....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.
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Date: 2024-08-25 11:31 pm (UTC)Thanks for sharing this. You're right, it's eerie and terrifying.
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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.
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Date: 2024-08-25 11:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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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.
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Date: 2024-08-26 03:02 am (UTC)"during COVID" (past tense)
as if COVID had stopped happening
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Date: 2024-08-26 09:18 am (UTC)(no subject)
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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.
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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!
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From:(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.
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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.)
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