COVID denialism and disability justice
September 21, 2024 1:37 PM Subscribe
The first crucial thing to understand is that, if you're at least on board with the basic idea that COVID denialism is a pervasive problem, COVID-19 has already disabled you. This is an analysis based on the social model of disability, a major branch of disability theory that emphasizes the way disability is created by a society's failure to provide accommodations for certain bodies and minds rather than intrinsic aspects of those bodies and minds themselves.
Using this model, if you exist in a society that has accepted the uncontrolled spread of COVID-19 as normal, the attempt to avoid catching this disease is itself a disability. Society is organized to systematically deny accommodations like mask mandates, sanitizing ventilation[3], lockdowns and contact tracing, and free access to vaccines, prophylatics, tests, treatments, and protective equipment.What is it about Covid that entitles us to mask mandates and lockdowns that other diseases don’t have?
posted by anotherpanacea at 2:00 PM on September 21 [23 favorites]
That sounds like Orwellian doublespeak to me. It's inherently paradoxical. COVID denial was a real problem, and plenty of people have DIED from it, most of them healthy and "believed" in their "natural immunity" (remember "hair flu"?) that refused vaccines and masking protocols. This sounds like taking that to the next stage gobbledygook disguised by pseudo-psychology to me.
posted by kschang at 2:02 PM on September 21 [9 favorites]
posted by kschang at 2:02 PM on September 21 [9 favorites]
Is there any place on earth where adequate precautions are being taken? If not, why not? If so, what does it look like?
posted by Selena777 at 2:05 PM on September 21 [13 favorites]
posted by Selena777 at 2:05 PM on September 21 [13 favorites]
I don't know that I find the argument itself compelling (I am certainly more cautious than most and do not feel like I'm paying a meaningful social cost), which is unfortunate because I do think COVID is a useful on-ramp for talking about the social model of disability.
posted by hoyland at 2:17 PM on September 21 [8 favorites]
posted by hoyland at 2:17 PM on September 21 [8 favorites]
And so they find the prospect of taking COVID precautions, which is to say voluntarily re-entering a state of disability, essentially unthinkable […] even to protect themselves
That seems explicable within the framework presented. People prefer taking the chance of real-deal disability (what else are they being encouraged to protect themselves from?) to living in a state of voluntary disability indefinitely.
posted by atoxyl at 2:31 PM on September 21 [15 favorites]
That seems explicable within the framework presented. People prefer taking the chance of real-deal disability (what else are they being encouraged to protect themselves from?) to living in a state of voluntary disability indefinitely.
posted by atoxyl at 2:31 PM on September 21 [15 favorites]
I get what tha author is trying to argue, but feel like a theoretical apparatus applies to air pollution and racism, where we have much better data, and more theoretical development. But I think I would still rely on those other models than a theory of disability. I
Guess I'm unfamiliar with the discipline.
It s difficult for me to find a statement like "I'm so glad COVID is over" as categorically oppressive or a micro aggression, without a lot more context.
To me, it was clear, even in 2020, that COVID public health response was a matter of the labor power of medical workers, (and, early on, the NBA, because Trump was the "president", which gave more power of the bully pulpit to the CEO of the NBA than the actual president)
The US society was going to respond with the public health mandates I assume the author wants, so long as it was a threat to the capacity of the medical sector to respond. As soon as the virus became less of a threat to doctors and nurses, and we stopped counting available hospital beds, it became another thing mismanaged by capital.
Some of that was the nature of the viral changes, and some was the vaccination effort, which probably changed the genetics of the viral population. Complicated stuff.
It s difficult for me to treat all COVID under the same theory, since the strains are so different
posted by eustatic at 2:37 PM on September 21 [6 favorites]
Guess I'm unfamiliar with the discipline.
It s difficult for me to find a statement like "I'm so glad COVID is over" as categorically oppressive or a micro aggression, without a lot more context.
To me, it was clear, even in 2020, that COVID public health response was a matter of the labor power of medical workers, (and, early on, the NBA, because Trump was the "president", which gave more power of the bully pulpit to the CEO of the NBA than the actual president)
The US society was going to respond with the public health mandates I assume the author wants, so long as it was a threat to the capacity of the medical sector to respond. As soon as the virus became less of a threat to doctors and nurses, and we stopped counting available hospital beds, it became another thing mismanaged by capital.
Some of that was the nature of the viral changes, and some was the vaccination effort, which probably changed the genetics of the viral population. Complicated stuff.
It s difficult for me to treat all COVID under the same theory, since the strains are so different
posted by eustatic at 2:37 PM on September 21 [6 favorites]
What is it about Covid that entitles us to mask mandates and lockdowns that other diseases don’t have?
It s difficult for me to treat all COVID under the same theory, since the strains are so differentAn airborne disease that mutated quickly, is incredibly infectious, is easy to misidentify as a respiratory disease but causes damage to any and all vascular tissue, and variable presentation actively breaks mental models for risk assessment.
And there will absolutely be more coming.
If you’re failing to treat COVID like a healthcare crisis then you’re missing the boat. Internal organ damage for those who didn’t think the my got all that sick are already presenting historic levels of childhood diabetes, epilepsy, stroke etc at statistically significantly higher levels than we’ve seen in modern times.
As a population we haven’t even started baying the bill for COVID; our healthcare costs and risks have changed forever.
And there are more diseases coming.
posted by mce at 2:46 PM on September 21 [48 favorites]
...already presenting historic levels of childhood diabetes, epilepsy, stroke etc...
mce, just curious: would not be surprised, but you have a source for this?
posted by BlueHorse at 3:26 PM on September 21 [9 favorites]
mce, just curious: would not be surprised, but you have a source for this?
posted by BlueHorse at 3:26 PM on September 21 [9 favorites]
I was diagnosed with Graves disease about 6 months after my first bout with covid. In fact, there has apparently been a significant uptick in diagnoses of Graves disease. Since covid. There is not nearly enough research yet, but the idea that there may be a correlation is out there. So who knows what other surprises may be in store for us all as the years roll by.
posted by supermedusa at 3:51 PM on September 21 [7 favorites]
posted by supermedusa at 3:51 PM on September 21 [7 favorites]
mce, just curious: would not be surprised, but you have a source for this?
Regarding diabetes, it’s a thing.
A stronger risk factor for T1D than influenza but maybe not by that much?
posted by atoxyl at 4:11 PM on September 21 [4 favorites]
Regarding diabetes, it’s a thing.
A stronger risk factor for T1D than influenza but maybe not by that much?
posted by atoxyl at 4:11 PM on September 21 [4 favorites]
COVID definitely has its own particular, peculiar sequelae, but it also highlights how much post-viral illness is overlooked in general, I think.
posted by atoxyl at 4:12 PM on September 21 [50 favorites]
posted by atoxyl at 4:12 PM on September 21 [50 favorites]
Better air purification would be great. And I wish we could have universal masking in a lot of places: drugstores and medical offices especially, but also supermarkets and public transit. Free masks and daily test kits would be great.
Even then, though, I think people who need to be really strictly covid-averse are still going to be isolated, unfortunately. Unless there’s a good solution for the fact that people eat and drink socially, which seems to be pretty universal to our species and also a great way to spread germs?
posted by smelendez at 4:25 PM on September 21 [13 favorites]
Even then, though, I think people who need to be really strictly covid-averse are still going to be isolated, unfortunately. Unless there’s a good solution for the fact that people eat and drink socially, which seems to be pretty universal to our species and also a great way to spread germs?
posted by smelendez at 4:25 PM on September 21 [13 favorites]
I haven't done any follow-up searches to see if these have been debunked or if there are other causes at play but the side-affects of surviving a bout of Covid-19 for some people seem sub-optimal (& seemingly statistically significant compared to baseline) -
* BMJ - Analysis reveals global post-covid surge in infectious diseases
* Mayo Clinic - Long COVID: Lasting effects of COVID-19
posted by phigmov at 4:29 PM on September 21 [6 favorites]
* BMJ - Analysis reveals global post-covid surge in infectious diseases
* Mayo Clinic - Long COVID: Lasting effects of COVID-19
posted by phigmov at 4:29 PM on September 21 [6 favorites]
The author, by their own admission, is a habitually cautious and catastrophizing person. I'm not convinced by their assertion that anyone's assessment of their own COVID risk that differs from the author's is engaging in "COVID denialism".
Yes, levels of various COVID strains have spiked in wastewater at different times. And yes, COVID presents not-insignificant health risks for not-insignificant numbers of people.
But believing that this evidence must lead everyone to exactly the same conclusions as the author about "the precautions necessary to proportionally mitigate those risks" is, well, at the very least, a recipe for driving oneself a bit mad. And asserting that society must operate under emergency restrictions until we know more about the long-term effects of COVID across populations is reflective of a particular bias rather than any objective facts.
Many, many, many people have had COVID, often more than once, and appear to have recovered fully. It is not wildly unreasonable for such people to conclude from this that their personal COVID risk is akin to the risk of contracting a disease like the flu (which can also inflict serious harm on a subset of the population, but be nothing more than a temporary nuisance for most people).
I can appreciate some of the author's sociological argument about disabilities, accommodations, etc. I do think better ventilation is a thing we should probably be focusing more on, particular during viral surges. But expecting everyone to radically curtail their social interactions forever is simply unrealistic.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 4:39 PM on September 21 [41 favorites]
Yes, levels of various COVID strains have spiked in wastewater at different times. And yes, COVID presents not-insignificant health risks for not-insignificant numbers of people.
But believing that this evidence must lead everyone to exactly the same conclusions as the author about "the precautions necessary to proportionally mitigate those risks" is, well, at the very least, a recipe for driving oneself a bit mad. And asserting that society must operate under emergency restrictions until we know more about the long-term effects of COVID across populations is reflective of a particular bias rather than any objective facts.
Many, many, many people have had COVID, often more than once, and appear to have recovered fully. It is not wildly unreasonable for such people to conclude from this that their personal COVID risk is akin to the risk of contracting a disease like the flu (which can also inflict serious harm on a subset of the population, but be nothing more than a temporary nuisance for most people).
I can appreciate some of the author's sociological argument about disabilities, accommodations, etc. I do think better ventilation is a thing we should probably be focusing more on, particular during viral surges. But expecting everyone to radically curtail their social interactions forever is simply unrealistic.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 4:39 PM on September 21 [41 favorites]
Thanks for posting this, evilmomlady. I have been thinking about just this idea recently, because my partner and I have been very cautious for the past four years. A few months ago, we had finally started to incorporate some slightly more COVID risky behaviors into our life; for example, eating indoors at restaurants at slow times of the day, and putting our masks on/leaving if it starts to get busy. We were still masking in any public space if we weren't eating/drinking, avoiding crowds, and seating ourselves outdoors whenever possible.
Two weeks ago we finally caught COVID. It’s too early to tell if there’s been any permanent damage, but frankly, that doesn’t even matter. We have both been entirely nonfunctional for the past two weeks; feeding and washing ourselves have been the limit. The most we can do is lay in bed and maybe work on a puzzle. This is both with us having Paxlovid within the first three days of symptom onset, and with us being very lucky to already have a bunch of adaptive equipment that prevents us from accidentally overexerting ourselves, which can worsen outcomes. As expected, it’s exacerbated both of our chronic illnesses—my partner has had to be on daily painkillers the past two weeks, and for me COVID triggered an acute asthma attack that required a week on corticosteroids to kick. We've both had the flu many times in our life, and it never hit either of us like this.
Even if we both completely recover, I simply cannot afford to be completely nonfunctional for 2+ weeks (or more, given the multiple waves) a year. Nor can I afford the destabilization of my chronic illnesses. Most of my friends who don’t take precautions have had COVID 6+ times now. But because they aren’t already balancing chronic health conditions and financially insecure, they can afford to deal with the consequences of being bedbound for a week plus. I can’t.
So now I’m coming to terms with the fact that there will be no post COVID for me. That I’ll be masking indoors, only eating at restaurants with outdoor seating (which is available less than half the year in my location), and avoiding crowded events for the rest of my life. In some ways this is not so difficult for me, because a lot of the COVID precautions map onto limitations I already have had due to my other disabilities. When I was in a wheelchair living in a small town, I was limited to the three wheelchair accessible restaurants. I’ve never been able to go to conferences in my field because my chronic health issues are exacerbated by flying; COVID now only limits me from the once-in-six-years that a conference is in driving distance. I generally couldn’t handle crowded social events more than once or twice a year anyway due to my sensory issues and vision/hearing impairment. Etc.
But if I didn’t have those limitations already, I would feel very acutely the impact protecting myself from COVID has on my life. I still feel it some because a lot of my disabilities improved in the past handful of years, so I had a brief window of getting to experience the wonder of activities like hanging out at a bar for a few hours, or going to a Halloween party with 6-10 friends. Those things were nice, but given I didn’t have access to them for most of my life it’s not much of a sacrifice for me to give them up.
The problem is one I thought about before COVID, but especially once news about long COVID started to hit. Becoming disabled in childhood was, for myself, somewhat a gift. When I was defining who I was, I did so within severe limitations. As a child I was so ill that I was largely housebound and only had two or three hours of energy per day to do anything other than lie on some cushions on the floor. I made meaning and joy in a very small box, but the thing is, I had never known a larger one. It never felt that limiting, because I didn’t know more than vaguely that I could have been anything different.
Becoming disabled as an adult means being shoved in that box when you’ve previously had access to the entire world. This wrecks people. I have done therapy with individuals who became disabled later in life, and man. The grief is so palpable. The denial, too. I often talk to people about what some short term goals could look like, how we can improve their life while working on the mental or physical health issue that is disabling them. The number of times people have looked at me like I’m crazy when I ask them what three months of progress could look like. “In three months I’ll be 100% back to my old self.” (Reader, they will not be.)
Abled people look at disabled lives and think, “That’s miserable. I could never live like that.” But that’s because they have never learned to find value or meaning in a more restricted life. I think sometimes about men learning about all the ways women adjust their lives to protect themselves—they think it sounds untenable, horrifically restricting. And in some ways it is. But also women still live full and meaningful lives within those restrictions. Becoming a woman and having to deal with those restrictions is not, in fact, the worst thing that could happen to someone. The same is true of becoming disabled. But particularly because so few people have access to what a full disabled life looks like, this is unthinkable for most abled people. So of course they would never voluntarily place those restrictions on themselves. They have no practice with living a life with those kinds of physical limitations.
Which is in some ways unfortunate, because learning to live with being disabled is excellent preparation for coping with aging. I think it makes sense that people don’t want to deal with any limitations until they have to; on the other hand, there’s a reason senior suicidality is so high and I do think that sustained practice learning to adapt to a more limited existence could really buffer against that. But I’m also not going to force that on anyone, or even really think it reasonable to ask other people to do.
What I do find reasonable is to ask the people who have the privilege to take that risk to advocate for those who can’t. I like to tell people, if you go somewhere without a wheelchair accessible entrance, you can bring that up and talk about how you have friends/family you would love to bring here but can’t because they don’t have a wheelchair accessible entrance. You can start similar conversations about ventilation systems, offering outdoor seating, and other ways to make spaces accessible to people who need to keep taking precautions against COVID. If you want to go farther, you can refuse to patronize locations that don’t do this, or maybe refuse alongside seasonal COVID stats—“I would love to take my kid here, but we’re in a COVID wave and there isn’t adequate ventilation/crowd control.” The more demand there is for accessible spaces, the more capital will sway towards actually putting money into fixing them. But those of us who can’t access the current spaces need the support of people who can.
posted by brook horse at 4:43 PM on September 21 [144 favorites]
Two weeks ago we finally caught COVID. It’s too early to tell if there’s been any permanent damage, but frankly, that doesn’t even matter. We have both been entirely nonfunctional for the past two weeks; feeding and washing ourselves have been the limit. The most we can do is lay in bed and maybe work on a puzzle. This is both with us having Paxlovid within the first three days of symptom onset, and with us being very lucky to already have a bunch of adaptive equipment that prevents us from accidentally overexerting ourselves, which can worsen outcomes. As expected, it’s exacerbated both of our chronic illnesses—my partner has had to be on daily painkillers the past two weeks, and for me COVID triggered an acute asthma attack that required a week on corticosteroids to kick. We've both had the flu many times in our life, and it never hit either of us like this.
Even if we both completely recover, I simply cannot afford to be completely nonfunctional for 2+ weeks (or more, given the multiple waves) a year. Nor can I afford the destabilization of my chronic illnesses. Most of my friends who don’t take precautions have had COVID 6+ times now. But because they aren’t already balancing chronic health conditions and financially insecure, they can afford to deal with the consequences of being bedbound for a week plus. I can’t.
So now I’m coming to terms with the fact that there will be no post COVID for me. That I’ll be masking indoors, only eating at restaurants with outdoor seating (which is available less than half the year in my location), and avoiding crowded events for the rest of my life. In some ways this is not so difficult for me, because a lot of the COVID precautions map onto limitations I already have had due to my other disabilities. When I was in a wheelchair living in a small town, I was limited to the three wheelchair accessible restaurants. I’ve never been able to go to conferences in my field because my chronic health issues are exacerbated by flying; COVID now only limits me from the once-in-six-years that a conference is in driving distance. I generally couldn’t handle crowded social events more than once or twice a year anyway due to my sensory issues and vision/hearing impairment. Etc.
But if I didn’t have those limitations already, I would feel very acutely the impact protecting myself from COVID has on my life. I still feel it some because a lot of my disabilities improved in the past handful of years, so I had a brief window of getting to experience the wonder of activities like hanging out at a bar for a few hours, or going to a Halloween party with 6-10 friends. Those things were nice, but given I didn’t have access to them for most of my life it’s not much of a sacrifice for me to give them up.
The problem is one I thought about before COVID, but especially once news about long COVID started to hit. Becoming disabled in childhood was, for myself, somewhat a gift. When I was defining who I was, I did so within severe limitations. As a child I was so ill that I was largely housebound and only had two or three hours of energy per day to do anything other than lie on some cushions on the floor. I made meaning and joy in a very small box, but the thing is, I had never known a larger one. It never felt that limiting, because I didn’t know more than vaguely that I could have been anything different.
Becoming disabled as an adult means being shoved in that box when you’ve previously had access to the entire world. This wrecks people. I have done therapy with individuals who became disabled later in life, and man. The grief is so palpable. The denial, too. I often talk to people about what some short term goals could look like, how we can improve their life while working on the mental or physical health issue that is disabling them. The number of times people have looked at me like I’m crazy when I ask them what three months of progress could look like. “In three months I’ll be 100% back to my old self.” (Reader, they will not be.)
Abled people look at disabled lives and think, “That’s miserable. I could never live like that.” But that’s because they have never learned to find value or meaning in a more restricted life. I think sometimes about men learning about all the ways women adjust their lives to protect themselves—they think it sounds untenable, horrifically restricting. And in some ways it is. But also women still live full and meaningful lives within those restrictions. Becoming a woman and having to deal with those restrictions is not, in fact, the worst thing that could happen to someone. The same is true of becoming disabled. But particularly because so few people have access to what a full disabled life looks like, this is unthinkable for most abled people. So of course they would never voluntarily place those restrictions on themselves. They have no practice with living a life with those kinds of physical limitations.
Which is in some ways unfortunate, because learning to live with being disabled is excellent preparation for coping with aging. I think it makes sense that people don’t want to deal with any limitations until they have to; on the other hand, there’s a reason senior suicidality is so high and I do think that sustained practice learning to adapt to a more limited existence could really buffer against that. But I’m also not going to force that on anyone, or even really think it reasonable to ask other people to do.
What I do find reasonable is to ask the people who have the privilege to take that risk to advocate for those who can’t. I like to tell people, if you go somewhere without a wheelchair accessible entrance, you can bring that up and talk about how you have friends/family you would love to bring here but can’t because they don’t have a wheelchair accessible entrance. You can start similar conversations about ventilation systems, offering outdoor seating, and other ways to make spaces accessible to people who need to keep taking precautions against COVID. If you want to go farther, you can refuse to patronize locations that don’t do this, or maybe refuse alongside seasonal COVID stats—“I would love to take my kid here, but we’re in a COVID wave and there isn’t adequate ventilation/crowd control.” The more demand there is for accessible spaces, the more capital will sway towards actually putting money into fixing them. But those of us who can’t access the current spaces need the support of people who can.
posted by brook horse at 4:43 PM on September 21 [144 favorites]
I believe there is no level of precaution or lockdown that could have stopped the spread of Delta or later more transmissible variants.
The state of Victoria in Australia practically did a controlled trial on this. They eradicated the original strain with some of the strictest measures in the word. They eradicated the original strain. Remember "donut days"?
Then when Delta emerged, they tried the exact same measures - and it escaped and took off anyway.
Being able to isolate was (is) a big privilege. In Australia it was poor, immigrant, people of colour who had the dirty jobs that had to be done in person, and had to actually load and unload boxes of food, and deliver goods to people who were able to to stay at home, and took the risk of much higher exposure and got infected first.
posted by other barry at 5:16 PM on September 21 [21 favorites]
The state of Victoria in Australia practically did a controlled trial on this. They eradicated the original strain with some of the strictest measures in the word. They eradicated the original strain. Remember "donut days"?
Then when Delta emerged, they tried the exact same measures - and it escaped and took off anyway.
Being able to isolate was (is) a big privilege. In Australia it was poor, immigrant, people of colour who had the dirty jobs that had to be done in person, and had to actually load and unload boxes of food, and deliver goods to people who were able to to stay at home, and took the risk of much higher exposure and got infected first.
posted by other barry at 5:16 PM on September 21 [21 favorites]
Thanks, brook horse, for that comment.
posted by eustatic at 5:17 PM on September 21 [8 favorites]
posted by eustatic at 5:17 PM on September 21 [8 favorites]
Thanks, brook horse, for that comment.
+1
posted by Pouteria at 5:20 PM on September 21 [4 favorites]
+1
posted by Pouteria at 5:20 PM on September 21 [4 favorites]
Being able to isolate was (is) a big privilege. In Australia it was poor, immigrant, people of colour who had the dirty jobs that had to be done in person, and had to actually load and unload boxes of food, and deliver goods to people who were able to to stay at home, and took the risk of much higher exposure and got infected first.
Just as a note, "disabled people who have been taking precautions for years" and "frontline workers" aren't mutually exclusive. I worked in direct patient care for years, masking the entire time. That's part of why I have remained so restricted in my social life, because my job was already such a high risk vector I couldn't afford to not isolate the rest of the time. (The greatest irony of my life is that I caught COVID a month after quitting my hospital job.) A lot of disabled people both isolate as much as possible and are also poor and marginalized with risky in-person jobs.
posted by brook horse at 5:34 PM on September 21 [38 favorites]
Just as a note, "disabled people who have been taking precautions for years" and "frontline workers" aren't mutually exclusive. I worked in direct patient care for years, masking the entire time. That's part of why I have remained so restricted in my social life, because my job was already such a high risk vector I couldn't afford to not isolate the rest of the time. (The greatest irony of my life is that I caught COVID a month after quitting my hospital job.) A lot of disabled people both isolate as much as possible and are also poor and marginalized with risky in-person jobs.
posted by brook horse at 5:34 PM on September 21 [38 favorites]
Many, many, many people have had COVID, often more than once, and appear to have recovered fully. It is not wildly unreasonable for such people to conclude from this that their personal COVID risk is akin to the risk of contracting a disease like the flu (which can also inflict serious harm on a subset of the population, but be nothing more than a temporary nuisance for most people).
Covid killed 0.1% of the worlds population, substantially worse than the flu at its peak, a lot less bad now. Globally it's a rounding error though.
posted by Sebmojo at 5:34 PM on September 21 [3 favorites]
Covid killed 0.1% of the worlds population, substantially worse than the flu at its peak
If it's peak is 1917, that flu pandemic killed somewhere between 1-5% of the world's population then. We're not done with COVID deaths of course, but we're also not done with flu deaths.
posted by aubilenon at 5:58 PM on September 21 [19 favorites]
If it's peak is 1917, that flu pandemic killed somewhere between 1-5% of the world's population then. We're not done with COVID deaths of course, but we're also not done with flu deaths.
posted by aubilenon at 5:58 PM on September 21 [19 favorites]
Why should covid be different from the flu? The flu and covid do similar damage to the body, increasing the risk of heart attacks, strokes, brain disorders, etc., but people are getting covid 3x a year and the flu once every 8-10 years.
posted by MagnificentVacuum at 6:10 PM on September 21 [12 favorites]
posted by MagnificentVacuum at 6:10 PM on September 21 [12 favorites]
"Many, many, many people have had COVID, often more than once, and appear to have recovered fully."
"Appear" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.
Every month I read articles about newly discovered significant long-term health impacts from Covid.
I would not be surprised if a lot of "young healthy" people who "recovered fully" from their Covid infections end up dying prematurely decades from now because their hearts give out years earlier than they would have otherwise.
posted by Jacqueline at 6:19 PM on September 21 [22 favorites]
"Appear" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.
Every month I read articles about newly discovered significant long-term health impacts from Covid.
I would not be surprised if a lot of "young healthy" people who "recovered fully" from their Covid infections end up dying prematurely decades from now because their hearts give out years earlier than they would have otherwise.
posted by Jacqueline at 6:19 PM on September 21 [22 favorites]
Vaccines Significantly Reduce the Risk of Long Covid, Study Finds
Get your boosters, y'all.
posted by gwint at 6:24 PM on September 21 [32 favorites]
Get your boosters, y'all.
posted by gwint at 6:24 PM on September 21 [32 favorites]
> "Many, many, many people have had COVID, often more than once, and appear to have recovered fully."
"Appear" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.
Every month I read articles about newly discovered significant long-term health impacts from Covid.
I would not be surprised if a lot of "young healthy" people who "recovered fully" from their Covid infections end up dying prematurely decades from now because their hearts give out years earlier than they would have otherwise.
Well, "I would not be surprised" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.
We just don't know what we don't know.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 7:14 PM on September 21 [20 favorites]
"Appear" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.
Every month I read articles about newly discovered significant long-term health impacts from Covid.
I would not be surprised if a lot of "young healthy" people who "recovered fully" from their Covid infections end up dying prematurely decades from now because their hearts give out years earlier than they would have otherwise.
Well, "I would not be surprised" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.
We just don't know what we don't know.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 7:14 PM on September 21 [20 favorites]
Considering there's 3 links above in these threads specifically saying what we already do know. The "not be surprised" comes from at least *some* informed position.
posted by symbioid at 7:26 PM on September 21 [10 favorites]
posted by symbioid at 7:26 PM on September 21 [10 favorites]
Postacute sequelae of COVID-19 at 2 years
posted by brook horse at 7:26 PM on September 21 [26 favorites]
Risks among nonhospitalized group. Compared to the control, people with COVID-19 who were not hospitalized during the acute phase of the disease were still at an increased risk of death during the 91–180 days after SARS-CoV-2 infection, but not the 181–720 days following SARS-CoV-2 infection, suggesting the risk horizon occurred between 91 days and 360 days (Fig. 1, Extended Data Fig. 3 and Supplementary Table 5). Compared to those without SARS-CoV-2 infection, the risk of hospitalization was increased in the 361–540 days following the infection, but not the 541–720 days after SARS-CoV-2 infection, suggesting the risk horizon occurred between 361 days and 720 days.Here's some of what we do know.
Over the span of 2 years of follow-up in the nonhospitalized group, risks declined and became not significant for 69% of the examined sequelae (Fig. 1, Extended Data Fig. 3 and Supplementary Table 5) and remained increased for 31% (24 of 77) of sequelae—including 7% (1 of 14) of cardiovascular sequelae, 20% (1 of 5) of coagulation and hematologic sequelae, 100% (1 of 1) endocrine sequelae, 36% (4 of 11) of gastrointestinal sequelae, 100% (1 of 1) general sequelae, 0% (0 of 4) of kidney sequelae, 15% (2 of 13) of mental health sequelae, 75% (3 of 4) of musculoskeletal sequelae, 45% (9 of 20) of neurologic sequelae and 50% (2 of 4) of pulmonary sequelae (Extended Data Fig. 3). In analyses of PASC and sequelae by organ system, risks of PASC for coagulation and hematologic disorders, pulmonary disorders, fatigue, gastrointestinal disorders, musculoskeletal disorders and diabetes remained increased 2 years after a SARS-CoV-2 infection in those not hospitalized for COVID-19 compared to those without SARS-CoV-2 infection (Fig. 2 and Supplementary Table 6). The risks of sequelae in several organ systems and disease groups became not significant during the 2 years of follow-up including risks in neurologic (not significant at 541, possible range of risk horizon: 361–720 days), cardiovascular (not significant at 541, 361–720 days), mental health (at 181, 91–360 days) and kidney (not significant at 361, 181–540 days).
...
The findings show that among people who were nonhospitalized during the acute phase of SARS-CoV-2 infection (this group represents the majority of people with COVID-19), the risk of death becomes nonstatistically significant at 6 months (possible range of risk horizon: 3–12 months) after infection and the risk of hospitalization remains elevated until 19 months (12–24 months) after infection. The risks of both death and hospitalization remained statistically significantly elevated through the 2 years of follow-up in those who had been hospitalized during the acute phase of SARS-CoV-2 infection. At 2 years, risks remained elevated for 31% and 65% of the sequelae in nonhospitalized and hospitalized individuals, respectively.
posted by brook horse at 7:26 PM on September 21 [26 favorites]
Covid is not done with us yet. Even if the virus itself completely disappeared forever, the health consequences are going to persist on a serious scale until the generation who lived through it have passed into history, and that is assuming there is no adverse consequences transmitted genetically/epigentically onto the next generation.
Covid denialism is real and serious. Denial of the long term consequences is far worse and much more insidious.
posted by Pouteria at 7:51 PM on September 21 [18 favorites]
Covid denialism is real and serious. Denial of the long term consequences is far worse and much more insidious.
posted by Pouteria at 7:51 PM on September 21 [18 favorites]
(I wanted to say the following because it's something that's important to me, but, for reasons that I outline, my perspective isn't very well informed except by limited, recent personal experience. You would probably do better to go read brook horse's comment again.)
posted by It is regrettable that at 8:15 PM on September 21 [22 favorites]
What is it about Covid that entitles us to mask mandates and lockdowns that other diseases don’t have?anotherpanacea, since I have not lost anyone to COVID, this was one of the greatest sadnesses of COVID for me. I am not a disabled person, and, though I like to think I had basic human sympathy, I never thought about how radically a disability could change someone's life. COVID forced us all to grapple with just a sliver, for a little while, of what disabled people and chronically ill people have to deal with their entire lives, and it was a (hopefully not-to-be-repeated!) opportunity for a societal grappling with the suddenly visible issue of how society is set up, often unintentionally but sometimes intentionally, to marginalize and remove from view the disabled and the sick. We could have learned from this, and we could have started the process of doing better, or even just of thinking about what it means to do better! It turned out that so many of our assumptions about society had to be just weren't true, and we could make big changes quickly when society accepted the need to do so! But it was judged so much more important to rush back to calling things normal as soon as they were less catastrophic.
posted by It is regrettable that at 8:15 PM on September 21 [22 favorites]
> What is it about Covid that entitles us to mask mandates and lockdowns that other diseases don’t have?
Comments like this are so weird to me. People are asking for masks because we’ve had a huge revolution in our understanding of respiratory disease transmission - if we clean our indoor air we can dramatically reduce colds, flus, rsv, covid, etc.
When Snow figured out the cholera was in the water, we (eventually) installed sanitation infrastructure. Now when it breaks, we get boil water advisories.
Wearing a mask until we fix indoor air quality is like boiling your water when there’s a problem with the infrastructure. And if we install sanitizing ventilation and good air filtration, then we don’t really need masking except maybe during peak illness periods or for, say, chemo nurses.
When you don’t mask and you don’t advocate for indoor air quality improvements, you signal that you don’t believe getting sick would be a problem for you in the short or long term and you don’t care if it does for anyone else.
Or you signal your ignorance of the truly astonishing scientific advances we’ve had in the last several years around long and short term sequelae of viruses (especially Covid) and viral transmission - which is fair. It’s not widely reported and not everyone has a university library subscription and time to read lots of papers every week.
Anyway, here’s a report from an insurer about how they’re having to plan for 3% excess mortality for at least the next decade because of Covid.
https://www.swissre.com/press-release/Covid-19-may-lead-to-longest-period-of-peacetime-excess-mortality-says-new-Swiss-Re-report/
posted by congen at 8:51 PM on September 21 [60 favorites]
Comments like this are so weird to me. People are asking for masks because we’ve had a huge revolution in our understanding of respiratory disease transmission - if we clean our indoor air we can dramatically reduce colds, flus, rsv, covid, etc.
When Snow figured out the cholera was in the water, we (eventually) installed sanitation infrastructure. Now when it breaks, we get boil water advisories.
Wearing a mask until we fix indoor air quality is like boiling your water when there’s a problem with the infrastructure. And if we install sanitizing ventilation and good air filtration, then we don’t really need masking except maybe during peak illness periods or for, say, chemo nurses.
When you don’t mask and you don’t advocate for indoor air quality improvements, you signal that you don’t believe getting sick would be a problem for you in the short or long term and you don’t care if it does for anyone else.
Or you signal your ignorance of the truly astonishing scientific advances we’ve had in the last several years around long and short term sequelae of viruses (especially Covid) and viral transmission - which is fair. It’s not widely reported and not everyone has a university library subscription and time to read lots of papers every week.
Anyway, here’s a report from an insurer about how they’re having to plan for 3% excess mortality for at least the next decade because of Covid.
https://www.swissre.com/press-release/Covid-19-may-lead-to-longest-period-of-peacetime-excess-mortality-says-new-Swiss-Re-report/
posted by congen at 8:51 PM on September 21 [60 favorites]
Are we clear on what a lockdown is? Everybody stays home except essential workers? It’s a pretty massive intervention, requiring significant coercion to maintain. It’s literally socially and legally disabling mobility, free expression, organizing, and sociality.
Also, we already tried it and it didn’t eradicate Covid. So how long would this lockdown need to be? Six weeks? Six months?
I think it’s fairly obvious that someone calling for persistent lockdowns in 2024 has lost the plot. In the US, if the Biden administration called for a lockdown tomorrow then Harris would lose the election to Trump, who would immediately lift it. A lot of states and localities would refuse to comply, and COVID is global and has multiple strains circulating, so it wouldn’t even work.
What will the health effects of the lockdowns be? What will the economic effects be? What will the educational effects be? How will the lockdowns exacerbate other disabilities, like mental illnesses? How will lockdowns exacerbate inequalities? How will noncompliance and resistance be punished?
The human race cannot just stop and hold our collective breath until this endemic virus and its variants disappears. That’s terrible! But it spreads too rapidly to contain. If we COULD do that, then we’d almost certainly be obligated to eradicate a bunch of other diseases as well, starting with the flu and malaria.
But unfortunately the proposed solution would fail and along the way it would literally be worse than the disease, while making many features of the disease itself even more severe and weakening our ability to respond to future pandemics.
I have two good friends with long Covid. Both are academics with significant relevant insights. Neither believes more lockdowns would have saved them.
posted by anotherpanacea at 8:58 PM on September 21 [12 favorites]
Also, we already tried it and it didn’t eradicate Covid. So how long would this lockdown need to be? Six weeks? Six months?
I think it’s fairly obvious that someone calling for persistent lockdowns in 2024 has lost the plot. In the US, if the Biden administration called for a lockdown tomorrow then Harris would lose the election to Trump, who would immediately lift it. A lot of states and localities would refuse to comply, and COVID is global and has multiple strains circulating, so it wouldn’t even work.
What will the health effects of the lockdowns be? What will the economic effects be? What will the educational effects be? How will the lockdowns exacerbate other disabilities, like mental illnesses? How will lockdowns exacerbate inequalities? How will noncompliance and resistance be punished?
The human race cannot just stop and hold our collective breath until this endemic virus and its variants disappears. That’s terrible! But it spreads too rapidly to contain. If we COULD do that, then we’d almost certainly be obligated to eradicate a bunch of other diseases as well, starting with the flu and malaria.
But unfortunately the proposed solution would fail and along the way it would literally be worse than the disease, while making many features of the disease itself even more severe and weakening our ability to respond to future pandemics.
I have two good friends with long Covid. Both are academics with significant relevant insights. Neither believes more lockdowns would have saved them.
posted by anotherpanacea at 8:58 PM on September 21 [12 favorites]
If we COULD do that, then we’d almost certainly be obligated to eradicate a bunch of other diseases as well, starting with the flu and malaria.
Oh no! How terrible! We might make the world better!
posted by adrienneleigh at 9:04 PM on September 21 [12 favorites]
Oh no! How terrible! We might make the world better!
posted by adrienneleigh at 9:04 PM on September 21 [12 favorites]
Oh no! How terrible! We might make the world better!
Okay, you’re right. The flu kills tens of thousands of Americans every year. Hundreds of thousands globally. How long do we have to lockdown to eliminate the flu?
Malaria kills more than a half million people a year. How long are the malaria lockdowns going to be?
posted by anotherpanacea at 9:14 PM on September 21 [10 favorites]
Okay, you’re right. The flu kills tens of thousands of Americans every year. Hundreds of thousands globally. How long do we have to lockdown to eliminate the flu?
Malaria kills more than a half million people a year. How long are the malaria lockdowns going to be?
posted by anotherpanacea at 9:14 PM on September 21 [10 favorites]
The problem with lockdowns is even if we did some magical universally coordinated effort of draconian measures and somehow stopped all human to human transmission for a year, worldwide, there's still reservoirs of COVID-19 in a bunch of different kinds of animals, and it wouldn't take that long to get back to where we are today.
However, I do feel improving air filtration and circulation is absolutely something we should be prioritizing, and probably incorporating into building codes. It's always unpopular to pass a law saying businesses and schools need to all spend many thousands of dollars they don't have to upgrade their ventilation, but at least saying it's required for new construction would mean eventually our society would be more robust against airborne pathogens. And standalone air purifiers are a pretty good stopgap measure that are relatively cheap to install in places that can't afford to retrofit their HVAC.
posted by aubilenon at 9:14 PM on September 21 [26 favorites]
However, I do feel improving air filtration and circulation is absolutely something we should be prioritizing, and probably incorporating into building codes. It's always unpopular to pass a law saying businesses and schools need to all spend many thousands of dollars they don't have to upgrade their ventilation, but at least saying it's required for new construction would mean eventually our society would be more robust against airborne pathogens. And standalone air purifiers are a pretty good stopgap measure that are relatively cheap to install in places that can't afford to retrofit their HVAC.
posted by aubilenon at 9:14 PM on September 21 [26 favorites]
I don’t think that article is calling for persistent lockdowns? They aren’t discussed as a prescription except in that one long list of prevention strategies.
I guess i see lockdowns as reasonable sometimes, but not most of the time. I think they should be used when things like the healthcare or food system are at risk from a surge in illness or there’s no other way to prevent massive mortality. Or as a precaution at the start of a pandemic while we figure out how it’s transmitted. But we’ve also studied how to use lockdowns effectively - they should be short as possible and imposed early in an outbreak. And ideally we’d use the time in lockdown to prevent the need for more lockdowns - installing air filters, setting folks up with free rapid tests and good masks, etc.
I think that the point the article makes about how scary people find thinking about becoming disabled is really interesting because as soon as you mention masks or lockdowns as a tool, lots of people freak out and knee jerk oppose it as a limit on their lives and freedom - but it’s hard to take that justification seriously when they’re simultaneously mocking anyone who wears a mask or limits their activities at all to avoid getting sick.
Like given what we know now, what entitles you to live in such a way that millions of people have to stay in permanent lockdown to survive or avoid further disability?
posted by congen at 9:22 PM on September 21 [21 favorites]
I guess i see lockdowns as reasonable sometimes, but not most of the time. I think they should be used when things like the healthcare or food system are at risk from a surge in illness or there’s no other way to prevent massive mortality. Or as a precaution at the start of a pandemic while we figure out how it’s transmitted. But we’ve also studied how to use lockdowns effectively - they should be short as possible and imposed early in an outbreak. And ideally we’d use the time in lockdown to prevent the need for more lockdowns - installing air filters, setting folks up with free rapid tests and good masks, etc.
I think that the point the article makes about how scary people find thinking about becoming disabled is really interesting because as soon as you mention masks or lockdowns as a tool, lots of people freak out and knee jerk oppose it as a limit on their lives and freedom - but it’s hard to take that justification seriously when they’re simultaneously mocking anyone who wears a mask or limits their activities at all to avoid getting sick.
Like given what we know now, what entitles you to live in such a way that millions of people have to stay in permanent lockdown to survive or avoid further disability?
posted by congen at 9:22 PM on September 21 [21 favorites]
NZ Lockdowns were pretty harsh and undoubtedly saved a lot of people (we had some natural advantages - island nation at the ass end of the world etc) & bought a lot of time to sort out vaccination programmes and other mitigations (masks). It'd be a tough ask to re-implement them again (public health service continues to be gutted and we no longer have charismatic PM Ardern at the helm) but I suspect it'd depend on the virulence of the outbreak. Probably the most disappointing thing was watching 1m+ people die in the US, medical professionals going through what amounts to PTSD as the system got flooded with victims worldwide and then as control regimes started to slip as we all pretend Covid isn't a thing (NZ has more deaths from Covid than die in road accidents or crime weekly but that no longer makes the news), people continue to get sick (its a mystery!) and people won't/don't bother to mask anymore (which would greatly slow spread & at least demonstrate a willingness not to inadvertently spread to others in society, particularly those at risk). At least a fair chunk of the population here in NZ is still entitled to a free vaccination & 6 monthly booster; although based on work absences for people with school age children, I do wonder when kids will be included in the vaccination programme as school seem to be a major transmission vector for all kinds of lurgies (not that that was a new thing but kids & parents getting covid 2-3 times seems to be the norm). As pointed out upthread, there are going to be a slew of C19 related issues in the years to come which struggling health-systems are going to find it even more difficult to cope with.
posted by phigmov at 9:32 PM on September 21 [9 favorites]
posted by phigmov at 9:32 PM on September 21 [9 favorites]
Both are right. The author's reframing of disability (that a pandemic creates a "zero level" norm of disability), and the mainstream's "we need to move on with our lives" attitude, are not mutally exclusive.
The correct solution is to address both. The only way to do that is a social welfare safety net that provides support for those who are at greater risk of being affected by COVID, e.g. those with preexisting conditions including elderly, immunocomprised, kidney, diabetes, heart disease, etc. To make sure the vulnerable are not treated as second-class citizens. To materially support those who are experiencing long Covid.
In an advanced, enlightened society, that solution would be possible.
posted by polymodus at 9:57 PM on September 21 [29 favorites]
The correct solution is to address both. The only way to do that is a social welfare safety net that provides support for those who are at greater risk of being affected by COVID, e.g. those with preexisting conditions including elderly, immunocomprised, kidney, diabetes, heart disease, etc. To make sure the vulnerable are not treated as second-class citizens. To materially support those who are experiencing long Covid.
In an advanced, enlightened society, that solution would be possible.
posted by polymodus at 9:57 PM on September 21 [29 favorites]
The author of the linked post has a point, though I tend to find it less useful to focus on microagressions than to consider the structures of macroaggressions. As eustatic points out, the initial precautions came from fear of crashing the health care system and, I think, more generally, the economy. Once there was a way to keep things going, even with a debilitated workforce, there was a concerted effort to normalize whatever level of illness we were stuck with and resume the usual level of exploitation. So the CEO of Delta pressed for shorter quarantine periods (from 10 to 5 days, though even in the more recent variants studied, people are usually contagious for 10 days), and the consultants advised Democrats to take the win by insisting that the pandemic was over, and the other ruling class think tanks and whatnot weighed in to insist it's mild, it's over, and now we have mask bans being passed.
Anyway, as others have noted, it's not just a cold or flu (not that flu is great) and no one knows exactly who is going to have the just-like-a-cold experience and who is going to die or be disabled, but it's more likely to happen with repeated infections and vulnerable populations, and I worry about the subclinical neurological impairments of surgeons and airline pilots as well as the other bodily damage, neurological and otherwise, and there's definitely more death and illness since it started.
And why do we not have universal masking requirements in hospitals and improved ventilation and air filtration in every hospital and school? Ideally we'd have air that's safe to breathe and water that's safe to drink in every building, but let's start with places for health care and children.
Things that would help reduce the burden of COVID-19 on people's bodies (and thus also reduce the disabling effects of the current practices in the US, or elsewhere, for those taking precautions) would also be helpful in addressing the health effects of air pollution and the risks of other diseases that are in the increase or on the way. Improved ventilation and air filtration--cleaning up air (as the Victorians learned to clean up water)--as some of the elite have already done for their spaces-- would improve people's health, improve children's learning, be, you know, an investment in the common weal.
posted by girandole at 11:11 PM on September 21 [30 favorites]
Anyway, as others have noted, it's not just a cold or flu (not that flu is great) and no one knows exactly who is going to have the just-like-a-cold experience and who is going to die or be disabled, but it's more likely to happen with repeated infections and vulnerable populations, and I worry about the subclinical neurological impairments of surgeons and airline pilots as well as the other bodily damage, neurological and otherwise, and there's definitely more death and illness since it started.
And why do we not have universal masking requirements in hospitals and improved ventilation and air filtration in every hospital and school? Ideally we'd have air that's safe to breathe and water that's safe to drink in every building, but let's start with places for health care and children.
Things that would help reduce the burden of COVID-19 on people's bodies (and thus also reduce the disabling effects of the current practices in the US, or elsewhere, for those taking precautions) would also be helpful in addressing the health effects of air pollution and the risks of other diseases that are in the increase or on the way. Improved ventilation and air filtration--cleaning up air (as the Victorians learned to clean up water)--as some of the elite have already done for their spaces-- would improve people's health, improve children's learning, be, you know, an investment in the common weal.
posted by girandole at 11:11 PM on September 21 [30 favorites]
Get your boosters, y'all.
We don't have boosters in my country (South Africa) and we haven't for years.
We don't have access to paxlovid, and it's very difficult and expensive to get N95 or equivalent masks.
I wouldn't be surprised if this is the case for most of the global south.
We've seen how variants arise all over the world. I think the Delta variant started here, or do I misremember?
As long as this is the state of affairs, I'm not sure how much difference better air quality / masking /booster rates / isolation in the global North will make for you guys either.
posted by Zumbador at 12:21 AM on September 22 [25 favorites]
We don't have boosters in my country (South Africa) and we haven't for years.
We don't have access to paxlovid, and it's very difficult and expensive to get N95 or equivalent masks.
I wouldn't be surprised if this is the case for most of the global south.
We've seen how variants arise all over the world. I think the Delta variant started here, or do I misremember?
As long as this is the state of affairs, I'm not sure how much difference better air quality / masking /booster rates / isolation in the global North will make for you guys either.
posted by Zumbador at 12:21 AM on September 22 [25 favorites]
Both are right. The author's reframing of disability (that a pandemic creates a "zero level" norm of disability), and the mainstream's "we need to move on with our lives" attitude, are not mutally exclusive.
The correct solution is to address both. The only way to do that is a social welfare safety net that provides support for those who are at greater risk of being affected by COVID, e.g. those with preexisting conditions including elderly, immunocomprised, kidney, diabetes, heart disease, etc. To make sure the vulnerable are not treated as second-class citizens. To materially support those who are experiencing long Covid.
I'm all for a social welfare safety net, but we also need measures that reduce the risk of infection for everyone, because no-one can be sure they're not actually vulnerable to covid. For example, I never thought of myself as falling into the category of "vulnerable," but I was recently diagnosed with an auto-immune disease, the symptoms of which could be considerably worsened by covid infection.
As others have mentioned above, we need to start implementing measures to improve indoor air quality in the same way that we take measures to keep our water supply clean.
posted by mydonkeybenjamin at 12:34 AM on September 22 [10 favorites]
The correct solution is to address both. The only way to do that is a social welfare safety net that provides support for those who are at greater risk of being affected by COVID, e.g. those with preexisting conditions including elderly, immunocomprised, kidney, diabetes, heart disease, etc. To make sure the vulnerable are not treated as second-class citizens. To materially support those who are experiencing long Covid.
I'm all for a social welfare safety net, but we also need measures that reduce the risk of infection for everyone, because no-one can be sure they're not actually vulnerable to covid. For example, I never thought of myself as falling into the category of "vulnerable," but I was recently diagnosed with an auto-immune disease, the symptoms of which could be considerably worsened by covid infection.
As others have mentioned above, we need to start implementing measures to improve indoor air quality in the same way that we take measures to keep our water supply clean.
posted by mydonkeybenjamin at 12:34 AM on September 22 [10 favorites]
Malaria kills more than a half million people a year. How long are the malaria lockdowns going to be?
Well, lockdowns would be 100% useless for eliminating transmission of malaria, since it doesn't spread human-to-human. We do have some pretty good ideas about how to eradicate malaria, though, and the WHO is on it. There's also a promising new vaccine.
posted by adrienneleigh at 1:09 AM on September 22 [25 favorites]
Well, lockdowns would be 100% useless for eliminating transmission of malaria, since it doesn't spread human-to-human. We do have some pretty good ideas about how to eradicate malaria, though, and the WHO is on it. There's also a promising new vaccine.
posted by adrienneleigh at 1:09 AM on September 22 [25 favorites]
I often thought during the lockdowns: people are always saying that if you want more pay, learn some skills (implicitly they ignore whatever skills the market currently doesn't value) and change job, stop complaining about your lot. Why am I an arsehole if I turn around to them and say, if you want to get outside, if you want to see people, get yourself a job that isn't useless and optional. Because a lot of those of us who were "essential workers" were in warehouses and factories with hundreds of other people.
Somehow the IT guys felt it fair to suggest we should do their work if we wanted their lifestyle, but it never occurred to them that they could apply to clean toilets like so many of the rest of us if they wanted to leave the house. Instead of was "so unfair" or something.
posted by Dysk at 1:09 AM on September 22 [14 favorites]
Somehow the IT guys felt it fair to suggest we should do their work if we wanted their lifestyle, but it never occurred to them that they could apply to clean toilets like so many of the rest of us if they wanted to leave the house. Instead of was "so unfair" or something.
posted by Dysk at 1:09 AM on September 22 [14 favorites]
As for the flu: early COVID lockdowns outright eliminated at least one strain of influenza—as far as we can tell, it's literally extinct now. Influenza is a more fragile virus than SARS-CoV-2!
posted by adrienneleigh at 1:11 AM on September 22 [28 favorites]
posted by adrienneleigh at 1:11 AM on September 22 [28 favorites]
I don’t think that article is calling for persistent lockdowns? They aren’t discussed as a prescription except in that one long list of prevention strategies
It’s listed among the accommodations that are required to eliminate Covid, or else be dubbed a denialist.
Some people kind of miss how maximalist the social model of disability is—ANYTHING that society refuses to do to remove the differential impact of some impairment is disabling. Recall the examples of vision disorders needing glasses (nondisabling) and sleep disorders (disabling): to avoid disabling someone, society must completely level the playing field by any means necessary. Glasses/contacts are the favored example because they’re socially acceptable and completely eliminate the differential between those with good vision and those with (some) vision disorders.
So let’s say you invest in air filtration, wear masks indoors, and vaccinate annually. You’re still complicit in disabling others if the virus persists and they can’t live as freely as you. If you believe that the virus is endemic and can only be managed rather than eliminated, you’re disabling the author and those who must still engage in enhanced self-protection measures.
So I think the big stuff is very much the point of the article. If you deny lockdowns would work, on the author’s view you’re literally an ableist denialist.
Nor is this maximalism uncommon: in this very thread adrienneleigh has been advocating ongoing lockdowns to eliminate both Covid and now influenza, biting the bullet on the idea that other diseases can have similar disabling effects and so deserve similar treatment. (Still haven’t heard how long the lockdowns will need to be!) It’s not enough to stop a single strain, of course: the remaining strains will still have a differential impact, so we will have to lockdown until they’re all gone.
My own view is that the this specific solution is worse and more damaging and disabling than the disease. I also resent the claim that this constitutes “Covid denialism,” but whatever.
posted by anotherpanacea at 1:58 AM on September 22 [16 favorites]
It’s listed among the accommodations that are required to eliminate Covid, or else be dubbed a denialist.
Some people kind of miss how maximalist the social model of disability is—ANYTHING that society refuses to do to remove the differential impact of some impairment is disabling. Recall the examples of vision disorders needing glasses (nondisabling) and sleep disorders (disabling): to avoid disabling someone, society must completely level the playing field by any means necessary. Glasses/contacts are the favored example because they’re socially acceptable and completely eliminate the differential between those with good vision and those with (some) vision disorders.
So let’s say you invest in air filtration, wear masks indoors, and vaccinate annually. You’re still complicit in disabling others if the virus persists and they can’t live as freely as you. If you believe that the virus is endemic and can only be managed rather than eliminated, you’re disabling the author and those who must still engage in enhanced self-protection measures.
So I think the big stuff is very much the point of the article. If you deny lockdowns would work, on the author’s view you’re literally an ableist denialist.
Nor is this maximalism uncommon: in this very thread adrienneleigh has been advocating ongoing lockdowns to eliminate both Covid and now influenza, biting the bullet on the idea that other diseases can have similar disabling effects and so deserve similar treatment. (Still haven’t heard how long the lockdowns will need to be!) It’s not enough to stop a single strain, of course: the remaining strains will still have a differential impact, so we will have to lockdown until they’re all gone.
My own view is that the this specific solution is worse and more damaging and disabling than the disease. I also resent the claim that this constitutes “Covid denialism,” but whatever.
posted by anotherpanacea at 1:58 AM on September 22 [16 favorites]
Thank you, girandole. Most folks in the US experienced nothing resembling a lockdown, so it's always frustrating to see them brought up by Americans as this terrible thing that happened to them. Not being able to hang out inside a bar is not a lockdown.
posted by hydropsyche at 4:55 AM on September 22 [31 favorites]
posted by hydropsyche at 4:55 AM on September 22 [31 favorites]
You’re still complicit in disabling others if the virus persists and they can’t live as freely as you.
The point of the article is also that we are ALL disabled by this, the ability masks and lockdowns and the rest going away that kept us ALL safer. We are all vulnerable.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:59 AM on September 22 [12 favorites]
The point of the article is also that we are ALL disabled by this, the ability masks and lockdowns and the rest going away that kept us ALL safer. We are all vulnerable.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:59 AM on September 22 [12 favorites]
When Snow figured out the cholera was in the water, we (eventually) installed sanitation infrastructure. Now when it breaks, we get boil water advisories.
Wearing a mask until we fix indoor air quality is like boiling your water when there’s a problem with the infrastructure. And if we install sanitizing ventilation and good air filtration, then we don’t really need masking except maybe during peak illness periods or for, say, chemo nurses.
Yes yes yes. I have been beating this drum in Covid threads, so I’m glad someone else has joined in.
Covid discussions here always drive me crazy, because you’ve got people posting things like “I haven’t left my house in 4 years” and everyone applauds. Like, yeah, I get it, but also: this reflects an individualist approach to a societal problem. One of these days maybe we’ll get that collective solution.
posted by rhymedirective at 6:43 AM on September 22 [21 favorites]
Wearing a mask until we fix indoor air quality is like boiling your water when there’s a problem with the infrastructure. And if we install sanitizing ventilation and good air filtration, then we don’t really need masking except maybe during peak illness periods or for, say, chemo nurses.
Yes yes yes. I have been beating this drum in Covid threads, so I’m glad someone else has joined in.
Covid discussions here always drive me crazy, because you’ve got people posting things like “I haven’t left my house in 4 years” and everyone applauds. Like, yeah, I get it, but also: this reflects an individualist approach to a societal problem. One of these days maybe we’ll get that collective solution.
posted by rhymedirective at 6:43 AM on September 22 [21 favorites]
Most folks in the US experienced nothing resembling a lockdown
Right, lockdowns are what China did.
posted by anotherpanacea at 6:49 AM on September 22 [3 favorites]
Right, lockdowns are what China did.
posted by anotherpanacea at 6:49 AM on September 22 [3 favorites]
Is there any place on earth where adequate precautions are being taken? If not, why not? If so, what does it look like?
I’ve been following a person travelling in Japan who’s extremely COVID cautious, and who has been pointing out some of the mitigations there. Included: Air quality monitors in many places including taxis and public transit, an overall social acceptance of masking (not everyone does it, but certainly more than in North America), better ventilation in public buildings. I don’t know about in the US, but in Canada we’ve been hard pressed to even get better ventilation in our schools let alone other public buildings. I’m thankful in my workplace I know the H&S person got the HVAC adjusted so we’d have the recommended air exchanges to mitigate things like COVID.
We also need to remember that mitigations like this help decrease the spread of multiple viruses not just COVID. And with things like measles, mumps, and whooping cough all making a comeback in some areas, it helps with that too. As someone else in this thread said, there’s also a whole lot of post-viral illness that’s been largely ignored by the medical profession, so better treatment of that is also desirable.
It boggles my mind that many people are willing to swallow just about any wellness tripe on the internet, while eschewing safe and effective vaccines and simple things like putting on a mask in a crowded public space and turning up the ventilation in a public school. Poor Florence Nightingale is in some afterlife scenario just shaking her head right now.
posted by eekernohan at 6:51 AM on September 22 [27 favorites]
I’ve been following a person travelling in Japan who’s extremely COVID cautious, and who has been pointing out some of the mitigations there. Included: Air quality monitors in many places including taxis and public transit, an overall social acceptance of masking (not everyone does it, but certainly more than in North America), better ventilation in public buildings. I don’t know about in the US, but in Canada we’ve been hard pressed to even get better ventilation in our schools let alone other public buildings. I’m thankful in my workplace I know the H&S person got the HVAC adjusted so we’d have the recommended air exchanges to mitigate things like COVID.
We also need to remember that mitigations like this help decrease the spread of multiple viruses not just COVID. And with things like measles, mumps, and whooping cough all making a comeback in some areas, it helps with that too. As someone else in this thread said, there’s also a whole lot of post-viral illness that’s been largely ignored by the medical profession, so better treatment of that is also desirable.
It boggles my mind that many people are willing to swallow just about any wellness tripe on the internet, while eschewing safe and effective vaccines and simple things like putting on a mask in a crowded public space and turning up the ventilation in a public school. Poor Florence Nightingale is in some afterlife scenario just shaking her head right now.
posted by eekernohan at 6:51 AM on September 22 [27 favorites]
Speaking as someone who lives in Japan, it's true that mitigations are better here than they are in many countries, and social acceptance of masks is much greater. It's far from perfect (we have the same ableist attitudes, blind belief among many people that "covid is over" because the government decided things had to get back to "normal," and ignorance about the damage that covid infections can cause) but being covid cautious and lobbying for clean air in public spaces is less soul-destroying here than I'm sure it is in many places.
And some businesses have really gone out of their way to improve air quality, e.g. AEON. In fact, I'm just about to pop out to do some late-night shopping, and will be going to one of their supermarkets precisely because I know it has good ventilation (something I've confirmed on multiple occasions with my CO2 monitor).
posted by mydonkeybenjamin at 7:26 AM on September 22 [19 favorites]
And some businesses have really gone out of their way to improve air quality, e.g. AEON. In fact, I'm just about to pop out to do some late-night shopping, and will be going to one of their supermarkets precisely because I know it has good ventilation (something I've confirmed on multiple occasions with my CO2 monitor).
posted by mydonkeybenjamin at 7:26 AM on September 22 [19 favorites]
The state of Victoria in Australia practically did a controlled trial on this. They eradicated the original strain with some of the strictest measures in the word. They eradicated the original strain. Remember "donut days"?
Then when Delta emerged, they tried the exact same measures - and it escaped and took off anyway.
Delta entered Victoria from NSW, whose government had persistently refused to implement anything like the movement restrictions that had done so much during earlier waves to keep the Victorian death rate as low as it was. And by the time Delta happened, there was already a substantial political backlash against masking and "lockdowns", fuelled largely from the US via the Murdoch right-wing disinformation pipeline, so the movement restrictions were put on far too late and compliance was nowhere near as high.
But all that is largely by the by. The main reason that eradication didn't work in this country is that we were forced to rely on fucking hotels as quarantine centres, right-wing governments having sold off all our purpose-built quarantine facilities decades earlier to make a quick buck.
I have clear memories of shouting at my radio as the reassuring lie that "it's droplets, not aerosols" kept on getting wheeled out over and over and over. Because of course if any official were to admit that it was aerosols as well (which of course it fucking was, always, it's a respiratory virus) then nobody would have bought the idea that commercial buildings not designed to limit airflow between rooms were in any way suitable to use for what we were using them for.
And then the backlash won the political argument, and here we all are.
People are so fucking stupid.
posted by flabdablet at 7:27 AM on September 22 [28 favorites]
Then when Delta emerged, they tried the exact same measures - and it escaped and took off anyway.
Delta entered Victoria from NSW, whose government had persistently refused to implement anything like the movement restrictions that had done so much during earlier waves to keep the Victorian death rate as low as it was. And by the time Delta happened, there was already a substantial political backlash against masking and "lockdowns", fuelled largely from the US via the Murdoch right-wing disinformation pipeline, so the movement restrictions were put on far too late and compliance was nowhere near as high.
But all that is largely by the by. The main reason that eradication didn't work in this country is that we were forced to rely on fucking hotels as quarantine centres, right-wing governments having sold off all our purpose-built quarantine facilities decades earlier to make a quick buck.
I have clear memories of shouting at my radio as the reassuring lie that "it's droplets, not aerosols" kept on getting wheeled out over and over and over. Because of course if any official were to admit that it was aerosols as well (which of course it fucking was, always, it's a respiratory virus) then nobody would have bought the idea that commercial buildings not designed to limit airflow between rooms were in any way suitable to use for what we were using them for.
And then the backlash won the political argument, and here we all are.
People are so fucking stupid.
posted by flabdablet at 7:27 AM on September 22 [28 favorites]
The main long-term change I see around me, in particular at my work, is that people mask up when they have a cold or a sore throat. I think that’s beneficial.
I find the social model of disability helpful but I think this essay is doing some backflips.
So when you hear someone say, "I can't let COVID control my life," understand that they mean they can't let themselves think about becoming disabled.
Well, my kid is probably always going to have to rely on public transportation because his vision is degrading. I developed a heart condition that fortunately seems to have been temporary due to Covid. My daughter was severely disabled and died. Additionally, I have what was probably sequelae from Epstein-Barr that have resulted once in visible lesions on my brain, which fortunately have not repeated again to get a final diagnosis. My mum has post-polio.
Framing our choices around Covid as if we fear masks or isolation because that might make us more disabled than the things we’ve already experienced or are experiencing is taking a wide range of choices we make in various shades and drawing them down to a stark black and white line. The strain in this essay that the author understands disability on some deeper level because they recognize the permeability of disabled unlike the rest of us is something I find suspect.
Particularly after what happened to my first child, I have never sent my kids into any activities or off on a field trip or even strapped them in the car without that fleeting thought. At first these thoughts were debilitating and gradually they have become manageable through therapy and work. But my response to a post-vaccine, post-Delta world is quite different.
My beliefs around virus and the flu and head injuries have led me to believe that getting out there and living - sometimes masked, staying home if sick because my job lets me, etc. - is how humans have always lived. In the face of disability and death. Making that choice around Covid is just as complex, whether the stats are better or worse.
I’m proud that we all locked down in those initial waves. People here took care of each other. I’m sad that changed over some - right-wing media and toxic wellness certainly didn’t help - but I am actually not convinced that this is the end point. The young people I see and the fields they are choosing in higher ed have shifted. Many more on public health, climate-related research ( this predates Covid), mental health, etc. Their narrative is not “we failed, people went into denial.” It’s “we learned and we’re still learning.”
And yes, at a cost, sometimes. It’s funny; in 2021 I would have insisted my privileged kids did fine in lockdown. They did not actually. Of course, they survived to recover and so they are but man there was an impact. And there’s an ongoing impact to people who are still running that calculus and isolating. We do need ways to move things more equitably, but it doesn’t have to be everything. Here in my climate, in the summer it’s the outdoor season and you can see groups of people out, some masked, at the edge of outdoor theatre. I think there’s more support for those places. Maybe a grocery chain will figure out mask only times or other offerings; it’s something to work on.
But painting people’s choices as exclusively fear-based doesn’t sit well with me. It’s okay if this author wants to speculate of course. But I disagree.
posted by warriorqueen at 8:15 AM on September 22 [29 favorites]
I find the social model of disability helpful but I think this essay is doing some backflips.
So when you hear someone say, "I can't let COVID control my life," understand that they mean they can't let themselves think about becoming disabled.
Well, my kid is probably always going to have to rely on public transportation because his vision is degrading. I developed a heart condition that fortunately seems to have been temporary due to Covid. My daughter was severely disabled and died. Additionally, I have what was probably sequelae from Epstein-Barr that have resulted once in visible lesions on my brain, which fortunately have not repeated again to get a final diagnosis. My mum has post-polio.
Framing our choices around Covid as if we fear masks or isolation because that might make us more disabled than the things we’ve already experienced or are experiencing is taking a wide range of choices we make in various shades and drawing them down to a stark black and white line. The strain in this essay that the author understands disability on some deeper level because they recognize the permeability of disabled unlike the rest of us is something I find suspect.
Particularly after what happened to my first child, I have never sent my kids into any activities or off on a field trip or even strapped them in the car without that fleeting thought. At first these thoughts were debilitating and gradually they have become manageable through therapy and work. But my response to a post-vaccine, post-Delta world is quite different.
My beliefs around virus and the flu and head injuries have led me to believe that getting out there and living - sometimes masked, staying home if sick because my job lets me, etc. - is how humans have always lived. In the face of disability and death. Making that choice around Covid is just as complex, whether the stats are better or worse.
I’m proud that we all locked down in those initial waves. People here took care of each other. I’m sad that changed over some - right-wing media and toxic wellness certainly didn’t help - but I am actually not convinced that this is the end point. The young people I see and the fields they are choosing in higher ed have shifted. Many more on public health, climate-related research ( this predates Covid), mental health, etc. Their narrative is not “we failed, people went into denial.” It’s “we learned and we’re still learning.”
And yes, at a cost, sometimes. It’s funny; in 2021 I would have insisted my privileged kids did fine in lockdown. They did not actually. Of course, they survived to recover and so they are but man there was an impact. And there’s an ongoing impact to people who are still running that calculus and isolating. We do need ways to move things more equitably, but it doesn’t have to be everything. Here in my climate, in the summer it’s the outdoor season and you can see groups of people out, some masked, at the edge of outdoor theatre. I think there’s more support for those places. Maybe a grocery chain will figure out mask only times or other offerings; it’s something to work on.
But painting people’s choices as exclusively fear-based doesn’t sit well with me. It’s okay if this author wants to speculate of course. But I disagree.
posted by warriorqueen at 8:15 AM on September 22 [29 favorites]
Most folks in the US experienced nothing resembling a lockdown, so it's always frustrating to see them brought up by Americans as this terrible thing that happened to them. Not being able to hang out inside a bar is not a lockdown.
Deaths of despair in the US rose significantly during 2020-2021 (specifically related to drugs and alcohol). As the linked study mentions, this wasn't a universal outcome, and given that the comparison here is with the UK and Ireland, the suggestion seems to be some of this could be off-set with a better social safety-net (shocking). Anyway, I had a notable uptick in the number of my students (college) who asked for extensions because they were dealing with grief after a friend died (mostly overdoses), or because the lockdown was exacerbating their own mental health difficulties, so the tendency of some to mock people who point to the US lockdowns as having a cost as just people who were bummed about not being able to hangout in bars or whatever always rubs me the wrong way. Even people who didn't experience acute mental health crises experienced declines in their mental health because people are generally wired to be social - I would be happy if more tax dollars went to helping immunocompromised people be able to safely access more places, but a sustained practice of lockdowns doesn't seem a feasible answer - and I disagree with the author that thinking this makes one a COVID denialist.
posted by coffeecat at 9:31 AM on September 22 [14 favorites]
Deaths of despair in the US rose significantly during 2020-2021 (specifically related to drugs and alcohol). As the linked study mentions, this wasn't a universal outcome, and given that the comparison here is with the UK and Ireland, the suggestion seems to be some of this could be off-set with a better social safety-net (shocking). Anyway, I had a notable uptick in the number of my students (college) who asked for extensions because they were dealing with grief after a friend died (mostly overdoses), or because the lockdown was exacerbating their own mental health difficulties, so the tendency of some to mock people who point to the US lockdowns as having a cost as just people who were bummed about not being able to hangout in bars or whatever always rubs me the wrong way. Even people who didn't experience acute mental health crises experienced declines in their mental health because people are generally wired to be social - I would be happy if more tax dollars went to helping immunocompromised people be able to safely access more places, but a sustained practice of lockdowns doesn't seem a feasible answer - and I disagree with the author that thinking this makes one a COVID denialist.
posted by coffeecat at 9:31 AM on September 22 [14 favorites]
The U.S. never did have lockdowns, properly speaking, though. The only place I'm aware of that even had universal curfews was NYC, for about a week (and those were done to try to prevent us from organizing against the cops). As someone who lived through that whole period in the city, I think it's fair to call my experience categorically different from what was done in, e.g., China.
My feeling is that we had a great opportunity and we fumbled it away, but trying to restore an artificial level of alarm will not bring the opportunity back. We had enough trouble trying to get people to be sufficiently alarmed with much worse facts; now that the proposed response doesn't match most people's daily experience of the danger, such a plan will go nowhere. I would prefer a stronger focus on improving the infrastructure (e.g., ventilation in buildings!), which I think could end up an item in liberal packages if played right.
And if we're allowed to psychologize, am I allowed to say that maybe this author was so traumatized during the first half of 2020 that they are still stuck in the black-and-white, one-risk-factor-only-to-consider analysis that was (largely) appropriate back then and now isn't? And may I please see the receipts for how this person was masking during flu season in 2018 to avoid disabling everybody else?
posted by praemunire at 9:42 AM on September 22 [14 favorites]
My feeling is that we had a great opportunity and we fumbled it away, but trying to restore an artificial level of alarm will not bring the opportunity back. We had enough trouble trying to get people to be sufficiently alarmed with much worse facts; now that the proposed response doesn't match most people's daily experience of the danger, such a plan will go nowhere. I would prefer a stronger focus on improving the infrastructure (e.g., ventilation in buildings!), which I think could end up an item in liberal packages if played right.
And if we're allowed to psychologize, am I allowed to say that maybe this author was so traumatized during the first half of 2020 that they are still stuck in the black-and-white, one-risk-factor-only-to-consider analysis that was (largely) appropriate back then and now isn't? And may I please see the receipts for how this person was masking during flu season in 2018 to avoid disabling everybody else?
posted by praemunire at 9:42 AM on September 22 [14 favorites]
The Victorian experience demonstrated very clearly that early, hard movement restrictions work; late, loose restrictions don't, they just cause misery. For a lockdown to be both tolerably short and effective, it needs to start well before enough people have been showing symptoms to convince the general public that anything serious is going on, which is why they're so politically difficult. It's just too easy for fuckwit right-wingers to paint them as overreactions.
They'd be a lot less politically difficult if most people understood how exponential growth and decay work, but most people just think "exponential" means "big and fast" and simply cannot grasp that the word describes a specific pattern where growth rate is proportional to present size, not an effect size per se.
The easy way to grasp this is to reflect on how much less work is involved in killing off a handful of seedlings if you know where they are than waiting until the kudzu is grabbing you by the ankles everywhere you go. But the generalization required to apply that logic to a pandemic is beyond most, it seems; innumeracy is a very widespread disability.
posted by flabdablet at 9:58 AM on September 22 [11 favorites]
They'd be a lot less politically difficult if most people understood how exponential growth and decay work, but most people just think "exponential" means "big and fast" and simply cannot grasp that the word describes a specific pattern where growth rate is proportional to present size, not an effect size per se.
The easy way to grasp this is to reflect on how much less work is involved in killing off a handful of seedlings if you know where they are than waiting until the kudzu is grabbing you by the ankles everywhere you go. But the generalization required to apply that logic to a pandemic is beyond most, it seems; innumeracy is a very widespread disability.
posted by flabdablet at 9:58 AM on September 22 [11 favorites]
Some of the increase in depression and other mental distress seems likely to be the result of that virus causing brain inflammation and other brain damage.
posted by girandole at 10:05 AM on September 22 [13 favorites]
posted by girandole at 10:05 AM on September 22 [13 favorites]
What *would* be a more accurate term for the period where Americans were instructed to not leave our houses for inessential activities?
posted by Selena777 at 10:11 AM on September 22 [6 favorites]
posted by Selena777 at 10:11 AM on September 22 [6 favorites]
I live in Georgia. That period, whatever you want to call it, lasted from mid-March until June 2020. And not everybody listened to the public health advisories even for those 3 months.
Meanwhile, I still have students dealing with missing class and depression due to family members dying of COVID in the current wave.
posted by hydropsyche at 10:26 AM on September 22 [13 favorites]
Meanwhile, I still have students dealing with missing class and depression due to family members dying of COVID in the current wave.
posted by hydropsyche at 10:26 AM on September 22 [13 favorites]
I don't think anyone here is suggesting US lockdowns were on par with China (or Italy, or New Zealand, etc.) so that's a strawman argument that misses the point - which again, is that whatever you want to refer to how American society did change in 2020, it did have a variety of negative consequences (economic, mental health, education, etc.), and if you want to build solidarity on the larger goal of making society more equitable (a good goal, I agree) then trivializing those costs as just people pissed they couldn't get drunk at a bar is unproductive, to put it mildly.
posted by coffeecat at 10:37 AM on September 22 [7 favorites]
posted by coffeecat at 10:37 AM on September 22 [7 favorites]
Were there people in uniforms with guns standing around checking your reason or validating your issued permission for being outside, or actual coercive equivalent? No? Then there wasn't a lockdown. The public health authorities telling you, even in strong terms, not to do something is not a "lock." Again, having lived in the place in the U.S. that probably had the most restrictive anti-COVID measures in 2020, I just cannot say I was locked down, except maybe for that one lousy week (and actually IIRC it was more like four nights).
We now are getting a much clearer picture of the long-term costs of even moderate restrictions (I myself delayed a cancer screening and when I finally went had to go all the way through to biopsy to confirm I hadn't screwed myself by doing so), and, while I definitely consider those costs to have been worth it in 2020, in the circumstances of the present day we have to take them into account and not sweep them under the rug of black-and-white thinking. People actually suffer from having the social fabric seriously disrupted, especially for extended periods of time. This is normally a progressive position.
posted by praemunire at 10:42 AM on September 22 [4 favorites]
We now are getting a much clearer picture of the long-term costs of even moderate restrictions (I myself delayed a cancer screening and when I finally went had to go all the way through to biopsy to confirm I hadn't screwed myself by doing so), and, while I definitely consider those costs to have been worth it in 2020, in the circumstances of the present day we have to take them into account and not sweep them under the rug of black-and-white thinking. People actually suffer from having the social fabric seriously disrupted, especially for extended periods of time. This is normally a progressive position.
posted by praemunire at 10:42 AM on September 22 [4 favorites]
“may I please see the receipts for how this person was masking during flu season in 2018 to avoid disabling everybody else”
See this is what i’m talking about re major scientific advances in the last several years. We really thought that flus and colds and such were primarily close contact large droplet transmission (and boy were we wrong! And it’s a fascinating story why!).
In which case, covering your nose and mouth when you cough or sneeze, advocating for paid sick leave, staying home when sick yourself, and, yes, wearing a surgical mask during flu season are all reasonable precautions. Masking wasn’t super common most places but a lot of the other mitigations were, especially by disability activists.
Asymptomatic airborne transmission is a whole other ball game!
And things *are* different with covid - on average folks catch the flu about once every decade. Most people get covid multiple times a year now. And covid has a much higher mortality rate, especially in the elderly. In recent times, covid kills about 300,000 people a year globally. Covid has killed more than 30 million with most of the deaths occurring after vaccines were available.
I don’t know what this author was doing about flu in 2018. I was handwashing, encouraging vaccination, advocating for paid sick days and me/cfs research, coughing into my elbow, and avoiding my office when folks came in sick. Now that i’ve learned more about transmission and risks, i’ve updated my behaviour and expectations.
posted by congen at 10:45 AM on September 22 [21 favorites]
See this is what i’m talking about re major scientific advances in the last several years. We really thought that flus and colds and such were primarily close contact large droplet transmission (and boy were we wrong! And it’s a fascinating story why!).
In which case, covering your nose and mouth when you cough or sneeze, advocating for paid sick leave, staying home when sick yourself, and, yes, wearing a surgical mask during flu season are all reasonable precautions. Masking wasn’t super common most places but a lot of the other mitigations were, especially by disability activists.
Asymptomatic airborne transmission is a whole other ball game!
And things *are* different with covid - on average folks catch the flu about once every decade. Most people get covid multiple times a year now. And covid has a much higher mortality rate, especially in the elderly. In recent times, covid kills about 300,000 people a year globally. Covid has killed more than 30 million with most of the deaths occurring after vaccines were available.
I don’t know what this author was doing about flu in 2018. I was handwashing, encouraging vaccination, advocating for paid sick days and me/cfs research, coughing into my elbow, and avoiding my office when folks came in sick. Now that i’ve learned more about transmission and risks, i’ve updated my behaviour and expectations.
posted by congen at 10:45 AM on September 22 [21 favorites]
but about those “lockdowns”. . .
posted by girandole
Ok, but my friend who died in 2020 died not from a virus but because she was instructed not to go to the hospital for an acute tylenol-liver issue, an issue that would have been treatable if not for the public health emergency.
Which speaks to the need for a better, more robust medical system overall, but the point is that public health restrictions are a complicated issue.
Much like hurricane evacuations. You can have a fully funded FEMA and NOAA and local EOCs, and imagine a world with a functioning Red Cross and wildlife agents on boats, but people will die in the mandatory evacuation if called. and so governments are calling more on shelter in place, especially as batteries get cheaper and the grid is more armored.
Anyway, I think there is consensus in this thread for more air cleaning and ventilation, but I feel like the car dealership people and API in the USA, any corp whose business model is fire-based, really, are not going to allow an educational effort about air quality to succeed without a fight.
A lot of air pollution and the discussion is racial ized in the USA
In good news, even This Old House did a ventilation/ filtration piece, and I have enjoyed tech nerds on YouTube getting into it
Solutions are out there, and we must persist.
posted by eustatic at 10:52 AM on September 22 [8 favorites]
posted by girandole
Ok, but my friend who died in 2020 died not from a virus but because she was instructed not to go to the hospital for an acute tylenol-liver issue, an issue that would have been treatable if not for the public health emergency.
Which speaks to the need for a better, more robust medical system overall, but the point is that public health restrictions are a complicated issue.
Much like hurricane evacuations. You can have a fully funded FEMA and NOAA and local EOCs, and imagine a world with a functioning Red Cross and wildlife agents on boats, but people will die in the mandatory evacuation if called. and so governments are calling more on shelter in place, especially as batteries get cheaper and the grid is more armored.
Anyway, I think there is consensus in this thread for more air cleaning and ventilation, but I feel like the car dealership people and API in the USA, any corp whose business model is fire-based, really, are not going to allow an educational effort about air quality to succeed without a fight.
A lot of air pollution and the discussion is racial ized in the USA
In good news, even This Old House did a ventilation/ filtration piece, and I have enjoyed tech nerds on YouTube getting into it
Solutions are out there, and we must persist.
posted by eustatic at 10:52 AM on September 22 [8 favorites]
> What *would* be a more accurate term for the period where Americans were instructed to not leave our houses for inessential activities
I call that time "quarantine," which I know isn't absolutely accurate but is more accurate than "lock down."
posted by The corpse in the library at 10:53 AM on September 22 [14 favorites]
I call that time "quarantine," which I know isn't absolutely accurate but is more accurate than "lock down."
posted by The corpse in the library at 10:53 AM on September 22 [14 favorites]
As a healthcare worker then and now, working during that period of time was so so stressful. Being yelled at by strangers, hoping I wouldn't get sick or bring it home to my spouse, not visiting family, etc.
I can tell you right now that I was glad I got sober before this happened. If I were still drinking, I honestly don't know if I would be here.
posted by Kitteh at 11:17 AM on September 22 [12 favorites]
I can tell you right now that I was glad I got sober before this happened. If I were still drinking, I honestly don't know if I would be here.
posted by Kitteh at 11:17 AM on September 22 [12 favorites]
Most people get covid multiple times a year now
I don’t think we know this, do we? Like part of the thing we stopped doing is religiously testing so most asymptomatic cases are going undiagnosed. Or if we do know this, could you share a citation please?
posted by anotherpanacea at 11:44 AM on September 22 [7 favorites]
I don’t think we know this, do we? Like part of the thing we stopped doing is religiously testing so most asymptomatic cases are going undiagnosed. Or if we do know this, could you share a citation please?
posted by anotherpanacea at 11:44 AM on September 22 [7 favorites]
Re: how often people get covid, I think the best we’ll do is data from the ONS infection survey in the UK, which is no longer operational (or maybe comes back seasonally; not sure). They kept up the population-based sampling with Covid swabs into sometime in 2022 I want to say, far enough after the acute (societal, immunological) response to Covid for me to feel like their estimates probably reflect an ongoing situation. Anyway the prevalence estimates I saw suggested that people not taking precautions should expect to be infected 1-2 times per year, and some of those will be asymptomatic. Sorry, I don’t have a citation better than that, but perhaps someone else here who was also tracking it closely remembers better.
Re: TFA, I thought the argument was interesting. I’m not 100% sold but I’m thinking about it. As a non driver, that’s where my mind went right away: to believe this argument I would also need to be comfortable putting myself in the category of “disabled” because I don’t drive. And I’m not sure! What makes it thorny is that me not driving is partially a choice — I say partially because it’s a choice I made amid constraints, namely, that I kind of sucked at it; that my parents weren’t good teachers; that I grew up in an area with high traffic high speed roads (suburbs of DC) and it made learning feel much higher stakes than I think it would have in, say, rural Wisconsin. The effects are very like a disability, in so many ways! I carry shame about it because it makes me different from other people and because that difference means that I am work. That knowledge often makes me withdraw from optional events because I don’t want to do the emotional work of believing other people will value my contributions enough to make space for me. My mother, disabled by chronic pain, has followed a very similar path. But it feels strange and sort of … presumptuous to call it a disability per se, because of that element of choice. Inflected by disability, very plausibly (I’m not great at depth perception and I had a childhood visual disorder that may have contributed). But that element of choice makes me feel strange about it somehow. I don’t know if I have the right vocabulary to talk about choices under constraints, the gradient between “possible” and “possible for me” and “possible for the me that I am today.”
posted by eirias at 12:13 PM on September 22 [9 favorites]
Re: TFA, I thought the argument was interesting. I’m not 100% sold but I’m thinking about it. As a non driver, that’s where my mind went right away: to believe this argument I would also need to be comfortable putting myself in the category of “disabled” because I don’t drive. And I’m not sure! What makes it thorny is that me not driving is partially a choice — I say partially because it’s a choice I made amid constraints, namely, that I kind of sucked at it; that my parents weren’t good teachers; that I grew up in an area with high traffic high speed roads (suburbs of DC) and it made learning feel much higher stakes than I think it would have in, say, rural Wisconsin. The effects are very like a disability, in so many ways! I carry shame about it because it makes me different from other people and because that difference means that I am work. That knowledge often makes me withdraw from optional events because I don’t want to do the emotional work of believing other people will value my contributions enough to make space for me. My mother, disabled by chronic pain, has followed a very similar path. But it feels strange and sort of … presumptuous to call it a disability per se, because of that element of choice. Inflected by disability, very plausibly (I’m not great at depth perception and I had a childhood visual disorder that may have contributed). But that element of choice makes me feel strange about it somehow. I don’t know if I have the right vocabulary to talk about choices under constraints, the gradient between “possible” and “possible for me” and “possible for the me that I am today.”
posted by eirias at 12:13 PM on September 22 [9 favorites]
I pay attention to covid wastewater levels in Houston. Let's not pretend people who don't wear masks are doing so based on an informed risk assessment for themselves. They just aren't wearing masks. Low levels during spring time? No mask. Middle of the delta/omicron spike when levels were literally 1000% of the baseline? No mask.
But the people who wear masks in public indoors in 2024 are "catastrophizing" and talking about long covid just gets you blank stares.
posted by AlSweigart at 12:27 PM on September 22 [20 favorites]
But the people who wear masks in public indoors in 2024 are "catastrophizing" and talking about long covid just gets you blank stares.
posted by AlSweigart at 12:27 PM on September 22 [20 favorites]
Masking wasn’t super common most places
Well, there you are--and that's a huge understatement, people wore masks at chemo infusion places (sometimes) and in some parts of Asian-American communities. It's fine for people to say they were wrong not to do so and have learned better (personally I plan to mask for colds now, the old ladies in Chinatown were right about that), but so often these sermons elide the part where the preacher was "out there disabling people to live their life" prior to COVID, because it requires much harder thinking.
And covid has a much higher mortality rate, especially in the elderly.
Flu still kills plenty of people, especially among the elderly, yearly. Where is the line drawn? Why? Note that I'm not saying that a line shouldn't be drawn, I just think the line materializing conveniently in a place that makes the speaker consistently righteous is a little suspect. Other disability justice activists have had good insights into the very real problem of competing access needs, and I think more of that understanding would be helpful here.
Most people get covid multiple times a year now.
Citation needed. I don't think our immunological surveillance even picks that up now (which is a pity).
posted by praemunire at 12:28 PM on September 22 [4 favorites]
Well, there you are--and that's a huge understatement, people wore masks at chemo infusion places (sometimes) and in some parts of Asian-American communities. It's fine for people to say they were wrong not to do so and have learned better (personally I plan to mask for colds now, the old ladies in Chinatown were right about that), but so often these sermons elide the part where the preacher was "out there disabling people to live their life" prior to COVID, because it requires much harder thinking.
And covid has a much higher mortality rate, especially in the elderly.
Flu still kills plenty of people, especially among the elderly, yearly. Where is the line drawn? Why? Note that I'm not saying that a line shouldn't be drawn, I just think the line materializing conveniently in a place that makes the speaker consistently righteous is a little suspect. Other disability justice activists have had good insights into the very real problem of competing access needs, and I think more of that understanding would be helpful here.
Most people get covid multiple times a year now.
Citation needed. I don't think our immunological surveillance even picks that up now (which is a pity).
posted by praemunire at 12:28 PM on September 22 [4 favorites]
I have had covid multiple times and am dealing with long covid symptoms. I try my best to be careful about exposure. Masking up if we go to the store, trying not to spend time inside around strangers. But when the local culture as a whole has decided it isn't an issue and people walk around unmasked and symptomatic (and give you a dirty look for masking) it is hard not to accept that future infections are inevitable.
Flu still kills plenty of people, especially among the elderly, yearly. Where is the line drawn?
I think trying to avoid spreading the flu by masking, getting flu shots, and trying to avoid unnecessary contact with strangers is something we should all be doing. Especially if you are spending time in contact with immunosuppressed, very young, or very old people. But even if you don't, your care might protect someone else who is.
None of us are going to be perfect, but the more we can do to protect the sick and make things accessible to them, the better.
posted by pattern juggler at 12:58 PM on September 22 [12 favorites]
Flu still kills plenty of people, especially among the elderly, yearly. Where is the line drawn?
I think trying to avoid spreading the flu by masking, getting flu shots, and trying to avoid unnecessary contact with strangers is something we should all be doing. Especially if you are spending time in contact with immunosuppressed, very young, or very old people. But even if you don't, your care might protect someone else who is.
None of us are going to be perfect, but the more we can do to protect the sick and make things accessible to them, the better.
posted by pattern juggler at 12:58 PM on September 22 [12 favorites]
in this very thread adrienneleigh has been advocating ongoing lockdowns to eliminate both Covid and now influenza
This reading of my comments is baffling to the point of mendacity.
posted by adrienneleigh at 3:15 PM on September 22 [16 favorites]
This reading of my comments is baffling to the point of mendacity.
posted by adrienneleigh at 3:15 PM on September 22 [16 favorites]
This reading of my comments is baffling to the point of mendacity.
Oh no! How terrible! We might make the world better!
Anyone who wants to can read the thread.
posted by anotherpanacea at 3:45 PM on September 22 [1 favorite]
Oh no! How terrible! We might make the world better!
Anyone who wants to can read the thread.
posted by anotherpanacea at 3:45 PM on September 22 [1 favorite]
And here is your “lockdowns for influenza” comment.
Who is lying?
posted by anotherpanacea at 3:47 PM on September 22 [1 favorite]
Who is lying?
posted by anotherpanacea at 3:47 PM on September 22 [1 favorite]
I didn't advocate for any such thing. I pointed out that lockdowns for COVID-19 did, in fact, eradicate at least one strain of influenza. That's a fact, not an exhortation.
posted by adrienneleigh at 3:54 PM on September 22 [7 favorites]
posted by adrienneleigh at 3:54 PM on September 22 [7 favorites]
Hi there, I'm a COVID realist and consider myself disabled because I'm seriously immunocompromised. If it helps, the state I live in and my employer also consider me to be permanently disabled due to my immunocompromised status. All I want - and all most of the disabled people I know want - is for people to wear masks in healthcare facilities, pharmacies, on public transit, and in grocery stores (even just a few hours a week at grocery stores would be amazing). These are places that everyone deserves access to.
And don't forget that workers are forced to be there -- we got rid of indoor smoking in the US twenty years ago now because air quality is a labor rights issue. Why isn't clean air still a right for employees? I've given up on all social forms of entertainment (restaurants, plays, movies, indoor parties). We just want to be able to safely access public transit and doctors offices at this point. But now even "blue" states are introducing potential mask ban legislation! This is not a hypothetical and it removes the first amendment rights of disabled people like me. "Oh those bans are just for protesters" -- do people know that disabled people got out of their wheelchairs and crawled up the steps of the Capitol building to get the Americans with Disabilities Act passed? (Disclaimer, I'm the author of the linked piece.)
Disabled people deserve access to public life and no one complaining about "lockdowns" that happened 4+ years ago can convince me otherwise.
posted by twelve cent archie at 4:03 PM on September 22 [44 favorites]
And don't forget that workers are forced to be there -- we got rid of indoor smoking in the US twenty years ago now because air quality is a labor rights issue. Why isn't clean air still a right for employees? I've given up on all social forms of entertainment (restaurants, plays, movies, indoor parties). We just want to be able to safely access public transit and doctors offices at this point. But now even "blue" states are introducing potential mask ban legislation! This is not a hypothetical and it removes the first amendment rights of disabled people like me. "Oh those bans are just for protesters" -- do people know that disabled people got out of their wheelchairs and crawled up the steps of the Capitol building to get the Americans with Disabilities Act passed? (Disclaimer, I'm the author of the linked piece.)
Disabled people deserve access to public life and no one complaining about "lockdowns" that happened 4+ years ago can convince me otherwise.
posted by twelve cent archie at 4:03 PM on September 22 [44 favorites]
This is not a hypothetical and it removes the first amendment rights of disabled people like me. "Oh those bans are just for protesters"
For what it’s worth, the bans that aim at protesters are (rightly) being challenged as unconstitutional. The bans will stay in place for everybody else, meaning they really do restrict public health usage of masks.
We had this fight in DC and DC Council rewrote the ban so it excluded expressive activities, and now focuses on masks worn while committing crimes but includes things like intimidation and fear which lets police use it to justify a stop. So if you wear a mask they can say it looked like it might make someone scared—to justify a stop and frisk. (This mostly happens to young Black men, of course.)
posted by anotherpanacea at 4:22 PM on September 22 [2 favorites]
For what it’s worth, the bans that aim at protesters are (rightly) being challenged as unconstitutional. The bans will stay in place for everybody else, meaning they really do restrict public health usage of masks.
We had this fight in DC and DC Council rewrote the ban so it excluded expressive activities, and now focuses on masks worn while committing crimes but includes things like intimidation and fear which lets police use it to justify a stop. So if you wear a mask they can say it looked like it might make someone scared—to justify a stop and frisk. (This mostly happens to young Black men, of course.)
posted by anotherpanacea at 4:22 PM on September 22 [2 favorites]
I pointed out that lockdowns for COVID-19 did, in fact, eradicate at least one strain of influenza.
And this wasn't even a lockdown (that word doesn't appear in the article) but rather "all the precautions that helped people avoid Covid-19 – including masking, staying at home and better ventilation."
But anyway, adrienneleigh has not "been advocating ongoing lockdowns to eliminate both Covid and now influenza" nor "lying."
This thread is getting derailed with assumptions of uncharitable/false reads of people's comments. Funny enough, that actually is one of the points in the original article:
I began to succumb to despair. I couldn't stop wondering, why? Why would people do this, when all the evidence is there for them to see? Succumbing to the "COVID is over" propaganda campaign was part of it, sure, but there was too much overt cognitive dissonance in the way people spoke about the disease for that to be everything.
posted by AlSweigart at 4:35 PM on September 22 [14 favorites]
And this wasn't even a lockdown (that word doesn't appear in the article) but rather "all the precautions that helped people avoid Covid-19 – including masking, staying at home and better ventilation."
But anyway, adrienneleigh has not "been advocating ongoing lockdowns to eliminate both Covid and now influenza" nor "lying."
This thread is getting derailed with assumptions of uncharitable/false reads of people's comments. Funny enough, that actually is one of the points in the original article:
I began to succumb to despair. I couldn't stop wondering, why? Why would people do this, when all the evidence is there for them to see? Succumbing to the "COVID is over" propaganda campaign was part of it, sure, but there was too much overt cognitive dissonance in the way people spoke about the disease for that to be everything.
posted by AlSweigart at 4:35 PM on September 22 [14 favorites]
Don't discount the role of cognitive impairment, and don't assume "...but I've had COVID 6 times and I'm fine".
Published in the Lancet next week
Published in the Lancet next week
Thirty-four young, healthy, seronegative volunteers were inoculated with Wildtype SARS-CoV-2 under prospectively controlled conditions. Volunteers completed daily physiological measurements and computerised cognitive tasks during quarantine and follow-up at 30, 90, 180, 270, and 360 days....posted by hydropsyche at 4:37 PM on September 22 [20 favorites]
Eighteen volunteers developed infection by qPCR criteria of sustained viral load, one without symptoms and the remainder with mild illness. Infected volunteers showed statistically lower baseline-corrected global composite cognitive scores than uninfected volunteers, both acutely and during follow up ...
Memory and executive function tasks showed the largest between-group differences. No volunteers reported persistent subjective cognitive symptoms.
I am just glad that there won't be any other airborne viruses/pandemics coming our way!
posted by armacy at 5:18 PM on September 22 [10 favorites]
posted by armacy at 5:18 PM on September 22 [10 favorites]
In other words: 18 out of 34 inoculated developed infections, and all of the infected still had cognitive damage a year later, but none of them realized it.
posted by AlSweigart at 6:31 PM on September 22 [9 favorites]
posted by AlSweigart at 6:31 PM on September 22 [9 favorites]
Aha! Here is the March 2023 ONS Infection Survey report, which is more recent than I thought. In that final week of the survey, 2.66% of people in England were estimated to have tested positive for COVID, for example. This was in the springtime after the pandemic phase of the pandemic had ended and not at the peak of any quasi-seasonal surge, so it seems not an unreasonable time to estimate incidence under endemicity. If we take that last estimated weekly incidence as likely to have been typical for the year that followed, the number of infections we’d expect to have in that year would exceed the number of people in England by something like 30 or 40%, suggesting that people can expect to get it 1-2 times per year. Obviously that’s super back of the envelope math, and in reality any given person will have didn’t exposures depending on their behavior and on luck, plus which I haven't really factored in the fact that the disease still does have surges, but “multiple infections per year” on average didn’t seem a crazy leap to me. It won’t feel that way subjectively though given that some infections are asymptomatic, people don’t test like they used to, and antigen test results are confusing.
Side note, over here in the US we actually never had good data, not like ONS. Voluntary testing doesn’t really support good inferences about infection and transmission (plus which CDC reporting turns out to be a shitshow because their power to get the data from states is weirdly limited).
posted by eirias at 6:45 PM on September 22 [3 favorites]
Side note, over here in the US we actually never had good data, not like ONS. Voluntary testing doesn’t really support good inferences about infection and transmission (plus which CDC reporting turns out to be a shitshow because their power to get the data from states is weirdly limited).
posted by eirias at 6:45 PM on September 22 [3 favorites]
Okay, I'm a big supporter of researching the long-term effects of COVID but I also am familiar enough with cognitive science to look a little closer at any study of cognitive impairment and OH MY FUCKING GOD IT'S THE STUPID FUCKING COGNITRON PEOPLE, I HATE THEM SO MUCH!
Ahem. The cognitive measures used in that test are not validated measures of cognition, and in no way indicate any sort of clinically relevant impairment. The platform was created for a BBC show about "testing the nation's intelligence" and it uses "AI" to generate its tasks. This shit is so far from scientifically or clinically valid I might actually write a letter about it. I recall making this rant before so I think they've run a previous study a few years ago on COVID and brain damage using the same garbage. Insert THEY CAN'T KEEP GETTING AWAY WITH THIS gif here.
posted by brook horse at 6:58 PM on September 22 [31 favorites]
Ahem. The cognitive measures used in that test are not validated measures of cognition, and in no way indicate any sort of clinically relevant impairment. The platform was created for a BBC show about "testing the nation's intelligence" and it uses "AI" to generate its tasks. This shit is so far from scientifically or clinically valid I might actually write a letter about it. I recall making this rant before so I think they've run a previous study a few years ago on COVID and brain damage using the same garbage. Insert THEY CAN'T KEEP GETTING AWAY WITH THIS gif here.
posted by brook horse at 6:58 PM on September 22 [31 favorites]
If we COULD do that, then we’d almost certainly be obligated to eradicate a bunch of other diseases as well, starting with the flu and malaria.
A few million children have already been vaccinated against malaria. Eventually everyone in malaria-prone areas will receive it as a childhood vaccination. It's spread via mosquitoes, so a lock down wouldn't do anything.
All the measures taken to prevent the spread of Covid also dramatically reduced the spread of flu for a few years, to the point where a few flu strains completely died out. Keeping up the Covid precautions would indeed help tremendously in stopping the flu.
Meanwhile, scientists are testing a one-and-done flu vaccine that immunizes you against the non-mutating part of the flu. Once that goes to market, the flu vaccine will likely become a standard childhood vaccination and we wouldn't have to worry about it much.
If you think taking extraordinary measures to stop the spread of contagious diseases is dumb or unprecedented, I encourage you to look up the history of smallpox and polio.
Drastically locking down society to prevent the spread of deadly or disabling diseases during an epidemic is actually the historical norm. The only reason modern people see it as weird or overkill is that developed countries had a couple generations reprieve from anything super nasty.
posted by Jacqueline at 7:47 PM on September 22 [24 favorites]
A few million children have already been vaccinated against malaria. Eventually everyone in malaria-prone areas will receive it as a childhood vaccination. It's spread via mosquitoes, so a lock down wouldn't do anything.
All the measures taken to prevent the spread of Covid also dramatically reduced the spread of flu for a few years, to the point where a few flu strains completely died out. Keeping up the Covid precautions would indeed help tremendously in stopping the flu.
Meanwhile, scientists are testing a one-and-done flu vaccine that immunizes you against the non-mutating part of the flu. Once that goes to market, the flu vaccine will likely become a standard childhood vaccination and we wouldn't have to worry about it much.
If you think taking extraordinary measures to stop the spread of contagious diseases is dumb or unprecedented, I encourage you to look up the history of smallpox and polio.
Drastically locking down society to prevent the spread of deadly or disabling diseases during an epidemic is actually the historical norm. The only reason modern people see it as weird or overkill is that developed countries had a couple generations reprieve from anything super nasty.
posted by Jacqueline at 7:47 PM on September 22 [24 favorites]
OH MY FUCKING GOD IT'S THE STUPID FUCKING COGNITRON PEOPLE, I HATE THEM SO MUCH!
It’s also worth noting it’s a 2021 study using… it sounds like the original original wild-type SARS-CoV-2 strain? The much larger NEJM study on post-COVID cognitive effects (which looks like it also used the Cognitron tests, actually) found impairments to be most severe among people infected early in the pandemic.
posted by atoxyl at 7:48 PM on September 22 [8 favorites]
It’s also worth noting it’s a 2021 study using… it sounds like the original original wild-type SARS-CoV-2 strain? The much larger NEJM study on post-COVID cognitive effects (which looks like it also used the Cognitron tests, actually) found impairments to be most severe among people infected early in the pandemic.
posted by atoxyl at 7:48 PM on September 22 [8 favorites]
Yep, that tracks. Adam Hampshire is the first author and creator of Cognitron (and one of the authors of the other study). Seems like he’s building a career off this nonsense. So, as a tip, CTRL+F “Hampshire” in any study of COVID cognitive effects and take with a large heaping of salt.
posted by brook horse at 7:53 PM on September 22 [9 favorites]
posted by brook horse at 7:53 PM on September 22 [9 favorites]
We now are getting a much clearer picture of the long-term costs of even moderate restrictions (I myself delayed a cancer screening
An uncle of mine died of metastatic prostate cancer during the pandemic, likely because of delayed screening. Would it have been caught, and would the outcome have been different if there had been no pandemic? There's no way to know. But for me it's the clearest illustration of the very real costs of responding to the pandemic in the right ways.
posted by pullayup at 8:05 PM on September 22 [4 favorites]
An uncle of mine died of metastatic prostate cancer during the pandemic, likely because of delayed screening. Would it have been caught, and would the outcome have been different if there had been no pandemic? There's no way to know. But for me it's the clearest illustration of the very real costs of responding to the pandemic in the right ways.
posted by pullayup at 8:05 PM on September 22 [4 favorites]
What *would* be a more accurate term for the period where Americans were instructed to not leave our houses for inessential activities?
I believe that "shelter-in-place advisory" is the precise term.
A few localties had curfews/lockdowns that individuals could actually be arrested for violating, but in most of the US it was just an advisory for individuals. Most of the executive orders and legal enforcement were aimed at businesses, to minimize the number of places open for people to gather in.
Churches' first-amendment exemptions to those executive orders led to a ton of early superspreader events via church services and other church gatherings, and is a big part of why Covid hit the US much harder than it hit similarly developed counties that don't prioritize "religious freedom" over public safety.
posted by Jacqueline at 8:07 PM on September 22 [11 favorites]
I believe that "shelter-in-place advisory" is the precise term.
A few localties had curfews/lockdowns that individuals could actually be arrested for violating, but in most of the US it was just an advisory for individuals. Most of the executive orders and legal enforcement were aimed at businesses, to minimize the number of places open for people to gather in.
Churches' first-amendment exemptions to those executive orders led to a ton of early superspreader events via church services and other church gatherings, and is a big part of why Covid hit the US much harder than it hit similarly developed counties that don't prioritize "religious freedom" over public safety.
posted by Jacqueline at 8:07 PM on September 22 [11 favorites]
Drastically locking down society to prevent the spread of deadly or disabling diseases during an epidemic is actually the historical norm. The only reason modern people see it as weird or overkill is that developed countries had a couple generations reprieve from anything super nasty
Ask your grandparents sometime what used to happen in the first half of the 20th Century when someone in the household contracted a highly-contagious disease like measles or scarlet fever or polio. (In many places in the U.S. Yes, I know about chicken pox parties.) The health department would put a quarantine sign on the front door of the house and the family couldn’t leave or have visitors until a doctor had cleared you as non-infectious. And it sucked, but people did it in order to protect their community. I cannot fathom the uproar over such a measure now.
posted by corey flood at 8:09 PM on September 22 [11 favorites]
Ask your grandparents sometime what used to happen in the first half of the 20th Century when someone in the household contracted a highly-contagious disease like measles or scarlet fever or polio. (In many places in the U.S. Yes, I know about chicken pox parties.) The health department would put a quarantine sign on the front door of the house and the family couldn’t leave or have visitors until a doctor had cleared you as non-infectious. And it sucked, but people did it in order to protect their community. I cannot fathom the uproar over such a measure now.
posted by corey flood at 8:09 PM on September 22 [11 favorites]
"Side note, over here in the US we actually never had good data, not like ONS. Voluntary testing doesn’t really support good inferences about infection and transmission (plus which CDC reporting turns out to be a shitshow because their power to get the data from states is weirdly limited)."
I think your impression of Covid modeling in the US is outdated.
The CDC has been using wastewater data for a while now. No need to have perfect voluntary testing and reporting if you can just look at the viral loads in cities' sewage systems. Shit doesn't lie.
posted by Jacqueline at 8:13 PM on September 22 [3 favorites]
I think your impression of Covid modeling in the US is outdated.
The CDC has been using wastewater data for a while now. No need to have perfect voluntary testing and reporting if you can just look at the viral loads in cities' sewage systems. Shit doesn't lie.
posted by Jacqueline at 8:13 PM on September 22 [3 favorites]
"Ask your grandparents sometime what used to happen in the first half of the 20th Century when someone in the household contracted a highly-contagious disease like measles or scarlet fever or polio."
It wasn't just individual families being quarantineed, either.
Polio outbreaks routinely led to all the schools, playgrounds, pools, beaches, churches, etc. -- anywhere that children might gather -- in a city being closed for months. Almost everyone complied without objections.
That so many people no longer think it's normal or reasonable to shut down society during contagious disease outbreaks is a testament to the wonder of vaccines.
posted by Jacqueline at 8:23 PM on September 22 [14 favorites]
It wasn't just individual families being quarantineed, either.
Polio outbreaks routinely led to all the schools, playgrounds, pools, beaches, churches, etc. -- anywhere that children might gather -- in a city being closed for months. Almost everyone complied without objections.
That so many people no longer think it's normal or reasonable to shut down society during contagious disease outbreaks is a testament to the wonder of vaccines.
posted by Jacqueline at 8:23 PM on September 22 [14 favorites]
Wastewater data does have some advantages, but it has disadvantages too. For one thing, not all homes are on city wastewater systems — some areas tend to use septic systems, those data aren’t captured, and it’s not random who’s on which type (it’s geographically inflected). For another thing, there are some types of inferences I don’t think it really supports. You can’t really infer number of infections, you can’t make long-range temporal comparisons, and I’m not sure you can make long-range geographical comparisons either (they used to be in a smattering of units; not actually sure if that’s still true). It’s good for understanding “are we going up or down, locally, now” but I think that’s the best it gives. It’s not nothing but I still preferred the survey.
posted by eirias at 8:35 PM on September 22 [8 favorites]
posted by eirias at 8:35 PM on September 22 [8 favorites]
Re: door postings, I actually think we had a public health notice slapped to our door when we had suspected pertussis in 2015 and were asked to shelter at home while we completed our antibiotic course. I dunno, my memory of stuff that happened that long ago is soup, so I might be misremembering, but it’d be a weird thing for my mind to fabricate.
posted by eirias at 8:38 PM on September 22 [3 favorites]
posted by eirias at 8:38 PM on September 22 [3 favorites]
There was that lady last year in Washington who got arrested because she kept going around with tuberculosis putting people at risk and not staying home or getting any treatment for months on end.
posted by aubilenon at 9:13 PM on September 22 [5 favorites]
posted by aubilenon at 9:13 PM on September 22 [5 favorites]
These days the need for quarantine to restrict the spread of airborne diseases should be much less anyway given advances in modern technology, i.e. masks. Early in the pandemic N95s were not available, so I used this mask fitter developed by the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a regular surgical mask (made from material that had a high degree of filtration). This achieved a level of protection very close to an N95.
Imagine if governments had moved quickly to actively devote resources to developing something like this, and had distributed surgical masks and instructions for how to make mask fitters (it could have been framed as a fun project for kids to get involved in!). I'm sure the pandemic could have been knocked out without any need for drastic lockdowns. Millions of lives could have been saved and we wouldn't be in the mess we are now.
posted by mydonkeybenjamin at 9:30 PM on September 22 [4 favorites]
Imagine if governments had moved quickly to actively devote resources to developing something like this, and had distributed surgical masks and instructions for how to make mask fitters (it could have been framed as a fun project for kids to get involved in!). I'm sure the pandemic could have been knocked out without any need for drastic lockdowns. Millions of lives could have been saved and we wouldn't be in the mess we are now.
posted by mydonkeybenjamin at 9:30 PM on September 22 [4 favorites]
We really thought that flus and colds and such were primarily close contact large droplet transmission (and boy were we wrong! And it’s a fascinating story why!).
Has there ever been a respiratory tract disease in the entire history of ever that spreads only via droplets and fomites and not by airborne transmission as well? I've never heard of one.
The physics of it just makes no sense to me and neither does the natural selection. If a virus is multiplying in the respiratory tract then it's inevitably going to be expressed in respiratory mucus, which anybody who has ever smelt somebody else's sneeze after walking into the room they sneezed in knows is perfectly capable of being aerosolized. And bacteria are easily small enough for loads of them to fit inside every suspended aerosol particle, let alone viruses.
So "we" "thought" no such thing. A specific group of reasoning-incapable box-ticking dipshits at WHO pushed the droplets-and-fomites-only line, with no evidence to support them as far as I can tell. And the story of how they kept on doing that as competent epidemiologists tore their hair out trying to persuade them not to isn't "fascinating" so much as enraging, especially given the amount of fucking mansplaining involved.
Insert THEY CAN'T KEEP GETTING AWAY WITH THIS gif here
And here as well. Did, though, didn't they. For way too long.
posted by flabdablet at 9:32 PM on September 22 [7 favorites]
Has there ever been a respiratory tract disease in the entire history of ever that spreads only via droplets and fomites and not by airborne transmission as well? I've never heard of one.
The physics of it just makes no sense to me and neither does the natural selection. If a virus is multiplying in the respiratory tract then it's inevitably going to be expressed in respiratory mucus, which anybody who has ever smelt somebody else's sneeze after walking into the room they sneezed in knows is perfectly capable of being aerosolized. And bacteria are easily small enough for loads of them to fit inside every suspended aerosol particle, let alone viruses.
So "we" "thought" no such thing. A specific group of reasoning-incapable box-ticking dipshits at WHO pushed the droplets-and-fomites-only line, with no evidence to support them as far as I can tell. And the story of how they kept on doing that as competent epidemiologists tore their hair out trying to persuade them not to isn't "fascinating" so much as enraging, especially given the amount of fucking mansplaining involved.
Insert THEY CAN'T KEEP GETTING AWAY WITH THIS gif here
And here as well. Did, though, didn't they. For way too long.
posted by flabdablet at 9:32 PM on September 22 [7 favorites]
I've got to agree. There were lots of incidents of unequivocally airborne spread of SARS in Hong Kong (SARS-ncov-2 wasn't my first rodeo!) and lessons learned about how to prevent that kind of spread, that the rest of the world (or Northern Europe at least, can't speak to everywhere) just didn't take note of.
posted by Dysk at 10:42 PM on September 22 [5 favorites]
posted by Dysk at 10:42 PM on September 22 [5 favorites]
I'm sure the pandemic could have been knocked out without any need for drastic lockdowns
I don't think it's at all realistic to think we could have contained and eliminated this virus. By the time that PCR COVID tests were first rolled out to any labs (Feburary 10th), community spread was already happening in many countries. Given that then testing capacity was very limited, the symptoms were poorly understood, ("dry cough"?) and asymptomatic people could be contagious anyway, even if we did all agree that masking would protect us (which was not at that point a consensus), then who would need to wear a mask when? In 2019 about 12.5 billion masks were sold, which is certainly not enough to suddenly start issuing a month's worth of masks to everyone.
posted by aubilenon at 10:43 PM on September 22 [2 favorites]
I don't think it's at all realistic to think we could have contained and eliminated this virus. By the time that PCR COVID tests were first rolled out to any labs (Feburary 10th), community spread was already happening in many countries. Given that then testing capacity was very limited, the symptoms were poorly understood, ("dry cough"?) and asymptomatic people could be contagious anyway, even if we did all agree that masking would protect us (which was not at that point a consensus), then who would need to wear a mask when? In 2019 about 12.5 billion masks were sold, which is certainly not enough to suddenly start issuing a month's worth of masks to everyone.
posted by aubilenon at 10:43 PM on September 22 [2 favorites]
Even before all the variants that were each much more contagious than the previous, COVID-19 was out the gate significantly more contagious than the original SARS, so in fact the lessons from SARS if anything inspired dangerous confidence.
posted by aubilenon at 10:46 PM on September 22 [2 favorites]
posted by aubilenon at 10:46 PM on September 22 [2 favorites]
I'm sure the pandemic could have been knocked out without any need for drastic lockdowns.
I think you underestimate the degree of mask use compliance that would be required if movement restrictions were taken off the table, as well as the degree to which that segment of the community that Won't Be Told What To Do By The Gubmint will actively oppose all mandated public health measures on purely ideological grounds.
I recall being struck in the early days of the pandemic by just how much of the opposition to masking was coming from the same voices who had already latched onto the idea of showing one's face in public as a Pillar of Western Civilization, in a pathetic attempt to give their rampant Islamophobia some plausible deniability.
Fuckwits gonna fuck us, it's just what they do.
posted by flabdablet at 11:02 PM on September 22 [7 favorites]
I think you underestimate the degree of mask use compliance that would be required if movement restrictions were taken off the table, as well as the degree to which that segment of the community that Won't Be Told What To Do By The Gubmint will actively oppose all mandated public health measures on purely ideological grounds.
I recall being struck in the early days of the pandemic by just how much of the opposition to masking was coming from the same voices who had already latched onto the idea of showing one's face in public as a Pillar of Western Civilization, in a pathetic attempt to give their rampant Islamophobia some plausible deniability.
Fuckwits gonna fuck us, it's just what they do.
posted by flabdablet at 11:02 PM on September 22 [7 favorites]
I've lost friends because of Covid. But more to the point, I watched two friends who loved each other, who agreed on pretty much everything (politically, socially, spiritually even) tear each other apart over covid. Both were parents. Both deeply loved their kids. Each took a different side on the "kids back to school" imperative.
everyone's right and nobody's sorry, that's the start and the end of the story
posted by philip-random at 11:07 PM on September 22 [1 favorite]
everyone's right and nobody's sorry, that's the start and the end of the story
posted by philip-random at 11:07 PM on September 22 [1 favorite]
>>I'm sure the pandemic could have been knocked out without any need for drastic lockdowns.
I think you underestimate the degree of mask use compliance that would be required if movement restrictions were taken off the table, as well as the degree to which that segment of the community that Won't Be Told What To Do By The Gubmint will actively oppose all mandated public health measures on purely ideological grounds.
I had in mind a counterfactual where the WHO/CDC hadn't aggravated the issue of compliance by sowing confusion about the value of masking, and governments were doing everything they could to support and facilitate mask-wearing, but sure, these are good points.
posted by mydonkeybenjamin at 11:29 PM on September 22 [3 favorites]
I think you underestimate the degree of mask use compliance that would be required if movement restrictions were taken off the table, as well as the degree to which that segment of the community that Won't Be Told What To Do By The Gubmint will actively oppose all mandated public health measures on purely ideological grounds.
I had in mind a counterfactual where the WHO/CDC hadn't aggravated the issue of compliance by sowing confusion about the value of masking, and governments were doing everything they could to support and facilitate mask-wearing, but sure, these are good points.
posted by mydonkeybenjamin at 11:29 PM on September 22 [3 favorites]
Even before all the variants that were each much more contagious than the previous, COVID-19 was out the gate significantly more contagious than the original SARS, so in fact the lessons from SARS if anything inspired dangerous confidence.
Speaking as someone who lived in HK for SARS, and the UK for the sequel, we would have been much better off over here if we'd taken the same precautions as with SARS in HK. We knew that SARS spread through whole building ventilation systems in some cases, for example, but they still sent us to work during covid with a single square meter of clear plastic between workspaces, between the worker and the customer.
There was no false sense of security from SARS. Nobody was even looking at the lessons you might learn from there, seemed like. Even the dangerous confidence would be better than the blithe ignorance and inaction we actually got.
posted by Dysk at 11:46 PM on September 22 [6 favorites]
Speaking as someone who lived in HK for SARS, and the UK for the sequel, we would have been much better off over here if we'd taken the same precautions as with SARS in HK. We knew that SARS spread through whole building ventilation systems in some cases, for example, but they still sent us to work during covid with a single square meter of clear plastic between workspaces, between the worker and the customer.
There was no false sense of security from SARS. Nobody was even looking at the lessons you might learn from there, seemed like. Even the dangerous confidence would be better than the blithe ignorance and inaction we actually got.
posted by Dysk at 11:46 PM on September 22 [6 favorites]
I've always felt that Covid occupied a very weird place in the hierarchy of risk. It was dangerous enough to cause (and it continues to cause) widespread death and disability but it isn't so obviously lethal as to frighten most people into following strict protocols for more than the briefest of periods.
It's going to be very interesting, and by interesting I mean horrible, to see how this debate turns out once H5N1 goes pandemic.
posted by Justinian at 12:17 AM on September 23 [5 favorites]
It's going to be very interesting, and by interesting I mean horrible, to see how this debate turns out once H5N1 goes pandemic.
posted by Justinian at 12:17 AM on September 23 [5 favorites]
The exaggerated sense of confidence/security I was talking about was my perception of the US's reaction. SARS and was contained and eliminated with minimal impact on anyone's lives in the US (27 cases, 0 deaths). I only right now learned that MERS was not contained and in fact a few people died from it this year still, but it didn't blow up the way people thought it might have been about to. H1N1 (swine flu) turned out to be a big nothingburger (most everyone got it but it wasn't really bad), and the previous H5N1 (bird flu) scare didn't really amount to much either. When COVID came along, a lot of people here seemed to think "oh I guess it's another weird disease outbreak somewhere else. I hope they can take care of it again so I can continue with life as normal". IDK if things were different in the UK, but they had even lower SARS numbers than the US (4 cases, 0 deaths), so I am not surprised to hear they were similarly blasé about it.
posted by aubilenon at 12:25 AM on September 23 [1 favorite]
posted by aubilenon at 12:25 AM on September 23 [1 favorite]
Yeah, the reason a lot of the rest of the world didn't get SARS too bad was in no small part because of efforts to contain it in Hong Kong. When covid was arriving in the rest of the world, we should've all been looking at HK's experience with SARS and saying "this is what we need to do" not looking at their own experience with SARS.
posted by Dysk at 12:29 AM on September 23 [13 favorites]
posted by Dysk at 12:29 AM on September 23 [13 favorites]
It's going to be very interesting, and by interesting I mean horrible, to see how this debate turns out once H5N1 goes pandemic.
posted by Justinian
Worst part about the 2020 Covid pandemic is that we actually got lucky in one way. It could have been a lot worse if it had a higher fatality rate. (Though that may have also been more effective at getting the complacent to pay much closer attention to the reality of it.)
I fear we have not learned the lessons for a much more serious pandemic, which will happen one day.
posted by Pouteria at 1:24 AM on September 23 [5 favorites]
posted by Justinian
Worst part about the 2020 Covid pandemic is that we actually got lucky in one way. It could have been a lot worse if it had a higher fatality rate. (Though that may have also been more effective at getting the complacent to pay much closer attention to the reality of it.)
I fear we have not learned the lessons for a much more serious pandemic, which will happen one day.
posted by Pouteria at 1:24 AM on September 23 [5 favorites]
Drastically locking down society to prevent the spread of deadly or disabling diseases during an epidemic is actually the historical norm.
[…]
That so many people no longer think it's normal or reasonable to shut down society during contagious disease outbreaks is a testament to the wonder of vaccines.
The crucial idea here is “during outbreaks.” It’s honestly absurd to me that this thread keeps flip-flopping.
The original post advocates lockdowns for Covid to eradicate it and help immunocompromised and other risk-averse people live equally with everyone else. (Despite the fact that it is endemic and we have vaccinations.) I asked why we would lockdown for this disease when we don’t for others that are endemic and for which we have vaccinations. A bunch of people yell that nobody really wants to lockdown, we just want to mask and vaccinate and ventilate. Then somebody new comes along and defends lockdowns for eradication. I protest. Denial. New defense of lockdown. Sigh.
It’s comes back to early, bad public health communication with Covid about whether we were quarantining to slow the spread while a vaccine was developed or to end the pandemic completely. Too many people heard that a few weeks of lockdown would end Covid (when what was said was that the goal was just to reduce infections until vaccination and while hospital capacity was overtaxed) and now we’re here….
This feels like gaslighting to them. And maybe some public health experts did permanent damage to expertise by actively contributing to misunderstandings to get short term compliance.
The truth is that of course during initial outbreaks lockdowns can be necessary. But they no longer make sense for endemic diseases where vaccinations are available and the death rate for vaccinated folks is low.
Everyone agrees that where vaccinations alone can eradicate a disease, we should do it! That’s the smallpox example, as well as polio, mumps, measles, so many more. But folks like the author of the original post are demanding the eradication of diseases that are not eradicable, so they end up demanding outsized interventions, which get defended on an emergency basis but following the line of the argument—the actual assertions and inferences—would need to be persistent.
“I’m not saying X, I’m just saying Y and Z that entail X.”
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
posted by anotherpanacea at 2:12 AM on September 23 [5 favorites]
[…]
That so many people no longer think it's normal or reasonable to shut down society during contagious disease outbreaks is a testament to the wonder of vaccines.
The crucial idea here is “during outbreaks.” It’s honestly absurd to me that this thread keeps flip-flopping.
The original post advocates lockdowns for Covid to eradicate it and help immunocompromised and other risk-averse people live equally with everyone else. (Despite the fact that it is endemic and we have vaccinations.) I asked why we would lockdown for this disease when we don’t for others that are endemic and for which we have vaccinations. A bunch of people yell that nobody really wants to lockdown, we just want to mask and vaccinate and ventilate. Then somebody new comes along and defends lockdowns for eradication. I protest. Denial. New defense of lockdown. Sigh.
It’s comes back to early, bad public health communication with Covid about whether we were quarantining to slow the spread while a vaccine was developed or to end the pandemic completely. Too many people heard that a few weeks of lockdown would end Covid (when what was said was that the goal was just to reduce infections until vaccination and while hospital capacity was overtaxed) and now we’re here….
This feels like gaslighting to them. And maybe some public health experts did permanent damage to expertise by actively contributing to misunderstandings to get short term compliance.
The truth is that of course during initial outbreaks lockdowns can be necessary. But they no longer make sense for endemic diseases where vaccinations are available and the death rate for vaccinated folks is low.
Everyone agrees that where vaccinations alone can eradicate a disease, we should do it! That’s the smallpox example, as well as polio, mumps, measles, so many more. But folks like the author of the original post are demanding the eradication of diseases that are not eradicable, so they end up demanding outsized interventions, which get defended on an emergency basis but following the line of the argument—the actual assertions and inferences—would need to be persistent.
“I’m not saying X, I’m just saying Y and Z that entail X.”
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
posted by anotherpanacea at 2:12 AM on September 23 [5 favorites]
I think the thought about lockdowns qua lockdowns is that if we had locked down well, early, maybe we could have driven SARS2 into the dustbin of history. It didn’t happen, so it feels a bit like fantasies of: wouldn’t it have been nice if the Supreme Court hadn’t installed Bush as president? I look at our H5N1 clown car and I’m thinking the best plan for squashing a pandemic is, don’t let it get to the USA, we do not have an advanced enough society to pull it off.
I think the thought about protecting the vulnerable is that if we normalized some precautions, being out and about would be less dangerous for the people who really can’t get Covid. That’s not the same as trying to eradicate it, which I’ve understood isn’t really possible in the time fork we got, that just means trying to hold endemicity to a lower level. I think one of the bugs is that each layer of protections that would help us keep the level lower only helps a bit, it’s not a silver bullet. I look at that personally as incentive to cooperate and do my part, but I think most people see it as a reason not to bother with any of them — including vaccination. Drives me mad.
posted by eirias at 3:29 AM on September 23 [10 favorites]
I think the thought about protecting the vulnerable is that if we normalized some precautions, being out and about would be less dangerous for the people who really can’t get Covid. That’s not the same as trying to eradicate it, which I’ve understood isn’t really possible in the time fork we got, that just means trying to hold endemicity to a lower level. I think one of the bugs is that each layer of protections that would help us keep the level lower only helps a bit, it’s not a silver bullet. I look at that personally as incentive to cooperate and do my part, but I think most people see it as a reason not to bother with any of them — including vaccination. Drives me mad.
posted by eirias at 3:29 AM on September 23 [10 favorites]
Speaking as someone who lives in a part of Canada that had actual, legally enforceable lockdowns with the goal of eradication at the start of the pandemic: I think of hat if you could get everyone in the world on board, they would take a little longer this time, but you probably could eradicate the current strains even though they are endemic. But the world includes the US, and the UK, and Russia, and places that don’t have the financial resources for vaccinations let alone other measures, and places that would maybe comply but wouldn’t share their resources with the places that can’t. And Mefites in the US etc., let alone the average American, won’t even believe those of us who lived in regions that achieved local eradication for a couple years that actually our lives were much less disrupted by our public health measures (except China, which seems to have gone a bit too hard without also using other pandemic control measures like vaccination or masking or improving air quality) than you all report experiencing. Our schools were open earlier, and we were enjoying covid-free indoor dining that first summer, for example. So that sucks for those of us who did put the effort in.
Anyway, treating indoor air quality like we do water quality in the US and having a concerted push for better ventilation and filtration in public buildings would be nice. I’m on board with that.
posted by eviemath at 3:40 AM on September 23 [10 favorites]
Anyway, treating indoor air quality like we do water quality in the US and having a concerted push for better ventilation and filtration in public buildings would be nice. I’m on board with that.
posted by eviemath at 3:40 AM on September 23 [10 favorites]
One of the things I think most people steadfastly refuse to hear is that a good chunk of the pain of this is how plainly it shows the vulnerable that they are not valued as human beings. Their social isolation doesn’t count as a problem somehow, and in fact is preferable because masks bum other people out. That’s what hit me hardest. The lesson I took is that when life gets tough I can count on my husband, but literally nobody else is going to pitch in for a goddamn second.
posted by eirias at 3:53 AM on September 23 [23 favorites]
posted by eirias at 3:53 AM on September 23 [23 favorites]
if you could get everyone in the world on board, they would take a little longer this time, but you probably could eradicate the current strains even though they are endemic.
Too many people stop reading here and ignore that you go on to acknowledge that getting international compliance is impossible. They see this as “probably could but—because of evil intentions—won’t.”
When it comes to all the other measures, I’m generally on board. (I think universal public masking mandates are the hardest case, and aren’t sustainable, but I’m personally willing. I just think that the way this feeds resentment and conservative intransigence will backfire, so then it ends up being useless.)
But I object to the idea that the only disabilities that matter for this discussion are immunocompromised folks, and not those of people who struggle with depression, social isolation, addiction, intimate partner or caretaker abuse, or the folks in prison who were on years of de facto solitary confinement and still struggle with a paucity of services, or poor students who became de-schooled at crucial developmental moments, or borderline folks who decompensated without engagement and services, or the dozens of other groups that require community to flourish and whose suffering is exacerbated by quarantines, lockdowns, and stay at home orders.
A holistic account of disability can’t one-sidedly obsess over one disabling set of practices and demand solutions that wholly disable all the other folks facing impairment. That’s not holistic, and it’s not equity!
That’s why I love the air purifier and ventilation policy changes, in part because it’s a basic infrastructure need and at the daily level it is undemanding. But that doesn’t mean we can shut down schools until they’ve all been retrofit through a cumbersome public procurement process, or try to enforce mask mandates on kindergartners. (Both demands that circulated locally and that I still see friends nostalgically referencing.)
It would go a long way towards getting normies on board with the easy stuff if more radical folks would acknowledge there was an over-reach at the height of the pandemic. But people really hate to admit that they were wrong or that we let anxiety drive us into extreme behaviors and demands.
Here maximalist approaches to the problem don’t help: your interlocutors can tell that you’ll demand as many interventions as you think you can get, up to and including the really massively harmful ones. So we end up in a war of position and compromises look like defeat for both sides—which means they don’t get done.
posted by anotherpanacea at 4:48 AM on September 23 [4 favorites]
Too many people stop reading here and ignore that you go on to acknowledge that getting international compliance is impossible. They see this as “probably could but—because of evil intentions—won’t.”
When it comes to all the other measures, I’m generally on board. (I think universal public masking mandates are the hardest case, and aren’t sustainable, but I’m personally willing. I just think that the way this feeds resentment and conservative intransigence will backfire, so then it ends up being useless.)
But I object to the idea that the only disabilities that matter for this discussion are immunocompromised folks, and not those of people who struggle with depression, social isolation, addiction, intimate partner or caretaker abuse, or the folks in prison who were on years of de facto solitary confinement and still struggle with a paucity of services, or poor students who became de-schooled at crucial developmental moments, or borderline folks who decompensated without engagement and services, or the dozens of other groups that require community to flourish and whose suffering is exacerbated by quarantines, lockdowns, and stay at home orders.
A holistic account of disability can’t one-sidedly obsess over one disabling set of practices and demand solutions that wholly disable all the other folks facing impairment. That’s not holistic, and it’s not equity!
That’s why I love the air purifier and ventilation policy changes, in part because it’s a basic infrastructure need and at the daily level it is undemanding. But that doesn’t mean we can shut down schools until they’ve all been retrofit through a cumbersome public procurement process, or try to enforce mask mandates on kindergartners. (Both demands that circulated locally and that I still see friends nostalgically referencing.)
It would go a long way towards getting normies on board with the easy stuff if more radical folks would acknowledge there was an over-reach at the height of the pandemic. But people really hate to admit that they were wrong or that we let anxiety drive us into extreme behaviors and demands.
Here maximalist approaches to the problem don’t help: your interlocutors can tell that you’ll demand as many interventions as you think you can get, up to and including the really massively harmful ones. So we end up in a war of position and compromises look like defeat for both sides—which means they don’t get done.
posted by anotherpanacea at 4:48 AM on September 23 [4 favorites]
I’m sure you’re not only responding to my comment, but as a response to my comment, that would be an ahistorical reading of the policies that I’ve advocated for over the years here on Metafilter. And also an illustration of the problem I was talking about, that folks in other regions aren’t listening to the actual experience of those of us who were in areas that achieved local eradication. Our health care system has long-standing under-resourcing problems that weren’t aided by the pandemic, for sure, but on other measures of non-pandemic related public health and wellness outcomes, we’ve come out relatively better than most places that had fewer initial restrictions.
posted by eviemath at 5:06 AM on September 23 [4 favorites]
posted by eviemath at 5:06 AM on September 23 [4 favorites]
(Er, non-covid - the other things that got influenced by the pandemic, that weren’t covid deaths, hospitalizations, or illness: mental health stuff, delay of other health care, etc.)
posted by eviemath at 5:07 AM on September 23 [2 favorites]
posted by eviemath at 5:07 AM on September 23 [2 favorites]
as a response to my comment, that would be an ahistorical reading of the policies that I’ve advocated for over the years here on Metafilter
Not at all directed at you—you discount the quoted sentence in the very next one—but rather at how people start and stop reading in systematic ways.
posted by anotherpanacea at 5:38 AM on September 23 [1 favorite]
Not at all directed at you—you discount the quoted sentence in the very next one—but rather at how people start and stop reading in systematic ways.
posted by anotherpanacea at 5:38 AM on September 23 [1 favorite]
I think some clarity around terms would help. As I understand it, it’s fair to call what was achieved in some countries regional elimination, but not eradication. This is an interesting paper defining terms and discussing conditions under which aiming for eradication makes sense. By my read, under these terms, it’s quite clear that at the present time, it makes no sense for SARS-CoV-2. Our vaccines can reduce but not prevent transmission; our testing infrastructure doles out a lot of false negatives to people early in their disease course; and we are far from the only vertebrate that can be a reservoir. I say this as someone who is, by 2024 standards, unusually committed to the project of reducing transmission (for example, we’ve been masking at home for five days because Little e has some kind of Schrodinger’s ick). But I think even without American intransigence eradication would be a nonstarter now.
I too would love to bring focus to the possible, like infrastructure. I assume that’s what the vaccine-only approach was meant to achieve. But it’s been a dismal failure! Last year uptake was worse than flu! I work at a med school and when I lined up for mine, the presumably medically educated woman in front of me told me she was only there for the flu shot and she doesn’t bother with Covid vaccines because “I just think that if I get the shot I shouldn’t get the disease”! In practice, our messaging seems to have convinced everyone that because perfection with Covid is not possible, there’s no point in them putting in any effort at all, because effort is for suckers and the mentally ill. I certainly am not on board with telling fairy stories about what could be possible in a radically different world but the approach we’ve taken is so nihilistic it makes my head spin. I don’t have answers here. I’m assuming that the CDC doesn’t, either.
posted by eirias at 6:12 AM on September 23 [7 favorites]
I too would love to bring focus to the possible, like infrastructure. I assume that’s what the vaccine-only approach was meant to achieve. But it’s been a dismal failure! Last year uptake was worse than flu! I work at a med school and when I lined up for mine, the presumably medically educated woman in front of me told me she was only there for the flu shot and she doesn’t bother with Covid vaccines because “I just think that if I get the shot I shouldn’t get the disease”! In practice, our messaging seems to have convinced everyone that because perfection with Covid is not possible, there’s no point in them putting in any effort at all, because effort is for suckers and the mentally ill. I certainly am not on board with telling fairy stories about what could be possible in a radically different world but the approach we’ve taken is so nihilistic it makes my head spin. I don’t have answers here. I’m assuming that the CDC doesn’t, either.
posted by eirias at 6:12 AM on September 23 [7 favorites]
There is still a lot of magical thinking about COVID in this thread that is baffling. COVID is a highly contagious virus that spreads in a way that is very hard to manage. Even with incredibly strict lockdowns, China did not fully contain it and the minute they were eased there were massive outbreaks. Worldwide lockdowns would be logistically impossible; too many people still need to work in essential businesses, and has been said before in this thread, the virus has non-human reservoirs. Plus, we now have good tools for controlling the virus, namely vaccines and widespread exposure that means that it is a much less serious infection for most people.
I think it's wishful thinking to believe that if we had just, the virus would be gone. If we had just masked better, if we had just coordinated a worldwide lockdown, if we had just fixed indoor air quality everywhere. Maybe if China had acted much earlier, if the virus wasn't so communicable before people were showing symptoms, if a butterfly had flapped its wings a different way one day in late 2019, the virus would be gone, but barring a vaccine that provides full sterilizing immunity, these expectations are a fantasy that you are using to blame people for something that ultimately is probably no one's fault. It certainly isn't the fault of Bob healthcare worker who didn't wear his mask perfectly, or Jane grocery store clerk who had to go in to interact with people in person, and dare I say it, it isn't even the fault of Donald Trump for not locking the US down harder or the various elected officials for not magically uplifting all indoor ventilation systems across the USA.
It is a tragedy that is not helped by the exaggerations of anecdote. Despite claims in this thread, we still don't really know how frequently most people will get COVID as the mutation patterns are still evolving, although 2 times a year (probably not both symptomatic) seems like the far upper end of possible. I've seen some models that expect more like every 2-3 years (no, I don't have links, sorry). To add my own anecdote, I work in-person, with significant travel, with other people who work in-person and travel a lot, without any noticeable masking since 2023, and people are not calling out of work sick for multiple weeks a year due to COVID (nor are they coming into work sick with COVID, in fact I'd say overall people are more likely to stay home when sick so we're all somewhat healthier). I say this not to minimize the bad experiences of people but to ground it in reality: the combination of "powers that be" and normal people are not neglecting to mask or avoiding strangers because they are ignorant, they are looking at what is happening around them and their own experiences and deciding that it isn't a high-risk activity for them personally, or their company/community (in the case of "powers") in aggregate.
We should absolutely continue to work on improving ventilation, for a bunch of reasons beyond COVID. Keep making vaccines work better. Don't shame people for masking, and encourage it where it makes sense. But let's not use the example of knocking out a flu strain that was already in global decline and was knocked out early in the pandemic (not seen since March 2020, so seems like it was a pretty easy knockout) to pretend that we can do the same thing for a much more entrenched endemic virus.
posted by ch1x0r at 6:16 AM on September 23 [17 favorites]
I think it's wishful thinking to believe that if we had just, the virus would be gone. If we had just masked better, if we had just coordinated a worldwide lockdown, if we had just fixed indoor air quality everywhere. Maybe if China had acted much earlier, if the virus wasn't so communicable before people were showing symptoms, if a butterfly had flapped its wings a different way one day in late 2019, the virus would be gone, but barring a vaccine that provides full sterilizing immunity, these expectations are a fantasy that you are using to blame people for something that ultimately is probably no one's fault. It certainly isn't the fault of Bob healthcare worker who didn't wear his mask perfectly, or Jane grocery store clerk who had to go in to interact with people in person, and dare I say it, it isn't even the fault of Donald Trump for not locking the US down harder or the various elected officials for not magically uplifting all indoor ventilation systems across the USA.
It is a tragedy that is not helped by the exaggerations of anecdote. Despite claims in this thread, we still don't really know how frequently most people will get COVID as the mutation patterns are still evolving, although 2 times a year (probably not both symptomatic) seems like the far upper end of possible. I've seen some models that expect more like every 2-3 years (no, I don't have links, sorry). To add my own anecdote, I work in-person, with significant travel, with other people who work in-person and travel a lot, without any noticeable masking since 2023, and people are not calling out of work sick for multiple weeks a year due to COVID (nor are they coming into work sick with COVID, in fact I'd say overall people are more likely to stay home when sick so we're all somewhat healthier). I say this not to minimize the bad experiences of people but to ground it in reality: the combination of "powers that be" and normal people are not neglecting to mask or avoiding strangers because they are ignorant, they are looking at what is happening around them and their own experiences and deciding that it isn't a high-risk activity for them personally, or their company/community (in the case of "powers") in aggregate.
We should absolutely continue to work on improving ventilation, for a bunch of reasons beyond COVID. Keep making vaccines work better. Don't shame people for masking, and encourage it where it makes sense. But let's not use the example of knocking out a flu strain that was already in global decline and was knocked out early in the pandemic (not seen since March 2020, so seems like it was a pretty easy knockout) to pretend that we can do the same thing for a much more entrenched endemic virus.
posted by ch1x0r at 6:16 AM on September 23 [17 favorites]
told me she was only there for the flu shot and she doesn’t bother with Covid vaccines because “I just think that if I get the shot I shouldn’t get the disease”!
The number of times I heard this from colleagues at various levels in NHS Test & Trace (when that was a thing for a couple year!) is still baffling to me. Then again, are there any other vaccines that we use routinely that don't prevent developing the disease in question to a great extent?
posted by Dysk at 6:20 AM on September 23 [3 favorites]
The number of times I heard this from colleagues at various levels in NHS Test & Trace (when that was a thing for a couple year!) is still baffling to me. Then again, are there any other vaccines that we use routinely that don't prevent developing the disease in question to a great extent?
posted by Dysk at 6:20 AM on September 23 [3 favorites]
People like to play the "gotcha" card for flu deaths/prevention in re: to Covid, but honestly not a lot of younger people get the flu vaccine. (This is why I like working in healthcare; you get that shit done for free every season.) If you were getting the flu vaccine every year even if you're not in a high risk category, good for you! But I guarantee you a lot of folks aren't because, much like Covid, it's just something that's gonna happen, right?
posted by Kitteh at 6:23 AM on September 23 [4 favorites]
posted by Kitteh at 6:23 AM on September 23 [4 favorites]
I think it's wishful thinking to believe that if we had just, the virus would be gone
On teh flip side, IO do think there are a lot of lessons to be learned. There is a lot that could have been done, that might have made the situation less dramatic at the time, the growth less explosive, and ultimately, the total impact of the disease significantly less. We do need to hash out the what-ifs in order to do better, respond better next time.
People like to play the "gotcha" card for flu deaths/prevention in re: to Covid, but honestly not a lot of younger people get the flu vaccine.
Here in the UK, unless you have a medical condition that makes you particularly vulnerable (or work in a care home) you have to be 65 to be offered it on the NHS. So it is not just young people not routinely getting it.
posted by Dysk at 6:28 AM on September 23 [4 favorites]
On teh flip side, IO do think there are a lot of lessons to be learned. There is a lot that could have been done, that might have made the situation less dramatic at the time, the growth less explosive, and ultimately, the total impact of the disease significantly less. We do need to hash out the what-ifs in order to do better, respond better next time.
People like to play the "gotcha" card for flu deaths/prevention in re: to Covid, but honestly not a lot of younger people get the flu vaccine.
Here in the UK, unless you have a medical condition that makes you particularly vulnerable (or work in a care home) you have to be 65 to be offered it on the NHS. So it is not just young people not routinely getting it.
posted by Dysk at 6:28 AM on September 23 [4 favorites]
WHAT
I never realized how lucky to live in Canada where the flu vaccine is free at every participating pharmacy during flu season!
posted by Kitteh at 6:35 AM on September 23 [7 favorites]
I never realized how lucky to live in Canada where the flu vaccine is free at every participating pharmacy during flu season!
posted by Kitteh at 6:35 AM on September 23 [7 favorites]
(The plus 65+ cohort get a modified version for the elderly.)
posted by Kitteh at 6:35 AM on September 23 [4 favorites]
posted by Kitteh at 6:35 AM on September 23 [4 favorites]
Yep. The NHS flu vaccine eligibility list is longer than the equivalent list for the NHS Covid vaccine, but it still excludes an awful lot of the population, and I've never been aware of a push to get the rest of us to consider a private flu jab.
The policy adopted for the ongoing Covid vaccination programme - this is only for people who might get REALLY ill and/or die if they catch it - wasn't without precedent. The thing that feels weird about it compared to the way we handle flu vaccinations is that they restricted access to the NHS Covid jabs two years before there were any private ones on offer at all, and now that we have them at last, they're much more expensive (£100 vs £20) and much harder to come by (I have to travel 20 miles to find a pharmacy offering one, vs three or four pharmacies within ten minutes' walk of home where I can get a flu jab).
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 8:24 AM on September 23 [3 favorites]
The policy adopted for the ongoing Covid vaccination programme - this is only for people who might get REALLY ill and/or die if they catch it - wasn't without precedent. The thing that feels weird about it compared to the way we handle flu vaccinations is that they restricted access to the NHS Covid jabs two years before there were any private ones on offer at all, and now that we have them at last, they're much more expensive (£100 vs £20) and much harder to come by (I have to travel 20 miles to find a pharmacy offering one, vs three or four pharmacies within ten minutes' walk of home where I can get a flu jab).
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 8:24 AM on September 23 [3 favorites]
I'm sorry, UK folks! I just thought that since you all had a healthcare system not too different from ours that you all got the flu vaccines and the COVID vaccines free and upon request. Like, wow. Flu vaccines are strenuously pushed here in Canada, especially for seniors and other at risk groups, and if you want a COVID booster/topup/etc, you can book that at a pharmacy, also for free.
posted by Kitteh at 8:46 AM on September 23 [4 favorites]
posted by Kitteh at 8:46 AM on September 23 [4 favorites]
I think the psychology of the original article is wrong. It claims that people have given up on COVID interventions because they remind them that everyone's a short slip from disability, but I think it's rather that COVID is now priced in, as the wonks say. The last time I remember Mefi doing this, this comment saying that society has reached a new equilibrium seemed to best describe what's happened.
Last I looked, COVID was less deadly than flu and age standardised mortality rates were converging for the vaxed and unvaxed, probably because most people are no longer immunologically naive even if they're unvaxed (this is all based on UK data, see my comment on that old thread). Nevertheless, recently I saw on the Facebook of one of the friends who (as that comment mentions) never fully came out of hiding (I infer because of worries about getting long COVID), there's a comment from another friend of theirs who believes that people who don't mask outdoors are ableist evildoers. I got a similar vibe from the article.
It seems like governments did their best to induce a germ-phobia as a public health measure and for some it stuck even when the risk was vastly reduced. Plus people who aren't particularly vulnerable themselves but are very conscientious feel guilty about socialising in case they pass on COVID in a way that they don't about, say, driving a car in case they pollute (or kill a pedestrian).
posted by pw201 at 9:02 AM on September 23 [6 favorites]
Last I looked, COVID was less deadly than flu and age standardised mortality rates were converging for the vaxed and unvaxed, probably because most people are no longer immunologically naive even if they're unvaxed (this is all based on UK data, see my comment on that old thread). Nevertheless, recently I saw on the Facebook of one of the friends who (as that comment mentions) never fully came out of hiding (I infer because of worries about getting long COVID), there's a comment from another friend of theirs who believes that people who don't mask outdoors are ableist evildoers. I got a similar vibe from the article.
It seems like governments did their best to induce a germ-phobia as a public health measure and for some it stuck even when the risk was vastly reduced. Plus people who aren't particularly vulnerable themselves but are very conscientious feel guilty about socialising in case they pass on COVID in a way that they don't about, say, driving a car in case they pollute (or kill a pedestrian).
posted by pw201 at 9:02 AM on September 23 [6 favorites]
Yep. The NHS flu vaccine eligibility list is longer than the equivalent list for the NHS Covid vaccine, but it still excludes an awful lot of the population, and I've never been aware of a push to get the rest of us to consider a private flu jab.
Not only that, but compare the language on the two:
"You can get the free NHS flu vaccine if you:"
vs
"You may be offered a COVID-19 vaccine if you:"
If you're eligible for the flu vaccine, you will be offered it, the only "may" language is about timing and where it will be offered. The covid one, well if you meet all the criteria, maybe you might be offered it. Perhaps.
posted by Dysk at 9:06 AM on September 23 [3 favorites]
Not only that, but compare the language on the two:
"You can get the free NHS flu vaccine if you:"
vs
"You may be offered a COVID-19 vaccine if you:"
If you're eligible for the flu vaccine, you will be offered it, the only "may" language is about timing and where it will be offered. The covid one, well if you meet all the criteria, maybe you might be offered it. Perhaps.
posted by Dysk at 9:06 AM on September 23 [3 favorites]
It seems like governments did their best to induce a germ-phobia as a public health measure and for some it stuck even when the risk was vastly reduced.
It me. My brain is VERY good at picking up new phobias, and VERY bad at putting them down again. In consequence, my life is ever so much smaller than it used to be, and I really don't know what to do about it.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 9:44 AM on September 23 [1 favorite]
It me. My brain is VERY good at picking up new phobias, and VERY bad at putting them down again. In consequence, my life is ever so much smaller than it used to be, and I really don't know what to do about it.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 9:44 AM on September 23 [1 favorite]
It’s comes back to early, bad public health communication with Covid about whether we were quarantining to slow the spread while a vaccine was developed or to end the pandemic completely. Too many people heard that a few weeks of lockdown would end Covid (when what was said was that the goal was just to reduce infections until vaccination and while hospital capacity was overtaxed) and now we’re here….
as a friend put it a couple years back (just past peak covid) -- the world community is in the midst of a stress test and we're failing, way worse in some nations and regions than others, but overall, given any infectious disease's disregard for political boundaries, yeah, we've blown it. Way too many dead or very sick that shouldn't be.
And his key point: it's not a failure of science, certainly not medical science. But it is a whopping failure of communication. Way too many people don't trust their governments, their elected officials, their official bureaucracies, blah-blah-blah.
Which I suppose feeds my main takeaway. Something along the lines of Celine's Second Law.
"Accurate communication is possible only in a non-punishing situation."[2]
aka: "communication occurs only between equals".
We have way too much inequality on this planet.
posted by philip-random at 10:02 AM on September 23 [8 favorites]
as a friend put it a couple years back (just past peak covid) -- the world community is in the midst of a stress test and we're failing, way worse in some nations and regions than others, but overall, given any infectious disease's disregard for political boundaries, yeah, we've blown it. Way too many dead or very sick that shouldn't be.
And his key point: it's not a failure of science, certainly not medical science. But it is a whopping failure of communication. Way too many people don't trust their governments, their elected officials, their official bureaucracies, blah-blah-blah.
Which I suppose feeds my main takeaway. Something along the lines of Celine's Second Law.
"Accurate communication is possible only in a non-punishing situation."[2]
aka: "communication occurs only between equals".
We have way too much inequality on this planet.
posted by philip-random at 10:02 AM on September 23 [8 favorites]
In the US at least, Covid is still deadlier than the flu and although there is a risk of long term complications from influenza, the risk of Long Covid is much greater.
I teach college. Covid is still knocking young healthy college students out of class for at least a week and sometimes longer. And us aged faculty are doing worse.
posted by hydropsyche at 10:25 AM on September 23 [13 favorites]
I teach college. Covid is still knocking young healthy college students out of class for at least a week and sometimes longer. And us aged faculty are doing worse.
posted by hydropsyche at 10:25 AM on September 23 [13 favorites]
Yeah, still deadlier and causing more hospitalizations than the flu or RSV by quite a margin.
Working in the hospital a few months ago, my coworkers were sick constantly, sometimes for a week or more at a time. and often coming back with lingering symptoms. I distinctly remember a nurse saying “every time I have a long weekend I get sick for like a week!” and the tech next to her looking at me, one of two people on our unit still masking, and commenting: “And people wonder why you still wear that.”
posted by brook horse at 10:39 AM on September 23 [17 favorites]
Working in the hospital a few months ago, my coworkers were sick constantly, sometimes for a week or more at a time. and often coming back with lingering symptoms. I distinctly remember a nurse saying “every time I have a long weekend I get sick for like a week!” and the tech next to her looking at me, one of two people on our unit still masking, and commenting: “And people wonder why you still wear that.”
posted by brook horse at 10:39 AM on September 23 [17 favorites]
told me she was only there for the flu shot and she doesn’t bother with Covid vaccines because “I just think that if I get the shot I shouldn’t get the disease”
Did you give her the bad news about the flu vaccine?
posted by Justinian at 1:25 PM on September 23 [7 favorites]
Did you give her the bad news about the flu vaccine?
posted by Justinian at 1:25 PM on September 23 [7 favorites]
Working in the hospital a few months ago, my coworkers were sick constantly, sometimes for a week or more at a time. and often coming back with lingering symptoms.
Current healthcare admin. This absolutely computes!
I am sorry but I know people are over Covid and living in denial because you cannot be that thick to post to your local subreddit the same question over and over once or twice a month: "Hey, is there a cold going around?" or "Be careful - there's a cold going around" without having some self-awareness, right?
For all the accessibility Canadians have to the flu and Covid vaccine, we too are hamstrung by the lack of rapid tests. It's near impossible to find them now. I wish I had a few in stock because I too make dumb mistakes and would like to make sure I don't infect anyone, but alas.
posted by Kitteh at 2:09 PM on September 23 [9 favorites]
Current healthcare admin. This absolutely computes!
I am sorry but I know people are over Covid and living in denial because you cannot be that thick to post to your local subreddit the same question over and over once or twice a month: "Hey, is there a cold going around?" or "Be careful - there's a cold going around" without having some self-awareness, right?
For all the accessibility Canadians have to the flu and Covid vaccine, we too are hamstrung by the lack of rapid tests. It's near impossible to find them now. I wish I had a few in stock because I too make dumb mistakes and would like to make sure I don't infect anyone, but alas.
posted by Kitteh at 2:09 PM on September 23 [9 favorites]
OH - I forgot to add: if you are someone who thinks you might have the 'rona and ask if anyone has rapid tests, prepare for a barrage of people telling you that Covid is overblown/no one cares anymore/stop scaring people.
So, really, damned if you do, damned if you don't.
posted by Kitteh at 2:59 PM on September 23 [5 favorites]
So, really, damned if you do, damned if you don't.
posted by Kitteh at 2:59 PM on September 23 [5 favorites]
Kitteh, don't know if this is in budget for your family but we use a PlusLife machine in our house for all visitors. (Again, for the "it's over " crowd in here, I am permanently immunocompromised and need to avoid COVID, sorry if this bothers you.)
It is a bit expensive for the machine but it's so much more reliable than at over the counter rapid tests. Happy to provide peer reviewed articles about it if anyone's interested. We've caught two positives on friends (one asymptomatic and the other borrowed it because she had symptoms and known exposure but was negative on two rapids) and that alone was well worth it for us.
Technology like this should be readily available to anyone who wants access to it, and it is an absolute travesty that we have to do this kind of test at home. You used to be able to just get it at Walgreens. Most people can't afford to own the machine, which is awful, because all people deserve access to easy, reliable, and affordable tests.
posted by twelve cent archie at 3:20 PM on September 23 [15 favorites]
It is a bit expensive for the machine but it's so much more reliable than at over the counter rapid tests. Happy to provide peer reviewed articles about it if anyone's interested. We've caught two positives on friends (one asymptomatic and the other borrowed it because she had symptoms and known exposure but was negative on two rapids) and that alone was well worth it for us.
Technology like this should be readily available to anyone who wants access to it, and it is an absolute travesty that we have to do this kind of test at home. You used to be able to just get it at Walgreens. Most people can't afford to own the machine, which is awful, because all people deserve access to easy, reliable, and affordable tests.
posted by twelve cent archie at 3:20 PM on September 23 [15 favorites]
There is no “it’s over” crowd in here, yeesh.
posted by warriorqueen at 3:50 PM on September 23 [5 favorites]
posted by warriorqueen at 3:50 PM on September 23 [5 favorites]
Then again, are there any other vaccines that we use routinely that don't prevent developing the disease in question to a great extent?
Flu shot is far from perfect many years. I think COVID vaccines have the problem that the virus is still evolving even faster than influenza, though?
posted by atoxyl at 6:49 PM on September 23
Flu shot is far from perfect many years. I think COVID vaccines have the problem that the virus is still evolving even faster than influenza, though?
posted by atoxyl at 6:49 PM on September 23
the virus is still evolving even faster than influenza
It will become crab-shaped any day now!
posted by aubilenon at 7:19 PM on September 23 [2 favorites]
It will become crab-shaped any day now!
posted by aubilenon at 7:19 PM on September 23 [2 favorites]
A few people asked for citations on infection frequency above.
The Pandemic Mitigation Collaborative estimates that in the US the average number of infections per person for all time is 3.42. Given that most infections were post Omicron, that's 1 or more infections per year.
You can also do a rough estimation of total infections yourself based on excess death numbers and infection fatality rate estimates. The upshot is that the only way to claim most folks aren't getting covid at least once a year is to believe covid has a higher death rate than it actually does.
A lot of infections are asymptomatic or so mild folks don't notice them and some people get way more infections than others (like people who spend a lot of time around other people indoors and healthcare workers). But if you're living your pre-covid life, you are getting infected once a year and probably more often.
If you want to take precautions for the sake of yourself and others but don't want to live on high alert on the time, you can keep an eye on the numbers on a site like pmc19 in the US or the covid hazard index in Canada to decide whether to mask or not. We do have experts who can do great modelling and stats with the data we do have to make good inferences about covid infections. Just because RATs have high false negative rates and are hard to get ahold of where you live doesn't mean we're flying totally blind here.
posted by congen at 10:42 AM on September 24 [12 favorites]
The Pandemic Mitigation Collaborative estimates that in the US the average number of infections per person for all time is 3.42. Given that most infections were post Omicron, that's 1 or more infections per year.
You can also do a rough estimation of total infections yourself based on excess death numbers and infection fatality rate estimates. The upshot is that the only way to claim most folks aren't getting covid at least once a year is to believe covid has a higher death rate than it actually does.
A lot of infections are asymptomatic or so mild folks don't notice them and some people get way more infections than others (like people who spend a lot of time around other people indoors and healthcare workers). But if you're living your pre-covid life, you are getting infected once a year and probably more often.
If you want to take precautions for the sake of yourself and others but don't want to live on high alert on the time, you can keep an eye on the numbers on a site like pmc19 in the US or the covid hazard index in Canada to decide whether to mask or not. We do have experts who can do great modelling and stats with the data we do have to make good inferences about covid infections. Just because RATs have high false negative rates and are hard to get ahold of where you live doesn't mean we're flying totally blind here.
posted by congen at 10:42 AM on September 24 [12 favorites]
in the US the average number of infections per person for all time is 3.42
Just awful 😢
posted by ellieBOA at 3:23 PM on September 24 [4 favorites]
Just awful 😢
posted by ellieBOA at 3:23 PM on September 24 [4 favorites]
Twelve cent archie, thanks for bringing the Plus Life back into my attention span -- I think I'm gonna order one and have poker nights again. That would be so sweet.
posted by Dashy at 10:04 AM on September 25 [2 favorites]
posted by Dashy at 10:04 AM on September 25 [2 favorites]
Flu shot is far from perfect many years.
AFAIK it's considered a good year if the flu shot is 50% effective. In a bad year it's, ah, even lower.
The idea is that it reduces severity to a greater degree than it reduces infection but as with the covid vaccine that's a harder sell than "get the shot so you don't get sick".
posted by Justinian at 3:23 PM on September 25 [2 favorites]
AFAIK it's considered a good year if the flu shot is 50% effective. In a bad year it's, ah, even lower.
The idea is that it reduces severity to a greater degree than it reduces infection but as with the covid vaccine that's a harder sell than "get the shot so you don't get sick".
posted by Justinian at 3:23 PM on September 25 [2 favorites]
Wanted to mention that the free covid test delivery in the U.S. via USPS has begun again - you can get 4 free tests shipped to you.
link
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:43 AM on September 26 [3 favorites]
link
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:43 AM on September 26 [3 favorites]
Thanks to all who are providing information sources. I was aware of long-term covid but had not heard/thought about transmitted genetic/epigentic issues affecting our next generation. So, we have a health system stretched thin and not going to get any better, a continually evolving virus, and a new generation born with a decreased ability to fight off disease being born into a society that doesn't care about attempting a current herd immunity. This cannot end well.
posted by BlueHorse at 10:57 AM on September 26 [3 favorites]
posted by BlueHorse at 10:57 AM on September 26 [3 favorites]
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