Important context.

"Look, we didn't pay much attention to the people who probably suffered the most, so by that study, we're fine!"

Hi! I work in this fucking field (psychiatric epidemiology). What's really weird about that review article is that their results actually do show significant increases in mental health symptoms, particularly among women, parents, and sexual minorities. They shouldn't have reported "minimal" impacts.

They also mention a decrease in suicide rates and use that as evidence of no mental health impact. This is true, but it's pretty well acknowledged that even though certain high-risk behaviors (suicide, alcohol misuse, drunk driving) decreased during this period due to quarantine, that doesn't mean mental health improved.

There are a bunch of other issues with their methods (it's less that they didn't look at vulnerable groups and more that they ignored how different the various groups were) but yeah there's a ton of research indicating mental health got worse during the pandemic.

BRFSS is an annual national survey of 400,000 U.S. adults. The Household Pulse Survey is a monthly survey of 75,000 U.S. adults. It started in 2020 to measure pandemic-related impacts. Those are basically the largest, most accurate datasets available on this topic. A study comparing these two datasets found the prevalence of poor mental health among U.S. adults increased from 33% in 2018 to 58% in spring of 2020 (Swaziek & Wozniak, 2020). Another study looking at clinically significant anxiety and depression in those two datasets found that prevalence was 10.9% in 2018-2019 vs 26.4% in 2020-2021 (Kessler et al., 2021).

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Reddit’s nursing forum makes for some pretty grim reading.

You may or may not have already watched the latest Ontario Government announcement where they just gave police the power to do random checks on pedestrians and pull over anyone driving to ensure that they are leaving their house for a necessary reason. If people don’t give their address and why they’re out they will get fined $750.

This will disproportionately affect Black people and people of colour. In this broadcast they also all but explicitly encouraged people to call the cops on their neighbours breaking protocol. DO NOT CALL THE COPS ON YOUR BLACK NEIGHBOURS.

[Image of text on a screen.
Black Ontarians can contact BLAC if they experience issues with the police or are in need of legal services during this stay at home order.

Phone: 1-877-736-9406
Email: info@blacklegalactioncentre.ca
Website: www.blacklegalactioncentre.ca /End image]

one of the most upsetting new covid regulations. but some departments have said they will NOT be conducting random stops despite the new rules so check this article to see if your local police have done so yet

https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5991872

stay safe everyone, and I will repeat the above statement DO NOT CALL THE COPS ON YOUR NEIGHBOURS OF COLOUR

Another resource I've found offering legal assistance to those who have been charged and/or ticketed.

Since then, the Ontario government has walked this back

In a statement Saturday, Solicitor General Sylvia Jones said officers will no longer have the right to stop any pedestrian or vehicle to ask why they are out or request their home address.

“If a police officer or other provincial offences officer has reason to suspect that you are participating in an organized public event or social gathering, they may require you to provide information to ensure you are complying with restrictions,” Jones said

“Every individual who is required to provide a police officer or other provincial offences officer with information shall promptly comply.”

The CCLA has also paused their court challenges following the announcement

Before the changes were made, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) issued a statement Saturday saying it had retained counsel and was preparing to go to court in the coming days to challenge Friday’s announced regulations.

But following the amendments to the regulations by the solicitor general Saturday night, the CCLA said it would “take yes for an answer and put this legal challenge on pause” as the revised order “restores an investigative detention standard for police stops.”

the reason the picture looks like that is likely because this particular bot utilizes machine learning to generate images of humans, but due to the pandemic, a lot of the images added to it’s database are of humans wearing masks, and they’re not marked as a separate category from humans WITHOUT masks, so the bot thinks that humans look like… this.

It’s EXTRA funny because the people who run the Facebook account (who I assume programmed the bot?) now sell masks that look like this

As someone who works in retail, let me tell you that it is exactly like this. Its been over a year of this pandemic and people still do shit like this all the time.

I can’t tell you how much I’ve wanted to yank people’s mask to cover their damn faces. Especially the nimrods that are walking around with their flipping noses hanging out

Left to die

Particularly appalling that they did this in the dead of winter, when people especially need housing.