Saturday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Zak Vescera looks back at the two-year period since the first COVID-19 cases were recognized in Saskatchewan, while Zeynep Tufecki offers a look at how millions of lives could have been saved in retrospect. Nicola Davis reports on the soaring case levels resulting from the UK's elimination of public health protections, while Max Fawcett is rightly critical of Doug Ford and others who have chosen to unmask their disregard for people's well-being. And Emily Pasiuk discusses the particularly complicated between loss and grief and the COVID pandemic. 

- Meanwhile, Katharine Wu describes long COVID as the pandemic following the pandemic, while noting that we're not doing anywhere near enough to even understand it (let alone treat it). 

- Angelyn Francis reports on new University of Toronto research showing that racialized students are twice as likely to report poor health as white students. And Tingxi Long et al. study the deterioration of the diet of older American adults even over the last couple of decades. 

- Gordon Lafer examines (PDF) how the U.S.' labour law system is biased against union organization - while noting the importance of building an electric vehicle industry and other new industrial sectors which allow workers to defend their interests through collective bargaining. And Greg Jericho notes that Australia's increase in hours worked is the result of people being forced to take multiple jobs in order to stay afloat. 

- Finally, Stephen Wentzell reports on Gord Johns' work to end the criminalization of personal drug use as part of a strategy to end the epidemic of drug poisonings.