Why Are We Like This?

Trying to unpack it all.

Over the last few years, society has moved on from Covid. But Covid has not moved on from society. It’s still killing people,¹ and even worse, it’s maiming many more with Long Covid. People who don’t think of themselves as “having Long Covid” are nonetheless getting sick all the time now and suffering all kinds of new health disasters, because Covid can harm the immune system and just about everything else. The world is in a bad way.

Except, when you walk outside, it’s fine. And Facebook feeds² are full of travel and shopping and all kinds of activities in very close quarters, masks entirely forgotten.

There’s just this one wee little corner of the internet. It’s made up of a hodge-podge of people, from the fancy to the obscure. It’s long covid patients, and aerosol experts, and ultraviolet light enthusiasts. There’s a whole lot of autistic people. There are a lot of people who were disabled long before Covid hit the dance floor. There are people who worship at the church of science, and those who worship at the church of…church. It’s a motley crew.

Some of these people are wry and many are fatalistic and many are angry. If I were to try to summarize the general zeitgeist, it would be something like this:

WHAT THE FUCK DO Y’ALL THINK YOU’RE DOING?!? GOING OUT WITHOUT A MASK DURING A M*****F***ING AIRBORNE PLAGUE?!? HAS THE ENTIRE WORLD LOST ITS F***ING MIND??? AFTER 4 OR 5 INFECTIONS, YOU’RE GOING TO GET LONG COVID, IT’S NEARLY A STATISTICAL CERTAINTY.³ AND THEN WHAT? YOU THINK THE WORLD IS GOING TO COME HELP YOU, WHEN YOU’RE BROKE AND SICK AND YOU CAN’T WORK, AND YOU CAN’T EVEN LEAVE YOUR DARKENED ROOM? WAKE THE FUCK UP!!!!⁴

In short, if the image below is “the world today,” most people are the golfers…

While a very few, very loud people are running around, out of frame, screaming, “Fire! FIRE!!! &^&^%*&^ FIIIIRRRRREEEE!!!!!”⁵

So.

It’s hard sometimes, even when you have the science, charts, graphs, statistics, and (sadly) your own experience on your side….it’s hard not to wonder occasionally, Am I wrong?

Sure, the CDC admitted that it changed its isolation period just because the CEO of Delta Airlines asked them to, but that sort of general f***ery doesn’t seem to make anybody suspicious. They just shrug and say, “The CDC says 5 days now.”

The memory hole, that used to swallow inconvenient facts after a decade, now swallows them within weeks.

We have always been at war with Oceania.

Kids have always had lingering coughs that never quite go away.

So I wonder.

Why do I still feel like yelling “Fire!”

What makes me, and others like me, so different?

It seems to come down to a few general patterns. In my experience, there are a few types of people who take Covid seriously:

1. Neurodiverse people who can't un-see that the Emperor's new clothes are just no clothes at all, no matter what people say

Go onto Twitter, and you will see a slew of people saying, “I’m autistic, and I’ve never really ‘gotten’ peer pressure. Covid is super f***ing dangerous and I don’t care if anybody agrees with me, I’ll mask for the rest of my life if I have to.”

2. Trauma survivors, who've already been through the wringer when it comes to gaslighting, disinformation, and neglect

Sadly, I am firmly in this camp. From my salad days, when my spinal injury was downplayed by my own mother,⁶ to my 20’s, when Christine Todd Whitman told us the air in NYC post-9/11 was safe, to my soul-crushing experiences with Chronic Lyme, I am Officially Over This Shit.⁷

3. Disabled people, and sometimes their families, who actually know what the worst case scenario feels like

Related to pattern #2, but so much more.

I don’t know how to say this, without it kind of sucking and being super depressing, but…

…healthy people don’t understand just how sick you can be, and still be alive. Just how much pain you can be in, and still be alive. And — crucially — just how DISABLED you can be, and yet still (somehow) find yourself unable to receive any kind of disability support.

Healthy people also don’t understand what happens to you, socially, when you develop certain kinds of serious illnesses:

(^ credit: https://twitter.com/now_grace)

Your friends abandon you. Your family tells you you’re crazy. If you’re lucky — very lucky — you end up with a few people who stick by you. 98% are gone for good.

The folks who say “Well I have to go to brunch, it’s crucial for my mental health!!” — they don’t get it.

Getting Long Covid?

It will destroy your mental health.

4. People who have personally suffered from Covid and Long Covid.

There’s nothing like bitter experience to show the lie from propaganda. Kinda like how I never started smoking after my dad died. What is Big Tobacco going to say to me, that’s more powerful than watching my own father on a ventilator? Not fucking much.

5. Scientists who are in it for the SCIENCE, not the accolades, money, proximity to power, etc.

We have all now had the supremely uncomfortable experience of watching respected scientists downplay Covid. From Anthony Fauci’s comments that masks don’t work, to Bob Wachter’s gaslighting of his own wife, to Rochelle Walensky’s….well, everything, it is clear that, as radiosof writes, there are a helluva lot of scientists that aren’t in it for the science:

If you think of them as “Doctors of Science” then of course none of their behavior makes sense. But if you think of Doctoring as a kind of big club, where you go to a club meeting and say “Heeeyyyy, Jack, how’s that golf game going? Let me slap you upon the back and we shall revel in our elevated status, together! Ho Ho!” then of course it makes sense. For them, going to medical school was just paying their dues to get into the club, and once they’re in the club they care mostly about staying in the club and not much else.

The problems arise of course when foolish people such as myself naively believe that a Doctor of Science must be interested in Science, that institutions that teach philosophy must be interested in Truth and Justice, that large religious organizations that follow the teachings of Jesus must be interested in the Poor, and so forth and so on.

By contrast, you have a small number of scientists looking at Covid from the POV of a variety of fields — or even doing work outside of their fields, but with the analysis and integrity that they learned in their particular disciplines. And this small group of scientists follow the data, no matter where it leads.

With the latest information on covid’s long-term sequelae, where it’s leading are some very scary places indeed.

So that’s it. The people who are shouting “Fire!” are the damaged ones, the castoffs and the rejects, the traumatized ones, the weird ones, and the folks who are too dumb to know that you’re only supposed to be smart enough to get invited to the right schools and the right cocktail parties, but not any smarter than that.

The ones who won’t go along to get along.

Fire.

1. My back-of-the-envelope estimate based on my own excess death calculations is that about 125,000-150,000 Americans will die of Covid this year, 2023. (By the way, I can’t wait until the day comes when the CDC posts accurate data, so folks like me don’t have to dust off their high school statistics and white-knuckle it through My First Actuary playschool.)

2. Of people who are not me

3. https://twitter.com/DavidSteadson/status/1546308765171224576

4. And here I would like to thank my long-suffering spouse, as I have been full of indignant sputtering just like this going on 4 years now.

5. If we were going to continue this metaphor, the golfers would be saying, “Well, what do you want me to do? I’ve got to Live my Life!” or, “You really need to get help for your anxiety.”

6. “But your grades are so good! You couldn’t make those kinds of grades if you were really in pain!” ← how not to parent

7. Where “This Shit” = Anybody in power who downplays Your danger for Their convenience and greed