It upsets me when people speculate despondently that we'll never get rid of covid now, that our chance has passed, when meanwhile we're not even trying for the lowest of low hanging fruit
For example, airplanes should be running their air filtration at max when boarding and deplaning. They don't. They have never done this throughout the pandemic. They can, there's no technical issue preventing them from doing this, they just don't, helping to spread covid variants internationally
Or schools. We've seen studies show that schools are a major vector for the spread of covid (and other airborne diseases!) We've also anecdotally seen many examples of schools that kept covid out completely, either through ventilation and filtration or testing and masking or some combination. Putting air filters in classrooms is dirt cheap compared to disabling students and sickening their households, but it's not even being looked at
They haven't even tried literally pushing a button and are telling us nothing can be done
This isn't even a problem that requires complex solutions. Enough air changes per hour can reduce the number of infections to a mere 5% and its not like "plug in a bunch of portable air filtration units" is a complex solution with lots of nuance that is hard to understand for the average joe
Imagine if we lived in a world where covid was 20 times less prevalent! Yeah it wouldn't be eliminated but you could actually go back to normal then. Hell, that'd probably make covid an actually seasonal disease like the flu, so we'd know exactly when it would be dangerous and when to get our boosters
But no. What we get instead is oncology wards for children getting rid of masks even though they masked before 2019 because hey, I don't know, maybe don't give the lil kids with a shot immune system from cancer diseases!
Not only are we not doing the simplest, easiest of things, things are actively regressing from where they were before the pandemic
Here, look. No in-school infections in a primary school in Australia during the height of omicron. You know what they used to achieve this miraculous feat?
A smoke machine, CO2 detectors, and portable hepa filtration units that you just plug into an outlet and turn on. It's not even fucking hard! They weren't even aerosol engineers or infectious disease experts, they were teachers and parents! Lay people!
Your school could do this! Any school could do this! Your kids could be safe from covid at school! You could be safe from being infected with covid by your children that you're forced to send into unsafe schools!
None of this sickness, death, and disability is necessary!
You should be angry! You should demand that school boards, hospital boards, locally elected officials explain why they are letting this happen! You should demand to know why they're letting everyone get sick and disabled and why they're letting people die when all of it is preventable and you pay taxes that pay for these places that force you to become sick!
Demand to know why your taxes aren't being invested in public health. Demand to know why your government isn't making marginal investments in air filtration that would recoup easily by several orders of magnitude in terms of productivity gained by way fewer people calling in sick, let alone the compounding economic damage from long term illness, disability, and death
Ask them why they're so incompetent, why they care so little about the economy, about jobs, about critical shortages of healthcare personnel. Rake them over the fucking coals with your anger until they finally fucking do something
