, which normally perform a critical role in keeping the tissue healthy but can turn inflammatory in response to injury such as heart attack or heart failure. The researchers analyzed heart tissue specimens from 21 patients who died from SARS-CoV-2-associated ARDS and compared them with specimens from 33 patients who died from non-COVID-19 causes. They also infected mice with SARS-CoV-2 to follow what happened to the macrophages after infection.
In both humans and mice, they found the SARS-CoV-2 infection increased the total number of cardiac macrophages and also caused them to shift from their normal routine and become inflammatory.
When macrophages are no longer doing their normal jobs, which includes sustaining the metabolism of the heart and clearing out harmful bacteria or other foreign agents, they weaken the heart and the rest of the body, said Matthias Nahrendorf, M.D., Ph.D., professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School and senior author on the study.
The researchers then designed a study in mice to test whether the response they observed happened because SARS-CoV-2 was infecting the heart directly, or because the SARS-CoV-2 infection in the lungs was severe enough to render the heart macrophages more inflammatory. This study mimicked the lung inflammation signals, but without the presence of the actual virus. The result: even in the absence of a virus, the mice showed immune responses strong enough to produce the same heart macrophage shift the researchers observed both in the patients who died of COVID-19 and the mice infected with SARS-CoV-2 infection.
What this study shows is that after a COVID infection, the immune system can inflict remote damage on other organs by triggering serious inflammation throughout the body and this is in addition to damage the virus itself has directly inflicted on the lung tissue, said Nahrendorf. These findings can also be applied more generally, as our results suggest that any severe infection can send shockwaves through the whole body.
The research team also found that blocking the immune response with a neutralizing antibody in the mice stopped the flow of inflammatory cardiac macrophages and preserved cardiac function. While they have yet to test this in humans, Nahrendorf said a treatment like this could be used as a preventive measure to help COVID-19 patients with pre-existing conditions, or people who are likely to have more severe outcomes from SARS-CoV-2 associated ARDS.
Funding: This study was supported by NHLBI grants: HL139598, HL142494, HL155097, and HL149647.
About the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI): NHLBI is the global leader in conducting and supporting research in heart, lung, and blood diseases and sleep disorders that advances scientific knowledge, improves public health, and saves lives. For more information, visit www.nhlbi.nih.gov.
About the National Institutes of Health (NIH): NIH, the nation's medical research agency, includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the primary federal agency conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and is investigating the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit www.nih.gov.
NIHTurning Discovery Into Health
Grune J, Bajpai G, Ocak PT, et al. Virus-induced ARDS causes cardiomyopathy through eliciting inflammatory responses in the heart. Circulation. 2024. doi:10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.123.066433.
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miflippo / iStock
In its most recent guidelines on the use of over-the-counter (OTC) drugs for COVID-19, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that mildly ill patients can relieve symptoms such as fever and sore throat with acetaminophen or ibuprofen, but a team led by Florida Atlantic University (FAU) researchers says it's not that simple..
In a review in the American Journal of Medicine, the investigators conclude that the decision to take acetaminophen (eg, Tylenol), aspirin, or ibuprofen (eg, Motrin, Advil) should be done on an individual basis under the guidance of a clinician.
This is because the drugs aren't risk-free, with overuse of acetaminophen tied to irreversible liver damage, liver failure, the need for liver transplant, and kidney damage, the authors noted.
While aspirin's anti-inflammatory properties may be useful in treating moderate to severe COVID-19, it carries the risk of bleeding, especially in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. This is of particular concern in COVID-19, which may itself lead to bleeding and clotting abnormalities.
Compared with aspirin, ibuprofen, naproxen (eg, Aleve), and other non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) have greater adverse-event profiles, namely for gastroenteritis (inflammation of the GI tract) and peptic ulcers. As with acetaminophen, long-term use of these drugs can lead to liver and kidney toxicity.
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America is in a funk, and no one seems to know why. Unemployment rates are lower than theyve been in half a century and the stock market is sky-high, but poll after poll shows that voters are disgruntled. President Joe Bidens approval rating has been hovering in the high 30s. Americans satisfaction with their personal livesa measure that usually dips in times of economic uncertaintyis at a near-record low, according to Gallup polling. And nearly half of Americans surveyed in January said they were worse off than three years prior.
Experts have struggled to find a convincing explanation for this era of bad feelings. Maybe its the spate of inflation over the past couple of years, the immigration crisis at the border, or the brutal wars in Ukraine and Gaza. But even the people who claim to make sense of the political world acknowledge that these rational factors cant fully account for Americas national malaise. We believe thats because theyre overlooking a crucial factor.
Four years ago, the country was brought to its knees by a world-historic disaster. COVID-19 hospitalized nearly 7 million Americans and killed more than a million; its still killing hundreds each week. It shut down schools and forced people into social isolation. Almost overnight, most of the country was thrown into a state of high anxietythen, soon enough, grief and mourning. But the country has not come together to sufficiently acknowledge the tragedy it endured. As clinical psychiatrists, we see the effects of such emotional turmoil every day, and we know that when its not properly processed, it can result in a general sense of unhappiness and angerexactly the negative emotional state that might lead a nation to misperceive its fortunes.
The pressure to simply move on from the horrors of 2020 is strong. Who wouldnt love to awaken from that nightmare and pretend it never happened? Besides, humans have a knack for sanitizing our most painful memories. In a 2009 study, participants did a remarkably poor job of remembering how they felt in the days after the 9/11 attacks, likely because those memories were filtered through their current emotional state. Likewise, a study published in Nature last year found that peoples recall of the severity of the 2020 COVID threat was biased by their attitudes toward vaccines months or years later.
From the May 2021 issue: You wont remember the pandemic the way you think you will
When faced with an overwhelming and painful reality like COVID, forgetting can be usefuleven, to a degree, healthy. It allows people to temporarily put aside their fear and distress, and focus on the pleasures and demands of everyday life, which restores a sense of control. That way, their losses do not define them, but instead become manageable.
But consigning painful memories to the River Lethe also has clear drawbacks, especially as the months and years go by. Ignoring such experiences robs one of the opportunity to learn from them. In addition, negating painful memories and trying to proceed as if everything is normal contorts ones emotional life and results in untoward effects. Researchers and clinicians working with combat veterans have shown how avoiding thinking or talking about an overwhelming and painful event can lead to free-floating sadness and anger, all of which can become attached to present circumstances. For example, if you met your old friend, a war veteran, at a caf and accidentally knocked his coffee over, then he turned red and screamed at you, youd understand that the mishap alone couldnt be the reason for his outburst. No one could be that upset about spilled coffeethe real root of such rage must lie elsewhere. In this case, it might be untreated PTSD, which is characterized by a strong startle response and heightened emotional reactivity.
We are not suggesting that the entire country has PTSD from COVID. In fact, the majority of people who are exposed to trauma do not go on to exhibit the symptoms of PTSD. But that doesnt mean they arent deeply affected. In our lifetime, COVID posed an unprecedented threat in both its overwhelming scope and severity; it left most Americans unable to protect themselves and, at times, at a loss to comprehend what was happening. That meets the clinical definition of trauma: an overwhelming experience in which you are threatened with serious physical or psychological harm.
Read: Why are people nostalgic for early-pandemic life?
Traumatic memories are notable for how they alter the ways people recall the past and consider the future. A recent brain-imaging study showed that when people with a history of trauma were prompted to return to those horrific events, a part of the brain was activated that is normally employed when one thinks about oneself in the present. In other words, the study suggests that the traumatic memory, when retrieved, came forth as if it were being relived during the study. Traumatic memory doesnt feel like a historical event, but returns in an eternal present, disconnected from its origin, leaving its bearer searching for an explanation. And right on cue, everyday life offers plenty of unpleasant things to blame for those feelingserrant friends, the price of groceries, or the leadership of the country.
To come to terms with a traumatic experience, as clinicians know, you need to do more than ignore or simply recall it. Rather, you must rework the disconnected memory into a context, and thereby move it firmly into the past. It helps to have a narrative that makes sense of when, how, and why something transpired. For example, if you were mugged on a dark street and became fearful of the night, your therapist might suggest that you connect your general dread with the specifics of your assault. Then your terror would make sense and be restricted to that limited situation. Afterward, the more you ventured out in the dark, perhaps avoiding the dangerous block where you were jumped, the more you would form new, safe memories that would then serve to mitigate your anxiety.
Many people dont regularly recall the details of the early pandemichow walking down a crowded street inspired terror, how sirens wailed like clockwork in cities, or how one had to worry about inadvertently killing grandparents when visiting them. But the feelings that that experience ignited are still very much alive. This can make it difficult to rationally assess the state of our lives and our country.
One remedy is for leaders to encourage remembrance while providing accurate and trustworthy information about both the past and the present. In the early days of the pandemic, President Donald Trump mishandled the crisis and peddled misinformation about COVID. But with 2020 a traumatic blur, Trump seems to have become the beneficiary of our collective amnesia, and Biden the repository for lingering emotional discontent. Some of that misattribution could be addressed by returning to the shattering events of the past four years and remembering what Americans went through. This process of recall is emotionally cathartic, and if its done right, it can even help to replace distorted memories with more accurate ones.
President Biden invited the nation to grieve together in 2021, when American death counts reached 500,000, and again in 2022, when they surpassed 1 million. In his 2022 State of the Union address, he rightly acknowledged that we meet tonight in an America that has lived through two of the hardest years this nation has ever faced, before urging Americans to move forward safely. But in the past two years, he, like almost everyone else, has largely tried to proceed as if everyone is back to normal. Meanwhile, American minds and hearts simply arent readywhether we realize it or not.
Read: The Biden administration killed Americas collective pandemic approach
Perhaps Biden and his advisers fear that reminding voters of such a dark time would create more trouble for his presidency. And yet, our work leads us to believe that the effect would be exactly the opposite. Rituals of mourning and remembrance help people come together and share in their grief so that they can return more clear-eyed to face daily life. By prompting Americans to remember what we endured together, paradoxically, Biden could help free all of us to more fully experience the present.
Feverpitched / Getty Images
The COVID-19 pandemic sent a painful shockwave through both the US and the global economy. Many people were forced to stay home and a record 9.6 million American workers (ages 16 to 64) lost their jobs as a result of business downsizing and closures, according to Pew Research Center.
Check Out: Average Cost of Groceries Per Month How Much Should You Be Spending? Read Next: 5 Genius Things All Wealthy People Do With Their Money
To make matters worse, the cost of housing, utilities, groceries, and more has reached new heights. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics indicated that the shock to food and energy prices, supply chain issues, and an increased demand for products all contributed to the sharp rise in inflation.
Fast forward four years and most Americans are still struggling.
Learn More: Frugal People Love the 6 to 1 Grocery Shopping Method Heres Why It Works
Sponsored: Protect Your Wealth With A Gold IRA. Take advantage of the timeless appeal of gold in a Gold IRA recommended by Sean Hannity.
Business Insider reported that the liquid assets of the lower 80% of American households, based on income, have dropped below their levels in March 2020 at the onset of the pandemic, taking inflation into account. The large majority of American households are rapidly depleting the excess savings they had accumulated during the COVID-19 pandemic, with only 20% above board.
At the same time, the bottom 40% of households experienced an 8% drop in their savings, while the middle class, which makes up the next 40%, has seen their cash savings fall below pre-COVID levels in the last quarter. Contrarily, the wealthiest 20% of households still maintain cash savings at approximately 8% above pre-pandemic levels.
Ultimately, with inflation taken into account, the majority of Americans are worse off financially compared with before the start of the pandemic. The Federal Reserve aims for a 2% annual inflation rate but has yet to bring inflation back down. Its unclear at this point when inflation will level out to pre-pandemic level and costs will drop for lifes necessities.
Story continues
More From GOBankingRates
This article originally appeared on GOBankingRates.com: 80% of Americans Are Still Struggling Financially 4 Years After COVID-19
Exactly four years ago today, Boris Johnson announced the UK's first COVID lockdown, ordering people to "stay at home".
Working from home became our reality and people were separated from their loved ones, while frontline workers tackled a new and unknown virus.
With a public inquiry under way into how the UK approached COVID-19, many have criticised when and how we went in and out of lockdowns.
So if another pandemic struck, would we have to lock down again - and how would it be different?
Sky News asks scientists and disaster experts whether we would ever be told to stay at home again, what lockdown measures would involve - and whether the public would comply.
When could a pandemic happen again?
COVID has often been referred to as a "once in a lifetime" event. But with more than six million estimated COVID deaths globally, the last comparable pandemic only emerged four decades ago.
HIV/AIDs was first identified in 1981 and has killed 36 million people worldwide. Prior to that, the Hong Kong flu pandemic in 1968 caused about a million deaths, and the Spanish flu of 1918 50 million.
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Scientists warn global warming and deforestation are also making it increasingly likely that a viral or bacterial agent will "jump" from animals to humans and cause another pandemic.
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"We're creating a situation that is rife for outbreaks," says Dr Nathalie MacDermott, clinical lecturer in infectious diseases at King's College London.
"I know that COVID was very hard for people and we want to believe we can just go back to normal and I understand that entirely.
"But the next pandemic is around the corner - it might be two years, it could be 20 years, it could be longer - but we can't afford to let our guards down. We need to stay vigilant, prepared and ready to make sacrifices again."
Dr MacDermott explains that by cutting down trees in the Amazon and parts of Africa, animals and insects are moving closer to people's homes.
And with rising temperatures, outbreaks of mosquito and tick-borne viruses such as dengue, chikungunya, and Crimean Congo haemorrhagic fever (CCHF) are happening in parts of Europe rarely seen before.
"As temperatures increase around the world, even the UK will become an area where it's possible for those types of mosquitoes to live," she says.
How long would lockdowns last?
While there were three lockdowns in England, each several months long, Professor Stephen Griffin, virologist at the University of Leeds, argues there should have "only ever been one".
"Lockdown was an extreme reaction to a situation that had already got out of control," he says.
But if there was investment in mitigations like air ventilation in public buildings and generic vaccines and antiviral drugs that could be adapted at speed, he argues, lockdowns would be shorter and less severe.
Dr MacDermott says that until the government, scientists and healthcare workers know more about an emerging virus and how it spreads, "a lockdown would be inevitable to some degree".
Professor Adam Kucharski, co-director of the Centre for Epidemic Preparedness and Response at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, says that if you can't contain severe infections and eliminate them completely - like Ebola in Africa and SARS-1 in East Asia - the only way to prevent a large disease epidemic is by heavily reducing transmission until a vaccine or treatment make the population less susceptible.
In the UK, it was eight months before the first COVID vaccine was administered and more than a year before it was rolled out more widely.
Would we be banned from socialising - and would schools shut?
Professor Lucy Easthope, expert in mass fatalities and pandemics at the University of Bath, says she would want to see what she calls a "nuanced quarantine".
"Lockdown is never a word I would have used - it's only really associated with things like school shootings," she says.
With regards to restrictions on socialising, she stresses how important "community and connection" are for disaster planning.
The 2016 UK flu plan says public gatherings are "an important indicator of normality" and that "there is little direct evidence of the benefits of cancelling such events".
Authorities should immediately prioritise creating "large ventilated safe spaces" for children, pregnant women, and vulnerable people, she says.
This would involve places like cinemas, leisure centres, and town halls being repurposed as community centres.
She adds the importance of people having a "purpose", so being able to meet people socially outside should be allowed as soon as the nature of the virus is clear.
Similarly, pubs, bars, cafes, and restaurants should be allowed to open outdoors as soon as possible, she says.
While the flu plan does advise schools in infected areas to shut, contingency measures have been suggested for temporary marquees to host lessons - or just spaces for children to go.
"Lots of children don't have gardens, so organised ways of getting them outside is important," Professor Easthope says.
"For the marquees for education, you might expect to see three or four schools consolidated together."
Another 'pingdemic'?
The government spent billions on its test and trace system, which included testing centres, the coronavirus helpline, manual contact tracing by what was then Public Health England, and the NHS COVID app.
While rapid tests are important to stop people from spreading the virus further, and the app "had a lot of promise", more innovative digital contact tracing may be required to avoid relying on another lockdown, Professor Kucharski says.
"The pingdemic was to some extent the NHS app doing what it was designed to do," he says.
"But with the digital contact tracing infrastructure that some Asian countries had, you can limit disruption to those people at higher risk in a particular outbreak rather than reverting to blanket measures."
He cautions that it would require "hard conversations" around privacy, but options include using smartphone location and debit card transactions to link people to identified cases.
In some countries, leaving quarantine would see people's phones automatically notify tracers of potential further spread.
Would the public comply?
When public health experts gave evidence to the COVID inquiry last year, they said they were wrong to assume the public would soon tire of a lockdown and suffer "behavioural fatigue".
Social psychologist and crowd behaviour expert Chris Cocking says it was a lack of trust in government that caused compliance rates to fall - not simply getting "tired" of restrictions.
"The overall message should be positive," the principal lecturer at the University of Brighton says. "Because if another situation arose, where it became necessary, people would be likely to comply."
Keep up with all the latest news from the UK and around the world by following Sky News
He says if another lockdown was needed, the current Tory government would either have to minimise scandals over their own rule-breaking - or change hands completely to keep the public on board.
He adds: "If we had a new government, people would be far more likely to have faith in them because they would be less likely to say, 'it's the same bunch as before - why should we do it again?'
"And if they put more effort into not having situations like 'Partygate' or Dominic Cummings driving to Barnard Castle, they could appeal to the public's shared sense of identity, and it would be possible for compliance rates to remain relatively high."
From COVID fines to arrests made during Black Lives Matter protests and the Sarah Everard vigil, Professor Easthope describes lockdown legislation as "definitely bad" and "cruelly applied".
Dr Cocking argues lockdown laws are largely irrelevant to people's decision to adhere to restrictions or not.
"It's not the laws in place, it's whether people psychologically identify with the need to comply," he says.
And for people who don't, engaging with each reason individually is important to avoid creating a mass movement of "lockdown sceptics".
"People might feel unable to comply with restrictions for lots of different reasons. But it's a real mistake to lump them all together because you then identify them all as part of the same group, which further alienates them from the authorities," Dr Cocking adds.
Would we be well enough prepared?
Four years before COVID, the UK had carried out secret pandemic preparedness exercises for both flu and coronavirus outbreaks.
A detailed report on the flu exercise was compiled, but public health officials have told the COVID inquiry that the coronavirus drill wasn't acted on.
According to Professors Kucharski and Easthope, the more extensive flu plan could be easily adapted.
"The separation of a flu plan from a coronavirus plan is nonsense," Professor Kucharski says.
"The characteristics of COVID were a lot like the sort of infection in a flu pandemic. It should have been a wider discussion about what the acceptable outcome was from the horrendous trade-offs we were going to have to make."
Read more: Doctors suing NHS over long COVID How widespread is COVID now?
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Professor Easthope says in the late 2010s, she and other emergency planners identified holes in infrastructure that meant the UK "wasn't ready for even a relatively manageable pandemic" in terms of health and social care. She also says stockpiles of PPE "failed" in 2017.
But she says the internet's capacity to cope with so many processes moving online is both "enabling and unifying".
"We just didn't know how well it would perform, but in the end, it was one of the reasons we didn't fall apart completely," she says.
A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson told Sky News: "Throughout the pandemic, the government acted to save lives and livelihoods, prevent the NHS being overwhelmed and deliver a world-leading vaccine rollout which protected millions of lives across the nation.
"We have always said there are lessons to be learnt from the pandemic and we are committed to learning from the COVID-19 inquiry's findings which will play a key role in informing the government's planning and preparations for the future. We will consider all recommendations made to the department in full."
Last year, German health minister Karl Lauterbach did something politicians almost never do unless theyve been caught with their pants down: He apologized. Closing schools for long periods during the COVID-19 pandemic, Lauterbach said, had been an unnecessary mistake.
Where is our Lauterbach?
Though President Joe Biden wasnt in office at the start of the pandemic, he and other prominent Democrats have had ample opportunities to account for their roles in a slow-motion disaster that began almost exactly four years ago, when schools closed temporarily in the earliest days of the coronavirus pandemic.
After what was supposed to be a merely temporary closure, New York City announced on March 23, 2020, that it was moving to remote learning for the rest of the year. That day, remote learning officially began in Washington, D.C., too, after days of haphazard experimentation with digital education. Similar experiments emerged across the country, as parents realizedwith dread, in many casesthat the societal disruption of the coronavirus was going to last.
Four years later, the wounds have not fully healed.
True, Republican resistance to masks and vaccines harmed and killed many more people than any policy embraced by liberals. But I dont think I am alone in expecting greater moral clarity from Biden than from Donald Trump. And when it comes to school, it is clear that Democrats have not truly reckoned with the decisions they made in 2020 and 2021.
Earlier this week, a data analysis by The New York Times summarized the effect of the closures that began four years ago: extended school closures did not significantly stop the spread of COVID, while the academic harms for children have been large and long-lasting. The longer schools stayed closed (or partly closed, with students only attending school in-person one or two days per week), the more children fell behind.
The devastating effects of remote learning are evident today in the absenteeism crisis, the teacher shortage, and the spike in mental illness among young adults.
This week, The Times also reported that city schools are grappling with a spike in discipline problems among children, evidence that the disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic are having lingering effects, educators and experts say. Its not just about test scores. Our children lost something essential because adults lacked the courage to do the right thing.
Thus, the deep bitterness many parents felt about having to play teacher for months on end. That bitterness manifested in the suburbs of Northern Virginia in Nov. 2021, helping Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, become the states next governor. And it is still there, waiting to surface in Nov. 2024.
I think parents who saw their children suffer from politics rather than scientific principles in making policy decisions still think about the prolonged school closures in the U.S., Monica Gandhi, a professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco who bravely called for schools to reopen long before many of her peers, wrote to me in an email.
Grievances tend to work on voters more than promises, I have found. The grievances of parentsmothers in suburban swing districts, for instancecould hurt Biden much the way they did former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, the presidents friend, when he ran confidently against the inexperienced Youngkin.
It should have never come to this. By summer 2020, we knew that children, for the most part, dont get especially sick with COVID-19. And around that time we also knew that schools were never the viral incubators some claimed they were bound to become. Studies from South Korea, the United Kingdom, and other countries confirmed as much. So did the safe reopening of schools in red states like Florida and Texas.
Somehow, evidence did not seem to matter. People who claimed to listen to the science turned away when the science said schools should reopen.
Liberals really poisoned the well when they decided to wage war against anyone who dared to make any public health calculations during the pandemic, despite the fact that such calculations were inevitable and necessary, wrote the perceptive writer Freddie deBoer in a recent Substack newsletter. The relentless braying about eugenics, the insistence that anyone who was not a [non-pharmaceutical intervention] maximalist hated the disabled and wanted them to die, contributed directly to the backlash that has resulted in so much COVID conspiracy insanity.
If Govs. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and Greg Abbott (R-TX) were reopening schools, then reopening schools had to be wrong, because DeSantis and Abbott did not trust the science and were xenophobic bigots to bootso the righteous thinking went at the time. To oppose them was to oppose everything wrong with America under Trump. So the schools stayed closed in most deep blue municipalities.
In a harrowing article for The New Yorker published in fall 2020, reporter Alec MacGillis bracingly revealed the scope of devastation remote learning brought to poor kids, especially poor kids of color.
Most chilling of all was the transparently disingenuous defense of school closures by Becky Pringle, head of the powerful National Education Association (NEA), of which First Lady Jill Biden is a member. Pringle preposterously told MacGillis that if schools reopened, some 50,000 children would die. But no news outlet fact-checked her. No one accused Pringle of peddling misinformation, the way they would have if a conservative had made so flagrantly baseless an assertion.
Somehow, evidence did not seem to matter. People who claimed to listen to the science turned away when the science said schools should reopen.
Amazingly, some union leaders continue to defend having closed down schools for months on end. I do believe it was the right decision, Jerry Jordan of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers told The Times this week. It is a defiant statement, and an indefensible one. And unless Democrats renounce it, they own it.
It is true that we did not know how serious the virus was at first, which justified closing schools and businesses. But a state of permanent emergency was unsustainable; once we learned how the virus behaved, we should have adjusted accordingly. Yet some experts continued to insist on masking outside and keeping schools closed.
Four years ago, we were lost in the fog of war. The fog was thick at first, but by May it did begin to lift. We started to understand the true threat of the virus, whom it harmed and for whom it was a very minor risk. Yet in many highly-populated jurisdictions governed by Democrats, nothing changed. It was almost as if they longed for the fog to stay.
Now, there ought to be some honest accountability. We dont need blue ribbon commissions or Capitol Hill hearings to relitigate how we responded to the pandemic. But we do need elected leaders to have the decency to admit their own mistakes.
The Buck Stops Here, said the famous sign on President Harry Trumans desk.
Where does the buck stop in 2024? Nobody owns their decisions or owns up to their mistakes. There is an almost Soviet avoidance of responsibility. This sure is awful, but its not my fault. That guy over there, he looks guilty. Off to the gulag!
If you ask the White House, they will tell you that Biden quickly got schools open in 2021. Thats true. Kind of.
But it took billions of federal stimulus dollars, and in many districts, unsatisfactory hybrid learning continued. Then, when the Delta variant came along in late 2021, many schools closed againwith an especially protracted refusal to return to the classroom by the teachers of Chicago, where in several months Democrats will hold their national convention.
I think an apology and acknowledgement of the mistakes Democrats made in this epidemic towards children would go a long way in helping their constituents forgive, Dr. Gandhi wrote to me.
There were plenty of things that Democrats got right about the pandemic. But nobody, anywhere, got it completely right. Not China, not California, not Florida, not Sweden. We know that now. Our political leaders should be brave enough to say it.
BOSTON (WWLP) Massachusetts businesswoman pleads guilty to submitting fraudulent COVID-19 loan applications.
A plea of guilty was entered by Vanessa Nixon, 45, of Framingham, for bank fraud. In February 2024, Nixon was charged with this crime.
Among Nixons businesses in Massachusetts were Mass Homes Investments LLC, Nixon Homes LTD, and Alpha Auto Body, Inc. As a result of her multiple fraudulent loan applications submitted to banks and the U.S. Government between April 2020 and November 2022, Nixon fabricated millions of dollars in business income through the Paycheck Protection Program and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan Program.
She also created fake tax documents to substantiate the fabricated business income and submitted them with loan applications. As a result, Nixon received more than $450,000 in loans, which were subsequently forgiven by banks and the Small Business Administration.
A conviction for bank fraud may result in a sentence of up to 30 years in prison, five years of supervised release, and a fine of up to $1 million.
Judge Indira Talwani of the U.S. Senior District Court scheduled the sentencing for June 26, 2024.
Kayleigh Thomas is a digital reporter who has been a part of the22Newsteam since 2022. Follow Kayleigh on X@kayleighcthomasand view herbioto see more of her work.
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