Thread:
I'm thinking about Tim Keller's influence.

There is the curious fact that Keller is well-regarded among the culture elite (or at least has not suffered the sort of vilification one might expect given his influence). How can we explain this?

A staple of anti-lockdown conspiracism in yoga/wellness is that public health measures are oppressive, authoritarian, and stifling what it means to be human. Masks suppress identity and speech. Vaccines assault the sovereign body. Influencers must rise up against tyranny! /1

Ironically, pandemic management in economies where yoga/wellness is lucrative has been a neoliberal, choose-your-own-adventure mess in which centre-right governments barter with public health to enact a patchwork of half-measures that punish the poor and marginalized. /2

The goal is not universal health rights, or protecting medical systems, or saving as many lives as possible. The goal is to return to business-as-usual, using public health as a pit stop on a productivity race off a cliff. The ice caps aren’t melting fast enough, I guess. /3

Right-leaning governments, like influencers, have assessed the COVID threat with the magical bias of limitless optimism. Then they work to normalize COVID casualties as a new cost of doing business. *This* is what alt-healthers and Qamoms call “socialist”, or “communist”. /4

Centre-right governments and wellness influencers share a goal: get back to the optimism of making productivity heroic and consumption virtuous, without any reflection on structural issues of injustice, or what universal health care funding and standards would look like. /5

12 things you should look out for before buying health insurance

A thread 🧵

It’s a good idea to make sure your health is protected under an insurance policy so that you don’t shell out large sums of money for hospitalization and treatment. But buying an individual health insurance policy can be daunting in itself.

Websites and policy documents can be overwhelming. There’s a lot of loaded terms, there’s a whole bunch of things that your policy may or may not cover. It’s important to know and understand the details though, so you’re not surprised later.

In this thread, we'll talk about the things you absolutely need to watch out for when buying an individual health insurance policy for yourself or your family members :)

If you take an individual health insurance policy and the insurance company offers to pay up to ₹15 lakhs during the year whenever you’re diagnosed with a disease or meet an accident, that amount is the 'sum insured'.

THIS IS A CATCHY & ATTENTION-GRABBING TITLE

Today, the Province will likely announce what zone of the reopening framework we'll shift into as of Tuesday. Whatever is announced, though, doesn't change what we need to do. Why?

Kindly read these 14 tweets & we'll tell you. (1/14)

Fun fact: COVID-19 does not follow us on Twitter. COVID doesn't know, or particularly care, if we're in the Red or Orange zone.

The behaviours of the virus do not depend on the current ‘zone’ of public health restrictions. And, to be perfectly candid, neither should ours. (2/14)

Once upon a time we used to say #WeAreInThisTogether in our messaging. Here's the thing: we are, but we aren't. Not everyone is experiencing this pandemic the same.

Nurses, doctors, paramedics & healthcare workers have experienced things much differently than most of us. (3/14)

Some people have been home & isolated for months, while others haven't been able to stop working.

Business owners & hospitality workers have been on a rollercoaster of openings & closures.

Students, parents, teachers & school staff have had to adapt to going from online (4/14)

to in-person learning (and back again) numerous times.
And this virus has disproportionately affected some groups more than others.

But there's the thing: while our experiences of this pandemic haven't been shared, we do have a shared goal.

And we can reach it together. (5/14)

"Public health" isn't just about vaccinations, clinics and urgent care: it's a holistic discipline that encompasses all the contributors to health outcomes, which include things like housing, employment, transportation, pollution and more.

1/

A new working paper from @nberpubs estimates the number of US covid deaths that could have been prevented with a coherent, effective eviction moratorium and a ban on utility cutoffs:

The paper, written by a multidisciplinary group of Duke researchers from medicine and economics, found that housing precarity (a risk of losing your home) drove risky behavior that increased the spread of the disease and the resulting deaths.

3/

For example, it forced people to double-up on lodgings, making social distancing impossible, to say nothing of self-isolating after an exposure. It also drove people to tolerate high-risk workplace conditions, including illegal conditions.

4/

The authors used regression techniques to control for confounding variables, and used like-for-like counties with different utility and eviction policies to estimate the effect that these had on infection rates.

5/

We’ve done menstruation, let’s talk about the menopause! Because only women however they present can have the menopause although men who have had treatments for prostate cancer can have symptoms mimicking the menopause. There’s nothing scary about

the menopause. It’s a perfectly natural function of the body but it’s tied up with a thousand stereotypes of women, ageism and ‘old women are frightening’. True, old women are often very frightening to young men because look! A woman who doesn’t give a rat’s

arse what you think of her now all her mating hormones have gone and with it your charm as a potential mate. Now you’re just another annoying lad. That’s gotta hurt. Menopause means Wisdom, like it or not and it’s not always nice or cosy. Old women

are encouraged to refer to themselves as ‘young at heart’ and ‘as young as you feel’ and other such crap and told to ‘never give in to age’ which is ludicrous. Cosmetic surgery is now a thing but I can tell you what the surgeons and marketing

men won’t - it does not make you look young. You’re just an old woman who looks like at best, she’s had a great holiday and at worst like she was was trapped in a wind tunnel. Old is good. Old is meritorious. Old is survival. Old means you didn’t die young