....but I'm not the only one
Aug. 25th, 2024 11:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cosmolinguistI saw a conversation between two other people on fedi about covid denial.
We used to talk about "covid denial" as an antivaxxer thing, but almost everyone does it now. People "just have a cold." They're sick a lot this summer. They pretend it's not abnormal to be sick this much. And to never really get better --people shrug off long-covid symptoms like brain fog and fatigue with excuses like "I'm feeling my age lately."
Reading someone saying
what i really notice is the method of denial is that it is ILLEGAL NOT ALLOWED FORBIDDEN to talk about covid at all in any way at any gathering. among liberal types, not a single person will acknowledge how one of us (me) is conspicuously wearing a 3m fully sealing N95 mask just to attend the event
we DO NOT talk about long covid, the wave of new conditions, the community members falling ill and off the radar. i am honestly amazed even after all this time
reminded me of something that happened at work the other day which I wanted to blog about and never got around to.
I was talking to my manager about a particular report about travel habits in the UK which might be useful for my work but since the data was collected either during or just after the last lockdown, it's not a useful baseline of public transport activity.
When I mentioned this, my manager agreed with me and said something like "You're the only one who remembers covid." Not in an accusing way or anything, just making an ob. Clearly based on the fact that I'm still masking and I've never seen any of my colleagues wear a mask at in-person gatherings. Almost a year ago already, I had a terrible time trying to find out what ventilation etc. would be like for a mandatory gathering of 150+ people in one room.
You're the only one who remembers covid.
I made a joke (about how it was like that movie where only one guy remembered the Beatles) but it was to cover my discomfort at this sentence. It didn't feel funny to me at all. It felt eerie. Still does.
Anyway I know I'm not the only one who remembers covid. If you remember too, you're not alone either. It's hard but we're not wrong.
(no subject)
Date: 2024-08-25 11:31 pm (UTC)Thanks for sharing this. You're right, it's eerie and terrifying.
(no subject)
Date: 2024-08-26 01:23 pm (UTC)Thanks for reading.
(no subject)
Date: 2024-08-25 11:42 pm (UTC)Six years ago, that seemed odd; four years ago, I was deliberately posting almost every day just so I would have a record of what those first months of the covid pandemic had been like.
(no subject)
Date: 2024-08-26 01:22 pm (UTC)Yeah I think a lot about how the 1918 flu pandemic is similar and also different to this.
(no subject)
Date: 2024-08-25 11:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2024-08-26 01:22 pm (UTC)I'm glad you're not alone.
(no subject)
Date: 2024-08-26 01:12 am (UTC)I always wear a mask when I go out. But I rarely go anywhere because of chronic autoimmune illness.
I feel grief. And bitterness.
(no subject)
Date: 2024-08-26 01:21 pm (UTC)I feel grief. And bitterness.
Yes. I wish there was a better place for these feelings to go, but we can share and witness them together.
(no subject)
Date: 2024-08-26 03:02 am (UTC)"during COVID" (past tense)
as if COVID had stopped happening
(no subject)
Date: 2024-08-26 01:21 pm (UTC)I hate that too. I'm very careful to say "during lockdown" or "during mask mandates" or whatever if that's what I mean, I never say covid is in the past tense.
(no subject)
Date: 2024-08-26 09:18 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2024-08-26 01:20 pm (UTC)Yeah. If it had been hostile I'd have just been able to be angry about it, but as a plain observation it was kinda chilling.
(no subject)
Date: 2024-08-26 09:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2024-09-01 08:09 pm (UTC)Yeah I think someone said it feels very Twilight Zone and that feels about right to me. Like, it's so contrived it feels like it's an allegory about something, or whatever. :) Too deeply metaphorical to just be a real thing happening.
(no subject)
Date: 2024-08-26 01:06 pm (UTC)Also, the pandemic has been going on for nearly five years now. It is actually true that people over 40 are often less fit than they were five years ago. A proportion of the population have acquired new chronic illnesses in a five year period, and some of those will just be immunological or genetic bad luck, or caused by other infections than Covid.
You're definitely right to continue masking and avoiding poorly ventilated places, and to consider the effect of the ongoing pandemic on any statistics from 2019 onwards. But it's also not true that in 2019 everybody was perfectly healthy all the time, or that Covid is the cause of all possible bad things now.
(no subject)
Date: 2024-08-26 01:19 pm (UTC)I don't think, didn't say and didn't imply that everybody was perfectly healthy until 2019 or that covid is the cause of all possible bad things. I live with a person who was chronically ill long before 2019. I have brain fog and fatigue myself from my anxiety and other mental health disorders...which apart from anything else I also had long before 2019.
(no subject)
Date: 2024-08-26 07:28 pm (UTC)The ventilation thing is incredibly frustrating, but I'm not sure how much it's denial and how much it's that the message that ventilation is key never got any traction. Even people who take Covid seriously went down the road of, everybody must wear a professionally fit-tested respirator at all times otherwise they're evil, whereas people who don't want to do that think the alternative is 'just stay home then'.
(no subject)
Date: 2024-09-01 08:17 pm (UTC)if you don't treat everybody who has a cold as deliberately undermining reality.
I don't. I mean, I sure hope no one feels I'm treating them as deliberately undermining reality because I don't think that. But I also don't say anything (beyond "that's too bad" / "feel better soon" etc.) to them.
What unsettles me isn't "deliberate denial of reality" (though there is some of that, in my own parents for one), but the way that "I am getting over a heavy cold" or whatever in work meetings is met with nothing at all, whereas even last year the cold-haver would say "It's not covid!!!" but now people don't test (which yes is for complex reasons including logistical and financial availability of tests, I continue to place most blame at systems and not individuals for the mishandling of the pandemic), no one bothers to refute that it's covid, no one asks about it, no one even seems surprised that people are sick this summer, no one connects to it the frequent juxtaposition of getting this cold after they've been to a festival or been on holiday or whatever.
Last summer people talked about this (in my experience) and this summer (in my experience) they don't.
And it's that collective change that contributes to the denial of reality, not that I t think everyone is lying about their colds because it's always covid (indeed, people are getting more colds because our immune systems have been compromised by covid infections).
(no subject)
Date: 2024-08-26 04:33 pm (UTC)Also, I wanted to thank you for talking about the Aranet 4, which my partner and I subsequently got and use to get an idea of air circulation!
(no subject)
Date: 2024-09-01 08:18 pm (UTC)Oh I'm so glad the Aranet 4 is working out for you! We rely on ours so much.
(no subject)
Date: 2024-08-26 05:36 pm (UTC)On day three of the trip, I felt a slight sore throat and with trepidation told him so. I was about to be all "do you want me to mask while we sleep" and "do you want me to get a separate hotel room" when he said, casually, "oh yeah, I've had that since France". (He went to France before we met up.) So, yeah... I got whatever that was from him, and I got way way sicker than he did from it, but through some peculiar alchemy of neurological self-forgiveness, by the end of our trip he was congratulating himself on his mighty immune system that somehow didn't get sick from my plague. And... WTF. I do not forget where that came from. But I also didn't blog that explicitly about it in my own journal, because I didn't want to publicly shame him for it or cause a huge fight. Dude has cancer and a short predicted future life span, and done is done. I'm not very eager to sign up for any more trips with him, though.
I am pretty sure that other people who got sick in the last year or two have experienced similar social awkwardness in knowing that if you blame your friends who got you sick, it's going to be a big friendship stressing deal, and so like myself, they privately grumble but are gracious in shared circles.
(no subject)
Date: 2024-09-01 08:21 pm (UTC)This is such a good point, the social pressure is immense. I remember the (first?) time my aunt and uncle had it, my aunt insisted they just had sinus infections and the rest of the family was like "...you've just gone to your grandkids' birthday party where literally everyone else got covid" but she was so determined.
And yeah I didn't blog about where we got covid either, because it was someone I was in a relationship with at the time, and again he's got his own stuff going on, and the mismatch in covid-related behavior change wasn't the only reason I had to break up with him but it would have been a sufficient one because I just never felt good spending time with him after I realized he'd brought this into our home and left at least one of us with effects from it that aren't ever expected to go away.
(no subject)
Date: 2024-08-28 01:54 pm (UTC)I can say the latter with confidence, too, as I'm recovering from suspected bacterial pneumonia (long story), and the main question I got was whether I'd tested or if I needed tests, and at the doctor's office, they offered to run a PCR for me. (Symptoms are textbook pneumonia and don't match what my COVID experience has been like historically, and I've tested negative multiple times via rapid tests, so I said no, but was glad to see it's still their first thought.)
(no subject)
Date: 2024-09-01 08:22 pm (UTC)I'm really glad things can be different, and that you're experiencing that. <3