Senate Hearing on LC
(Screen capture from U.S. Senate hearing on Long COVID 2024-01-18)
If you didn’t watch yesterday’s hearing of the USA’s Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions about Long COVID, it is worth setting aside three hours to at least listen to the audio. Only one Senator was notably underinformed. Other people dropped in corrections to his misstatements somewhere in their testimony. (They weren’t flashy about it. They simply stated actual facts without calling attention to his errors.) Senators on the Committee who have Long COVID themselves said so.
Most of the main points about Long COVID were at least mentioned. A few were explored at some length. Note that Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly mentioned viral persistence and potentially repurposing some antivirals and HIV medications. However, his microphone became garbled or cut out during some of the most crucial portions of his testimony. The American Sign Language interpreter and subtitle generation couldn’t hear him, either. That happened to him more than once and briefly to at least one other witness during the Panel 2 segment of the hearing when Long COVID experts testified and answered questions. It didn’t happen during the Panel 1 segment when patients and the mother of a young patient testified.
Each witness starts by reading a statement they prepare ahead of time. At the link I provided above to the video of the hearing, scroll down the page to see who the witnesses were. Below each witness’ name, there is a link where you can download and read their prepared statement. Don’t expect a transcript of their responses to questions yet.
The formal record of the hearing will include documents submitted by the witnesses within 10 business days. The written record will be more complete than the video with its garbled sections.
If you watch the video instead of only listening to the audio, you will see more face masks than usual in the gallery and on some of the witnesses. None of the Senators wore face masks. Although you can see some distress on social media about that, bear in mind that Congress has installed high grade air filtration for itself and politicians always want to look a particular way on camera.
With COVID highly prevalent, it isn’t really safe to rely on only the air filtration system for protection. Even if it is set up to blow filtered air directly at the committee members on the dais, eddies and swirls in the air could carry viral aerosols from one committee member to another. The audience and witnesses probably don’t all get filtered air blown directly on them. Face masks and nasal sprays are sensible additional layers of protection—and a great many people in the room used high quality masks. Witnesses who wore N95/N99 respirators were as easy to hear as those who didn’t. Where some of the testimony was hard to hear, it was entirely due to technical issues in the audio system, not face masks.
It was a good hearing. It raised some issues peculiar to the fragmented health care system in the USA, as well as issues that apply globally. It is well worth your time. Now that pertinent information is on the table, we need to see Congress do something about the situation.
I’ll be back after I get this grant-funded project properly ready for its quarterly review next week. The prep hasn’t been coming together as well as I wanted and I’m up against deadlines.