The Boiling Frogs Timeline

Globally, Covid cases rose by over 50% in the past month! 

This article that reported the stats, mistakenly says the WHO "officially declared the end of the coronavirus pandemic worldwide in May 2023." Here's what the WHO actually said last May: 

"I declare Covid-19 over as a global health emergency. That does NOT mean Covid-19 is over as a global health threat. Last week, Covid-19 claimed a life every three minutes, and that's just the deaths we know about." 

It was no longer emergent, but they were very clear that it's by no means over. At this point, over 7 million people have died of it. These organizations and the media have a lot of responsibility for how horribly things have gone, but we have to acknowledge when we misread their actual words. 

Sometimes they make accurate claims but just look at it in the most positive light, like 7 million deaths is less than a tenth of the number of deaths from WW2! Things could be worse! 

But we are creating an untenable number of people disabled by allowing Long Covid to flourish, perpetuated by disingenuous or outright dishonest media. One honest article reported, 

"Some experts and advocates are worried treatment options for the virus remain disappointingly inadequate. . . . Many Canadians suffering from long-term Covid-19 are left without many options. . . . We now know that the quality-of-life impact on people is similar or worse than those with stage four cancer. . . . There is no cure, and there's no real treatment. It's more a supportive treatment. . . . When we talk about real treatments - like really treating the underlying cause of Long Covid - you're going to be disappointed. . . . You have like 100 or 200 symptoms of Long Covid. And I think there's some under-reporting of Long Covid because some people may not think that these fatigue or other symptoms that they have are related to the infection that they had maybe a year back or so. . . . We are only beginning to see the lasting effects of the pandemic. . . . Awareness is very essential. Public health messaging is very important."

They advise more Long Covid clinics, like the rehab center in Toronto, because family doctors don't have the training for this, and a team is necessary to have the knowledge of the many systems affected. 

It's all pretty terrifying, and the lack of fear towards very real dangers that we're seeing everywhere is a maladaptive response. We will be destroyed if we continue to pretend it's not a bloody nightmare out there. 

But about that public health messaging...

Julia Doubleday assembled an excellent piece on the manufactured consent around Covid earlier this week, noting that Biden said we could get back to normal once daily infections are in the 3,000s, yet the U.S. is living with almost a million daily infections. It's way more deadly than the flu, but arguably worse than that is the number who survive as a shell of their former selves. It destroys the body and brain quietly. It's clear to me that many deaths we'll see in the next few years might not count as Covid deaths, but they will be. That's why excess death projections are so important. She writes,

"A new Canadian study found that Long Covid risk increases with each infection. . . . It's difficult for me to understand how anyone could see this data - which finds the rate of Long Covid after three infections to be a whopping 38% - and not understand why "let it rip" is an unsustainable approach to Covid. . . . It's not only a moral issue; yes, I believe it's wrong to forcibly infect everyone with a vascular disease with unknown long-term health effects over and over again. But it's also just practically unfeasible to operate a functional economy while rapidly disabling the workforce. . . . In 2021, we never would've accepted such a state of affairs. Let's review the never-ending media spin that won't stop spinning, that disorienting cascade of normalizing bullshit, or what I like to call: the Boiling Frogs timeline."

She starts in March 2021 when we thought vaccines would be the end of it all, when we were told they would be. It was more an overly optimistic error at that point, but their lack of certainty wasn't communicated as it should have been. This is the pivotal point in which "embracing the precautionary principle, i.e. acting as if the worst-case scenario were true - would've been critical." At the time, the claim that vaccines were sterilizing wasn't proven and then was later disproven. In the summer of 2021 they started calling an infection after vaccination a "breakthrough infection" and insisted they're rare, but it was very clear that vaccines didn't prevent infection, only severity of illness. 

We banked on vaccines, and it was hard to recover from the grief from acknowledging that vaccines wouldn't save the day. Some people got permanently stuck at this point and still vax and relax. A lot of people I know personally are really not worried about becoming permanently disabled. I believe they don't have a real sense of what that might be like for them. 

The narrative shifted to make us concerned only for high risk people: mainly the elderly and disabled  because children were somehow considered immune despite some deaths early on. The vulnerable were tossed under a bus so the rest of us could carry on. 

"Much of the public is still confused by what variants are, how they resist vaccines, why they develop, and why mitigations are critical to slow viral evolution. This fear of political consequences has led major health institutions and political actors around the world to correct their mistakes quietly, and the hushed nature of these corrections compounds the damage of the original mistake. . . . This is still no public understanding of what airborne means, why surgical masks are suboptimal, what airborne infection-control would look like in healthcare, or why 'social distancing' is outdated guidance. . . . We ran a droplet playbook on an airborne virus. The result - a failure of elimination - was inevitable."

Once Omicron peaked and it was clear that vaccinations weren't the way out, then we started hearing about mild Covid. The "proof" of mildness came from "a single study in South Africa," while many weekend Covid warriors tried to explain this vital math lesson: Omicron is less deadly but far more transmissible that Delta, but a smaller percentage of a much much larger number will be a larger number! It was clear to anyone with stats know-how that we would see more deaths from a more transmissible but less fatal variant.

And far more disabilities. Doubleday continues,

"Despite having the technical know-how to drastically reduce airborne virus spread in indoor spaces - ventilation, filtration, and new tools like Far UVC - we do nothing and sneer that action is impossible and naïve. This kneejerk violent reaction toward the mere suggestion of any preventative measures carries drastic implications for the future of public health generally, as does the now-mainstreamed anti-vaxxer claim that getting sick makes people healthy. (It doesn't). . . . You don't give a child cholera so that future cholera infections will be milder; you clean the water source. . . . It's hard to overstate just how much damage the normalization of Covid has done to the very concepts of public health and community."

I was recently reminded of regularly blowing a fuse from using a kettle in my classroom while the neighbouring teacher used a hotplate to fry up some bacon for his students! We were never told to stop using appliances from home. Ever. But you try to save some lives with one CR box, and the VPs rain down en masse to get it OUT OF THE BUILDING! So curious! That's when I started thinking that maybe some people in power want children infected. There's just no other way I can wrap my head around the intensity of anger around any mitigations being taken after mask mandates were dropped.

Doubleday's hopeful ending:

"Great progress is possible with great effort. . . . community care is most critical in times of state abandonment. . . . For those of us who are still here, education must start from a place of unpacking several years-worth of propaganda, while learning from disability justice activists who have reckoned with their social marginalization for decades. . . . The truth has the advantage of being obvious and patient. So we'll continue to repeat it, until the people are ready to hear it: Covid is not mild. Covid is not harmless. Covid is not inevitable. Covid is not over. Stay safe out there."

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BASICS REMINDER: Most Covid transmission is from people who look and feel completely healthy. Exhaling unmasked can send Covid across a room in minutes, where it hangs in the air for hours like cigarette smoke. Vaccines help reduce severity of cases, but can't eliminate transmission and wane in effectiveness within months because Covid mutates so fast (because of all the spread!). It takes seconds to inhale Covid where it gets into cells all over the body, able to hibernate and affect the brain, heart, and other organs. N95s trap Covid using inertial impaction, diffusion, interception, and electrostatic attraction. They really work!! Covid's the #3 killer in Canada, and we don't know how many people it has disabled. Avoid being one of them. There is no treatment, only prevention. Be wise with N95s!