Covid Affects Children! Who Knew??

 It's big news suddenly that Covid causes longterm damage to blood vessels in kids. 

This was known back in December 2020. Nothing has been suddenly revealed. I've been saying that Covid leave microclots in the bloodstream that can travel anywhere in the body. I haven't just said it on this little blog, but in letters to elected officials of all description. I've been yelling, "We have to protect children from getting Covid!" for years, with all the evidence from top peer-reviewed journals linked to each claim, and I've been consistently met with eye-rolling and looks of either contempt or pity. I've been telling my university professors, and they just chant like robots, "We can't tell people to wear masks." Sure, but you can ask, and you can definitely wear one yourself to show you understand the science. 

Lots of Covid cautious types are celebrating that last week's 60-Minutes spent a few minutes on cleaning indoor air. And tonight's episode is supposed to have more on it. But their tweet about it says, 

"Indoor air has been completely forgotten when we talk about public health, according to Harvard professor Joe Allen. 'The pandemic showed what a glaring mistake that was.'"

It wasn't forgotten. WEF organizers and participants at Davos didn't forget. People working on movie sets didn't forget. So many delegates to so many school boards didn't forget. 

It has been, and continues to be willfully ignored, discounted or avoided with lengthy, slow-moving "trials" to test the air before actually doing anything to clean it. 

Pardon me for not celebrating this as a victory. It just makes me angry. So many of us have been saying these things for so long, yet people are absolutely shocked by the news. It means that, not just the elected officials who are either incompetent or somehow benefitting from our demise, but our friends and family, and so many people who claim to care about us, haven't had the decency to at least listen to what we've been saying, to click on that link to the study, and to think a minute about the risks they're taking for themselves and everyone they're near for more than a few seconds. It takes a British tabloid and a TV show to get them to actually hear this. 

I mean, whatever works, right? But where the hell was 60 Minutes in four years ago when this really was news that needed to be presented and explained clearly enough for people everywhere to act on??

And, despite people sharing these two nuggets of information, I still don't think much will changes. We'll just grieve the error, and all the children who were put in harm's way, while we keep on making it.

I spent yesterday filling in forms to try to get an accommodation as a last-ditched attempt to avoid being  kicked out of grad school because I refuse to sit in a packed room with zero useful mitigations in place, and my prof said I could only miss one more class despite them being recorded. There's no way to be accommodated if you just want to avoid getting a disabling and deadly disease. That's not an option. I had to say I have anxiety about the disabling and deadly disease. I had to check the "mental illness" box in order to possibly be permitted to avoid getting Covid. I was straight with my advisor - that it's not anxiety to want to avoid something that's actually dangerous - but that's where we're at. Still. 

Hopefully tonight's 60 Minutes will actually have an effect. But I won't hold my breath.