What covid has taught me
That too many people are even bigger idiots than I thought.
Really. That’s not just the frustration talking. Consider the whole “Okay. it’s over. We’re done” mentality.
Hello? Would anyone dream of saying, “I’m tired of all this gravity shit. I’m jumping off this here cliff and you try to stop me.” And then, half way down, saying, “See? I’m doing fine.”
Nor did people and their governments get to that point after implementing sensible public health measures.
There’s no 100% vaccine mandate (with exceptions for the medically exempt).
There’s no mandate for building ventilation good enough to prevent viral spread.
[Edited to add, forgot a major one, :redface: ] Germicidal UVC lighting everywhere it can reduce viral loads.
There’s no mandate to mask up everywhere that people are within two meters of each other, and triply so when indoors.
No. Instead vaccine and mask mandates are being ditched everywhere by everyone all together. As if there’s some kind of global airborne miasma that destroys the neurons needed to understand anything. As for building ventilation, that never became important enough to mandate so there’s nothing in progress that could be ditched.
Accurate testing of prevalence and genotypes has gone right out. We’re supposed to do our own risk assessments and carry the entire load of infectious disease prevention individually (even though this is a social issue of transmission from person to person). But the tools to understand the risk are removed.
Note: none of those things are life-changing lockdowns. They’re just public health measures that improve our chances if we have to live with this particular virus. Instead of dying with it.
And also note, I’m not arguing any of this because I’m concerned only about vulnerable people. This affects everybody, including us immortals who’ve come through the last two years with minimal losses.
I’m boggled that we can stampede into spreading disease far and wide when we know so little about it.
One thing we do know is that the more sick humans there are to incubate new variants, the more variants we’ll have. The more variants, the more reinfections and the more new and worse forms of the disease. (Until a universal vaccine exists and is mandated for everyone not medically exempt.)
We have no idea, yet, of the long term burden of downstream disease. We’ve only had two years. There’s no way to know the number of excess dementias, heart attacks, strokes, and sudden diabetes ten years from now or twenty years from now. We don’t know whether the chance of long covid goes up with each reinfection. Now that we’ve decided to have millions of human petri dishes, instead of as few as possible, it’s guaranteed that new variants will make reinfections happen.
We’ve taken on a thousand unknown risks of mass disabling events because, the hell with it, masks are icky.
It’s insane.
In the high and far off times, people figured out that cholera and typhoid are spread by open sewers. If they had thought then like we apparently do now they would have said, “Ahh, screw it. Closed sewers cost too much. We’ll just live with it.”
By which, of course, they mean they hope they will live. And somebody else does the dying.
I hope you don’t mind if I post this link here, re: the Supreme’s totally foreseeable revocation of women’s human, legal and civil rights:
http://asifwomenmattered.blogspot.com/
It’s about the male supremacist, minority governed aspect of the woman hating religions, chief among them the Catholic Church.
I wrote this in 2006 and posted it a number of placec since then. Nothing’s changed to make any of it wrong. It just fell into the silence that uncomfortable truths about women’s true status have always disappeared into. Like women being legally shut out the right to earn our own living in 1991, with most forced instead into long-term sexual contracts for access to men’s wages, then shut out of the right not to be beaten, raped and killed by those men in 2000, a wrong cemented in place in 2005.
Please don’t worry about my running on again about the ‘liberal’ women in my family and elsewhere who are all safe and comfortable now, having focused on ‘larger issues’*, kept their heads down, never called out the Catholic and other male ruled churches and stayed in the good graces of their husbands, boyfriends, neighbors and employers due to their gentle silence.
It makes me too angry to even think about for long, much less post anywhere else. It can’t affect me anymore and I spent too many years fighting in increasing isolation for women’s rights to feel I have to do anything else now.
But yours is one of the few blogs that has been consistent about women’s rights and lack thereof, so I hope its okay to post the link here.
*(direct quote from the lawyer sister in the early 2000s, about not fighting for women’s rights – including not raising a single whisper against the religious anti-abortion zealots in her own liberal community. She had two unpicketed, utterly safe abortions in the early 1970s to which she owes her college education, her career and probably her life as well)
Earlynerd on May 7th, 2022 at 16:57
earlynerd, of course no objections. I’m having a hard time working up the 10 or 20 calories of energy needed to do a post.
I mean, gawwwwd, we KNEW this. We’ve known it since the government started colluding with the fundies in the 1980s.
We’ve known it since everybody swallowed the fundie terminology whole, and let them pretend the fight was about something besides livestock status for women.
I don’t know how the Hillary Clintons of the world stand it. She not only knew it and said it, but she was well enough known that people even saw her saying it. And for all the sound they heard, it might as well have been rose petals falling down the Grand Canyon. (with apologies to PGWodehouse)
So far, I’m pretty much in the club who was right about everything, and it’s more than I can stand. *You* know how it is. I deal with it by gardening or hiking or something. Not thinking about it. But there’s only so many things you can shut out. At some point there’s nothing tolerable left. I’m feeling, I guess, a centiHillary. Maybe only a milliHillary. And it’s already more than I can stand.
quixote on May 10th, 2022 at 14:30
Hiking, yes!
One of my favorite 2 – 6 mile hikes recently started with my trying to put the registration envelope through the slot, only to realize that some one had put some sticky substance over it. A ranger said later it was probably to steal whatever someone tried to put in there. I stood there saying out loud “I HATE humans”.
But after three hours on a deeply forested sunny path, with all the colors of green, spring flowers, birds, newts and views of the ocean, that was gone. I don’t have Hillary’s or Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s fortitude (or yours – great terms, BTW!), but this helps so much.
Earlynerd on May 12th, 2022 at 02:40