How Covid Became Yet Another Doom Loop We’re Trapped In
Dec 29
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It’s that time of year again. Christmas? The holiday season? No, the time of year when we’re all supposed to pretend…Covid’s over. Smile!! Hey, take a selfie while you’re at it!! We won!! Or did we? Me? I’m tired of pretending that Covid’s over, and you should be, too.
Pretending, after all, is what we’re supposed to do.It’s become a norm to have to think, say, express the idea that Covid’s over, and heaven forbid you say that it isn’t. People will literally lash out at you — perfect strangers, maybe just overhearing you, online, wherever. And that norm exists because our official public health policy pretends that Covid is over, in most parts of the world, at this point, with the exception of China, which we’ll come back to.
This fatal transmission isn’t of a pandemic, but of negligent policy becoming a foolish set of social norms.Because as anyone can see, well, cases arerising yet again, andhospitals are being swamped, and the whole nine yards.
It’s at this juncture that people tend to lecture me. You know the “arguments” they make by now, and I put that in quotes because, well, I’m about to debunk them, all of them. Covid’s just the flu! It…it became a common cold!! So what, it doesn’t even matter anymore! You’re not going todie, are you? LOL. Get a grip, you fainting Victorian bride. Youwoman.
The subtext of all this is eminently clear: the strong survive, and the weak…well, they perish. This isn’t reason, it’s just selfishness, restated.Worse, these “arguments” come masked in the guise of “science,” when in fact science says none of the above. These self-supposed scientists would do better to actually read the science, because what it really has to say? Isdire.
And yet — astonshingly — it barely makes headlines, because, like I said, the norm is to pretend that Covid’s over, so every winter, we have to endure this bizarregroundhog day of Covidiocy.
Whatdoesit say? Let’s catch up on a little bit of the latest science. This comesfrom a study done at the University of Washington Medical School, whose “researchers analyzed about 5.8 million de-identified medical records in a database maintained by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the nation’s largest integrated health-care system. Patients represented multiple ages, races and sexes.”
What did it find? If you don’t know this, you should, and you should ask yourself why you don’t.
The researchers found that people with COVID-19 reinfections weretwice as likely to die and three times more likely to be hospitalized than those with no reinfection.Additionally,people with repeat infections were 3½ times more likely to develop lung problems, three times more likely to suffer heart conditions and 1.6 times more likely to experience brain conditions than patients who had been infected with the virus once.
That’s not just “a” study. These findings have already supported by others. Like this one. Here’s asnippet from a new studythat examined Covid patients on autopsy. What does it find?
Others have previously reported SARS-CoV-2 RNA within the heart, lymph node, small intestine and adrenal gland. We replicate these findings and conclusively demonstrate that SARS-CoV-2 is capable of infecting and replicating within these and many other tissues, including brain…. [these] prove definitively that SARS-CoV-2 is capable of infecting and replicating within the human brain.
Now, this should come as no surprise to those who actuallyread the science. We’ve known for quite some time that Covid isn’t just the flu or a cold. It goes on to infect organs of all kinds, including the brain. And we’re still understanding what kind of damage, it does, exactly, there. But what we do know is that the damage isvery real. Every time you get infected with Covid, you are incurring what’s known to us economists as conditional risk: having had it another time, your risk of all kinds of things, from lung problems to heart conditions to outright death…goes right on increasing.
And every winter, we’re getting it. Over and over again. We can pretend that we’re not, sure. But the fact is that many of us are.There’s a funny tweet from some lady that says something like, “Why, I’ve had a hacking cough for six weeks, and I feel terrible, I wonder what it could be?” LOL. Yeah, no, totally,I wonder. Here you see the norm in action — we’re supposed to pretend it’s Novid — Not Covid. Meanwhile, we’re all getting Novid over and over again.
Dr Al-Aly, who led the study at the University of Washington, puts it very well:
During the past few months, there’s been an air of invincibility among people who have had COVID-19 or their vaccinations and boosters, and especially among people who have had an infection and also received vaccines; some people started to referring to these individuals as having a sort of superimmunity to the virus. Without ambiguity, our research showed that getting an infection a second, third or fourth time contributes to additional health risks in the acute phase, meaning the first 30 days after infection, and in the months beyond, meaning the long COVID phase.
He’s observing the norm in action too — we’re supposed to pretend it’s all over, and meanwhile, science says that it’s not, by a long, long way. The more that we get infected, the more damage we’re doing, on an unknown scale, to ourselves, to our vital organs, and that could very well end up beinganotherpublic health crisis to make this one look veritably tame. We’re playing with fire.
At this juncture, the exasperated readers on the side of “freedom” will exclaim, “So what do you want us to do about it!! You want everyone to be…to be…China!! Why, you’re afascist!” Not so fast, there, Elon. I didn’t say anything of the kind. What should we do about it all?
Well, let’s begin by understanding that Covid’s become a fiasco — a public health failure of historic proportions — around the globe.There are a handful of countries that’ve handled it well, in Asia, but elsewhere, more or less, uniformly, it’s become a disasteron topof a catastrophe. What do I mean?
More than a million Americanshave died of Covid, and there’s going to be more than a 9/11’s worth of them in the next few days yet again. Public health failure. In China, meanwhile, well, do I really have to point out how its zero-tolerance approachled to disaster, too? And then there’s a nation like Britain, which just…threw in the towel…to the point that it stopped collecting data, so I guess we’ll never really know, which prevents accountability. Meanwhile, in Sweden, something like 10% of the population isdeveloping Long Covid— good luck having a healthcare system like that in the near future. Meanwhile, overall, something like10–20%of people who’ve had Covid get Long Covid.
The global picture? Covid’s become a public healthfiasco.The pandemic was a disaster, but then…we botched it. Public health policies of all kinds emerged, and outside a handful of countries who did things sensibly and well,noneof them were really adequate. China went overboard, America didn’t do enough, Britain gave up, Sweden, LOL, didn’t even bother to fight, Europe acted a little more wisely, but still faces waves, and so forth.Nobodymuch got Covid right, except nations we still hear too little about.
So now, as so often happens when problems aren’t addressed properly, they multiply — and now we have two problems: an ongoing pandemic, and a failed set of public health policies. That’s a real challenge, of course, because undoing failed policies is difficult, since they come with bureaucracy and inertia of their own.
So what do we do about all this? Well,it’s not exactly rocket science. We do the following. Vaccinate the world, which is stilllargelyunvaccinated. Then boost it, too. Then we put in place common sense policies which nations which have handled Covid well demonstratework.Masks, especially in public spaces, like transit, or shops, or where have you. Sanitization. Air filtration and flow and purification. Ventilation. Stay home if you’re sick. Encourage meeting outdoors.
It’s just common sense at this point. None of the above is remotely draconian. It’s not really interfering with anyone’s freedom, or their life. If you’re going to be the kind of person who tells me: “But I have to wear a mask if I socialize!! My life is ruined!! I can’t see anyone’s face!!” — LOL, are you kidding? Have you ever been in a strobe-lit nightclub at 2AM? You can’t see anyone’s face there, either, and everybody’s having the time of their lives. So let’s get real. None of the above is remotely unworkable, and none of it should be in the slightest politically controversial.
And yet it alreadyis.Just the other day, the New Yorker ran thisbizarrearticle about how…people who say the CDC should recommend masking again…are Marxist leftists. Wait…what? That’sshockingly bad journalism. You know what Marxists actually say? There shouldn’t be any private property and everything should be decided by workers’ councils, which should replace democracy. Hello, does that sound like, “maybe wear a mask in public spaces” to you? I’m suddenly Vladimir Lenin, calling for the overthrow of the decadent West…because I…wear a mask? I’m now a walking Communist Manifesto because I think thatscience exists? Are you kidding me? It’s astonishing the New Yorker would publish this dreck — because it’s a prime example of the politicization of science. And nobody should be doing that anymore, because that’s why and how our public health policies failed.
The New Yorker article attracted itsfair share of opprobrium and scornonline, and rightly so.Nobodyshould be politicizing science. Because we all need public health policies that work, especially now. After all, we’re all going to be paying the price of Covid’s damage in years to come, from what we already know, according to the science. Just pretending that we can ignore it is foolish — we’re all going to be in high risk groups one day, whether as elderly, sick, immunocompromised, or just because we’ve all had it ten times, a decade from now, and who knows what level of organ damage it will’ve caused by then.
Just as science tells us that Covid is not “over,” because, no, it’s not the flu or a cold, so, too it tells us what todo about it. All the common sense measures that countries which have handled Covid well are justbasic precautions.Against the spread of any airborne pandemic, really. Masks, ventilation, filters, sanitization, meeting outdoors, and so forth. That’s stuff that goes back to theVictorians. They built the first public parks precisely to give the working and middle class clean air — did you know that? And yet here we are all over again, history repeating itself in this weird way, where clean air itself is becoming a luxury, because our public health policies have failed catastrophically.
It’s worth discussing, for a moment, just why they failed, in case it’s not already clear, so let me make it crystal. The science waspoliticized. Public health officials basically absolved themselves of responsibility in many places, and caved to politicians, who were eager to do the most convenient and expedient thing. In America, that was barely having working lockdowns, and lifting masking guidance. In China, on the other hand, it was zero-tolerance, to keep the economy humming along. In places like Britain and Sweden, that was a kind of pandering to the odd social norms those societies have of thinking they can just ride above the storm, walk on water.
We need to inject some basic common sense back into how we deal with the pandemic. It’s still a pandemic. Only now, it’s at a different stage.Luckily, we’re not at the same level of immediate risk we were in the early years, thanks to vaccines and boosters. But Covid’s risk profile is still pretty severe. Want to get it five times? Ten? Over a decade? And find out the hard way what it really does to your lungs, heart, brain? Sure, there’s a “chance” that it might not dothatmuch damage. Asmallchance. That’s what “risk” is. We are going to have to stop pretending that the risk of this pandemic has magically disappeared. It emphatically hasn’t.
Meanwhile, we are also going to have do better when it comes to being citizens of democracies, aka, decent human beings. It’s not fair of us to offload that risk onto the shoulders of those who can bear it least.Hey, so what if it’s mostly old and already sick people dying of Covid! LOL, I don’t care! Sorry, that’s not up to the standard of being a citizen of a democracy.At all. You must enact the democratic values of peace, equality, liberty, justice, andnoneof those are met by simply shrugging at saying “those guys are dying, not me, ha-ha, what do I care?”
This is where science and public policy turn into basic civic responsibility, and if it’s OK with you to neglect yours, then it’s only fair that you should be called out on it, because in democracies, we don’t make others carry our burdens, we try to spread them equally, so that everyone has a fair chance at this thing called life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness.All of us are going to be in those high-risk groups one day, or our parents, spouses, kids, might be, because Covid’s not exactly going anywhere — and the shoe will be on the other foot then.
I’m tired of it, and you should be too. The seasonal refrain. I used to get sick, like you did, of the usual offenders when it comes to Christmas Songs. God love that Mariah Carey song, and it’s a great song, but by the ten millionth time, my teeth begin to chatter a little. These days, though, it’s not the same old Christmas songs played too often I’m weary of. It’s the other refrain — Covid’s over!! Party time!! Could we just act a little bit…mature? Responsible? Decent? Sensible?
Nobody’s asking anyone to stop living their lives. Just to use a little bit of common sense, and act like a grown up.I know that’s hard for some people, who are used to putting themselves and their selfish wishes and desires first. It’s hard for me, at times, too. But you know what I’ve learned over the years? You’ve got to at leasttry. Otherwise, in the end, if we all act like selfish, spoiled children — waah!!! —everyone’s worse off. There are no grown-ups in the Covid room, folks. I guess that leaves you and me.
UmairDecember 2022
