"Four years! My God, four years!"
—Dr. Lutkin, A Bitter Pill to Swallow
It's been four years, and my soul is weary. I am so tired of the world. For the past few years I have been accused of "living in fear" when really I was living in a constant state of rage. And now I feel nothing but exhaustion and despair.
Since it's an election year, politicians keep asking, "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" I don't think anyone on either side would like my answer. Both Trump and Biden and their respective administrations are to blame for the mess we're in, whether the media and the general public want to acknowledge it or not. Mainstream publications minimize the danger of pandemic the same way they minimized the danger of Trump, and they fail to hold Biden accountable for his broken campaign promises the same way that they fail to inform the public about how many people are still dying of COVID.
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| One of many broken campaign promises from 2020 |
Since 2020, I've made an effort to learn as much about COVID as I can, and I never stopped studying. That's why I know that COVID is airborne, you don't want to catch it multiple times, it lingers in the air for hours, one-way masking isn't enough, ventilation is extremely important, the current vaccines are only halfway effective, the virus keeps on mutating, you can still catch it outside, and that immunity to it doesn't even last that long! But few people I speak to in person are interested in any of these facts.
I feel like a prophet of doom who no one wants to listen to. I am a voice crying out in the wilderness. It seems like no one wants to hear. I try to share what I've learned about COVID and the information is met with hostility, indifference, or silence. It's easier to just withdraw from all the unmasked people in my life and be alone. I feel a profound sense of alienation and isolation, as though I don't live in a shared reality with anyone else. Other people are around me and not with me, it seems. At some points I have even begun to cynically wonder, what do they have to offer me besides COVID?
Late last spring, I discovered some online communities of people who are still taking precautions. Talking to them has been the only antidote to the loneliness of being a lone masker in so many of the places I go. Since then, I've met people from all over the world of all ages and walks of life who are trying to protect themselves and others from COVID. Many are severely immunocompromised and have been increasingly shut out of public life as protective measures like mask mandates and vaccine requirements have been rolled back. Many of them can't go to work, or travel, or go grocery shopping now. Some have long COVID and are rightfully concerned that another infection will make their health problems even worse. Their conditions include sickle cell anemia, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, cancer, and immune deficiencies. Many of them had been thriving despite their illnesses pre-pandemic, but now because of everyone else's selfishness, they have no choice but to hunker down at home for their own safety, or that of the vulnerable children or other loved ones in their households. For many it has meant the loss of livelihoods, hobbies, and human connection. If you're not part of these communities, you probably have no idea how much those disabled by COVID or those who are at high risk of horrible outcomes have lost because of this. Careers, educational opportunities, relationships... These are the people who have been flippantly told "just stay home" over and over again by jerks on the internet. And do reporters interview them when protective measures get rolled back? Of course not. They're too busy interviewing the feckless fools who protested against mask mandates, just like they went out of their way to center the opinions of racist Trump supporters hanging out in diners. Virtual communities are all high-risk people have left, so they have built small but thriving parallel universes while the rest of the world ignores them.
But as I said, these communities are small, so small that they are not conducive to finding my ideal clients, art collectors, or a romantic partner. There have even been times when I've felt like the only interest that we have in common is our COVID caution. As much I appreciate my new virtual connections, I'm missing out on so much by taking precautions that others no longer will. Sometimes it can feel like I've given up on an ocean of opportunities to go live in a safe little fishbowl. I have been forced to rely on the internet, where my art is rarely seen by the right people. The internet, whose algorithms are always asking too much of me. And as I mentioned in a previous post, when I've opened my studio and required masking (and provided beautiful masks), half the potential visitors get an attitude and leave. And why? Because most art spaces are run by people who take no mitigations at all, and most of the interior design trade shows have policies like this:
So why am I still taking precautions? Because every time I read new research about what the virus can do, my first thought is, I have enough problems. I don't need this. So many of my dreams have never come true and I would prefer not to add to my preexisting miseries. I am concerned about the toll that long COVID would take on my life, not just physically and emotionally, but financially. My fields of interest are precarious enough as it is.
I have read too many horror stories at this point. All it takes is one time. All it takes is one person.
One celebratory birthday meal in a restaurant.
One opening reception in a poorly-ventilated gallery.
One crowded flight.
One champagne toast in a busy art fair booth.
One small dinner party.
One hair appointment.
One family member who didn't show any symptoms.
One medical appointment with careless doctors and nurses.
One car ride with a friend.
One office party in a crowded conference room.
And it's a wrap.
I have seen too much now. I know too much now. And I can't let my guard down now.
I also can't let my guard down because I now know too much about the damage the virus can do. It's an insidious virus that deceptively appears to be a cold but causes so much damage covertly. Unlike pandemic diseases in movies and TV shows, the drama of the suffering COVID-19 causes happens silently at first, behind the scenes later. It can cause organ damage, infertility, impotence, miscarriages, stillbirths, premature aging, and it can wreck the immune system. It makes existing health problems worse.
A recent, catastrophic example of that was laid bare in the circumstances surrounding the death of one of my favorite mutuals on Twitter, Shafiqah Hudson, aka Fiqah, aka @sassycrass. When she wasn't sounding the alarm about fake accounts wreaking havoc on social media or sharing witty remarks and insightful social commentary, she was very open about her health issues. She was already suffering from some serious ailments and getting infected with COVID 3 times made everything worse. Her second infection led to kidney failure. She already was dealing with heart failure. She died tried to crowdfund for medical care and housing. She caught COVID for the third time in the hospital. Not just kidney failure and heart failure but a societal failure all contributed to her demise.
Internet trolls would write her off as just another statistic and one even called her a hypochondriac in response to a memorial I posted (before I blocked that jerk and hid their comment). Shafiqah was just one of the many amazing people who was left to "fall by the wayside," as Dr. Fauci said. Or whose death would be explained away by some nit-picking weirdo who would pedantically ask if she died "with" or "from" long COVID, seeking to invalidate the meaning of her life. I remain heartbroken because she was brilliant and deserved so much more, and I know there are more stories like hers.
There has been so much death, and yet so little public grieving. Maybe that partially explains the collective denial. I blame the rest on corporate and political interests. They are the ones who are successfully manufacturing the consent to be infected repeatedly. They have popularized the wishful thinking that the coronavirus would somehow miraculously evolve to become milder. They spread made-up nonsense about "immunity debt" while denying the very obvious fact that children keep bringing COVID home to their families because schools no longer mandate masks or tests and most didn't bother updating their ventilation systems.
Companies keep having super-spreader events with no safe or creative alternatives. If you want to move up the ladder at work or network to find more clients, you have to subject yourself to being exposed to the virus again and again in poorly ventilated rooms where no one is masking because the food and drinks being served are the main attraction.
Our government says "we have the tools," but the tools they've given us are expired tests that give false negatives and vaccines that don't do enough to prevent transmission. The CDC sounds like the Cigarette Smoking Man from The X-Files, lying, denying, and hiding the truth from us all the time.
Perhaps they are honoring their Tuskegee Syphilis Study era and returning to a time when they would rather study how a disease progresses than prevent it, if their new quarantine guidelines are any indication.
Perhaps in a generation or 2 they will apologize (too little, too late) to the remaining survivors and their descendants, as they did for the Tuskegee Experiment.
I have lost so much respect for the authority and expertise of so many public figures. Life-and-death policies have been shaped by the opinions of "experts" with irrelevant credentials. We are perpetually sleepwalking into disaster, trapped in a viral quagmire. The only hope that I see of getting out of this mess is the possibility of the nasal vaccines that have shown promising results in monkeys and hamsters and are now ready to be tested on humans. But otherwise, it seems like the efforts to minimize and normalize COVID seem to have paid off. We lack the patience and endurance to get through this as a society, and the people in power are taking advantage of that. Maybe television, texting and TikTok have destroyed our collective attention spans. The result is complacency and apathy.
I felt profoundly disheartened when someone I care about deeply told me that if he dies of COVID, it was just his time to go. It wasn't the first time I've heard this sort of Final Destination fatalism expressed. Are we all so dead inside that this is how we have come to look at life-threatening situations? Is this resignation to a tragic fate shaped by our constant exposure to senseless mass shootings and other random acts of violence? I want everyone to understand that death is not the only bad outcome, and neither is hospitalization. Some people have been left in such agony from long COVID that they have chosen to be euthanized in Switzerland, or they've taken matters into their own hands.
"The burden of disease and disability from Long COVID is on par with the burden of cancer and heart disease.
— Dr. Lucky Tran (@luckytran) January 18, 2024
The best way to prevent Long COVID is to prevent COVID in the first place. There is no Long COVID without COVID."
Brilliant testimony by @zalaly! #HELPLongCovid pic.twitter.com/Cw24Eg8TiJ
Were people only choosing to wear masks and get vaccinated to score political points and dunk on their enemies? A lot of Democrats seemed to think that Biden's words about the "pandemic of the unvaccinated" only applied to stubborn MAGA people and not small children or others who either couldn't get vaccinated because of certain medical conditions or who have conditions that make vaccines less likely to work for them. Belief in Biden's words about the vaccine meant that everyone could be "vaxxed and relaxed." Never mind the possibility of breakthrough infections. (Remember when they used to call them breakthrough infections?) Never mind the fact that the virus keeps on mutating and the immunity to it doesn't last. Never mind the fact that since most Americans have had COVID by now, most of us are actually at higher risk of bad outcomes from additional infections than we realize.
And then there are Christians who insist that wearing a mask means you lack faith, but not wearing one means you have a "faith over fear" mentality. They treat COVID the way snake-handling churches treat pythons. Funny how the same faith community that
so adamantly taught me to stand in the courage of my convictions is so
opposed to be doing just that when it comes to dealing with an airborne
virus. This is a test from God and they have failed it repeatedly. They have no idea how many parishioners no longer attend because every Sunday is a super-spreader. These are the fellow Christians I know from online COVID-cautious groups.
Some poorer countries never got a vaccine. COVID is spreading through prisons, homeless shelters and migrant and refugee camps all over the world, compounding human suffering. You would never know that looking at the smiling, unmasked faces of glittering celebrities at fancy award shows, or from the considerably less glamorous yet similarly maskless politicians in Washington. They have access to tools the rest of us may have never even heard of.
Yet the public scarcely knows about the far UV lights, high-tech air filtration systems, highly reliable tests, and nasal disinfectants the elites can afford to take advantage of. We watch these people on TV without knowing of all the hidden mitigations that are propping up the appearance of normalcy. Meanwhile, the rest of us are playing games with a virus that's in the same category as plague, rabies, tuberculosis, and anthrax.
Is it ignorance or sadism? Incompetence or malice? Some of it seems to be motivated by short-sighted foolishness. Do you really think that people who've gotten POTS from long COVID will want to go to your theme park to ride roller-coasters? Do you think people who've lost their sense of taste from the virus will want to spend money on expensive restaurant food they can't fully enjoy? Do you expect people suffering from chronic fatigue to take expensive vacations on your cruise ships and at your resorts? Do you think people who now have chronic pain will be excited about standing in long lines in an airport so they can cram themselves into an uncomfortable seat on one of your planes?
But it's not just a lack of foresight and a profit motive, not when our captains of industry are the kinds of sociopaths who, when they finally go to hell, will try to find a way to get their assistants to bring them water because they're thirsty. Of course they're fine with social murder. These are the same people who brought us forever chemicals and microplastics. They want plausible deniability. They don't want us to be able to sue them. They want a chain of transmission that never breaks. They don't want us to be able to pinpoint the source of a COVID exposure. They want us to be complacent, compliant, and complicit.
That's why they keep lying. That's why they stopped collecting data and made what little data is still available much harder to find. That's why the news keeps trying to give us all a false sense of security in a fake-normal world that is far more dangerous that most Americans realize.
But if all you've been paying attention to is the way the major corporate news sources have been reporting on the pandemic, you have no idea how bad things really are. So you let the CDC and the President get away with telling you what you wanted to hear and never bothered to look beneath the surface. You plan events with no regard for safety. You don't cancel your travel plans when you're sick anymore. You started coming to work sick again and you stopped testing. You started sending your kids to school sick again and stopped testing them. And you are unwittingly part of the problem and have unintentionally made yourself an asymptomatic carrier or the host of the next variant mutation.
Don't yell at me. Yell at your local health department and the CDC. Yell at your boss for not protecting you at work and your school district for not protecting your children. Yell at the restaurant and hospitality lobby for prioritizing their profits. Yell at the CEO of Delta Airlines for shortening the length of the quarantine. Yell at your mayor, your governors, your state and local representatives. Yell at the President for not doing enough.
I don't care what everyone else is doing. Sometimes everyone else is wrong.
But I'm not wrong. I'm early.
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