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 what’s invisible by providing information. In the US our government has just given up on public health as a general concept. It wouldn’t even be that hard to get a lot of people taking precautions again if information was actually available to people who aren’t 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 there’s 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 hadn’t done it yet. They were asking if getting it Friday was too late or if they should find an earlier appointment.
People don’t want to get COVID, they’re just under the false impression that it’s “over” and “not a big deal anymore” because our government has systemically dismantled our public health infrastructure in the name of keeping the economy going and being able to campaign on “ending the pandemic” despite things being about as bad as they’ve ever been, possibly even worse as the original COVID-19 has gone extinct and so the original vaccines aren’t 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 it’s literally not that they don’t care. It’s that they don’t even know. All of the testing infrastructure and easy public information trackers like the NYTimes charts and Johns Hopkins have been dismantled. They just don’t have access to wastewater data because it’s not where they know to see it.
Information is a powerful thing.


