The Need for Uncensored Data and Debate on COVID Restrictions; The Fight Over Return-to-Office Is Turning Into a Disability Dispute, and other C-Virus related stories

The Need for Uncensored Data and Debate on COVID Restrictions:

“I think we would have done everything differently,” California Governor Gavin Newsom recently told NBC, conceding that strong criticisms of his state’s strict COVID-19 lockdown policies were “legitimate” in hindsight.

Looking in the rear-view mirror, the strict COVID-19 lockdowns, pursued in California and other states, were indeed a disaster. But it was a collective public policy failure, as Newsom observed. Public officials have a responsibility to look back and revisit what they knew—or should have known—before they proposed or implemented the various lockdown policies recommended by federal officials. The often draconian social and economic measures that many state officials imposed, including extended school closures and business shutdowns, resulted in multiple costly consequences that will plague Americans for a long time.

That’s why congressional investigators should take a deeper dive into the rationale behind federal officials’ guidance on COVID-19 lockdowns. States, especially where the toughest restrictions were implemented, should follow suit. Such reviews could help lawmakers avoid ill-advised government overreach when the next pandemic comes along.

COVID Lockdown Data. Peer-reviewed work of an international team of researchers led by Dr. Steve Hanke, professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University, Did Lockdowns Work? The Verdict on COVID Restrictions, offers some good insight. A comprehensive literature review, the first study of its kind over a broad range of countries, by Hanke, Dr. Lars Jonung of Sweden’s Lund University, and Dr. Jonas Herby of the Center for Political Studies in Denmark, examined over 19,000 studies but focused on 22 relevant studies with actual mortality data. Their “meta-analysis” examined the specific relationship of mortality to various lockdown restrictions, including mandatory stay-at-home orders, business and school closures, and mask mandates, especially in the workplace.

Hanke and his colleagues examined the specific impact of certain government mandates exclusively on mortality. Among other findings, they concluded that stay-at-home orders reduced COVID mortality between 1.4 and 4.1 percent; business closures by 7.5 percent; school closures between 2.5 percent and 6.2 percent; and mask mandates, particularly in the workplace, by 18.7 percent.

Looking at the aggregate impact of these restrictions across Europe and the United States, Hanke and colleagues found that “…lockdowns in the Spring of 2020 in Europe resulted in 6000 to 23,000 deaths avoided. To put those numbers in to context, during an average flu season, approximately 72,000 are recorded in Europe. Our results made clear that lockdowns had negligible public health effects when measured by mortality.” —>READ MORE HERE

The Fight Over Return-to-Office Is Turning Into a Disability Dispute:

The return-to-office battle between workers and employers is entering a more combative phase.

Workers are filing more charges of disability discrimination to federal and state agencies, and an increasing share of the charges are based on mental-health conditions such as anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Though agencies don’t disclose the events leading to the charges, the increase is driven partly by employers requiring that workers return to workplaces and denying some of their requests for exemptions, according to lawyers, government officials and disability advocates.

The number of charges filed to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging discrimination against individuals with anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder rose by at least 16% for each condition from 2021 to 2022. Data from multiple state civil-rights agencies show that in recent years, disability charges—encompassing a range of conditions including mental-health disorders, hearing impairments and autoimmune diseases—have overtaken previous top complaints, such as retaliation and race discrimination.

“Mental illness is at an all-time high, and Covid was a huge contributor,” said Hannah Olson, whose software firm, Disclo, helps employers manage the disability-accommodations process. “The other piece is return-to-office. People are asking for more things, and companies don’t know how to manage this.”

Employers still approve most accommodation requests, but the approval rate has declined since early in the pandemic, according to Sedgwick, which manages leave and disability claims for employers. In 2021, 95.6% of all requests were approved. In the first half of this year, workers’ requests were OK’d 91.8% of the time, said David Setzkorn, leader of Sedgwick’s workforce absence and disability practice.

The EEOC in September sued a Georgia employer for declining to allow a digital marketing manager with anxiety and other mental-health disorders to work remotely three days a week. The company, a small chain of pediatrics offices, fired the employee soon after she requested the accommodation, the suit says.

“It’s an issue we’re very aware of,” Sarah DeCosse, who leads the disability team in the EEOC’s legal department, said about denials of remote-work accommodations. “We understand and have noted anecdotally that there have been a lot of inquiries about this basic scenario.”

Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 to help disabled people participate in the labor force, even if they need some accommodations to perform their jobs. Employers can ask for documentation about a person’s limitations. As long as employees can fulfill the essential functions of their jobs, workers and employers are expected to negotiate in a so-called interactive process to find reasonable accommodations. —>READ MORE HERE

Follow links below to relevant/related stories and resources:

The Top COVID-19 Hot Spots in the U.S.



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USA TODAY: Coronavirus Updates

WSJ: Coronavirus Live Updates

YAHOO NEWS: Coronavirus Live Updates

NEW YORK POST: Coronavirus The Latest

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