The thing about viruses is they are not visible to the naked eye. The thing about public health is that a lot of it just telling people how germ theory works and helping them see whatâs invisible by providing information. In the US our government has just given up on public health as a general concept. It wouldnât even be that hard to get a lot of people taking precautions again if information was actually available to people who arenât actively seeking it out.
Last weekend someone I went out an outdoors date with asked me why I still mask and when I told them that long COVID affects 30% of people and cases are higher than they ever were in 2020, they were super shocked and immediately got out their phone and bulk bought KN95s off Amazon to wear to work.
Last night I was in a discord VC and someone mentioned being anxious because they have to go to a Christmas gathering with conservative family and mentioned how with 20 people present, at current levels thereâs a 50% chance someone is infectious with COVID, and just read out the current case levels and compared them to 2020. Two people on the call immediately started scheduling appointments to get the new vaccine because they hadnât done it yet. They were asking if getting it Friday was too late or if they should find an earlier appointment.
People donât want to get COVID, theyâre just under the false impression that itâs âoverâ and ânot a big deal anymoreâ because our government has systemically dismantled our public health infrastructure in the name of keeping the economy going and being able to campaign on âending the pandemicâ despite things being about as bad as theyâve ever been, possibly even worse as the original COVID-19 has gone extinct and so the original vaccines arenât particularly effective against the current variants circulating.
I feel like a paranoid conspiracy theorist whenever I share the most basic information about current COVID levels with people and only when they explicitly ask me why I still take precautions. But itâs literally not that they donât care. Itâs that they donât even know. All of the testing infrastructure and easy public information trackers like the NYTimes charts and Johns Hopkins have been dismantled. They just donât have access to wastewater data because itâs not where they know to see it.
Information is a powerful thing.
i feel like a broken record talking about this sometimes but if you are wondering how the hell we got to this moment of dismantled monitoring tools and social abandonment from the era of lockdowns and medicaid expansion, the Death Panel podcast has been documenting what they call "the sociological production of the end of the pandemic" since day one. their ongoing series of year-end reviews is a fantastic document of how the discourse has evolved, from Covid Year Zero to Year Two, Year Three, and now Year Four (this episode isn't publicly available yet at time of writing but will be soon).
that's a lot of audio to listen through (though you can find transcripts in the description), but thankfully they also published an excellent breakdown of year three for The New Inquiry in 2022: Part One, Part Two, Part Three. hosts Artie Vierkant and Beatrice Adler-Bolton are Marxist health and disability advocates whose book Health Communism is an essential examination of how our conception of health is a load-bearing pillar of modern capitalism, as it provides the parameters by which we decide who is and is not the surplus (disposable/monetizable) population.
i'm always boosting Death Panel whenever i can because their staunch and unrelenting materialism casts a damning shadow over virtually all mainstream Covid-19 reportage. it's genuinely maddening how out in the open this process of rolling back covid protections has been, and how willfully blind most outlets have been to it (because they're owned by rich people who don't want covid protections to get in the way of moneymaking game). the so-called "medicaid unwinding" has been a particularly egregious event, with over 10 million americans (many of them children) having been kicked off insurance in the last six months, the single largest loss of healthcare coverage in this country's history-- and basically no one is talking about it! Biden came into office talking about Medicare For All for crying out loud!!!
the first step to clawing back any kind of protections has to be awareness, and there are few folks out there doing more to spread awareness of just how monumentally our healthcare "system" has failed us, and how the politicians in charge have deliberately chosen to lead us here. it doesn't have to be this way. if there was a mask mandate, most people would follow it. if the CDC actually released guidance, most people would follow it. there is nothing more complicated than cowardice and greed at the center of this egregious abandonment of the working class, and we can't let them make us forget it.
mask up, get vaxxed, tell your friends and your family and your bosses that the pandemic was never over, and don't let anyone bully you into putting yourself in danger.
