Norms are for Breaking

Anonymous is urging me to move on away from precautions and towards prior norms of society in a string of comments on a previous post. I had too much to say to the most recent comment, so I moved it here.

from Catherine Flynn

Anon responded for a third time (or a third Anon -- who's to say) to this point from a week ago in which I borrowed the analogy that sharing air unprotected with someone likely carrying Covid is about as wise as having sex unprotected with someone likely carrying chlamydia:

"Analogies often fail with covid. This isn’t really like seatbelts or smoking which are additions to our base state in the world. If we’re going to play analogies, then perhaps this is like setting the right speed limit for cars. People die in crashes every year. We have speed limits to limit harms. What should these speed limits be? Some might want cars abolished. Some might want German autobahns. But here we’ve set certain norms based, ostensibly, on some sort of cost/benefit ratio. The pandemic was like a pile up on the 401. Everyone had to slow down and for a while we were all stuck. But now we're back to normal speeds. Some, though, are shell shocked. “I’m not driving again!” Some are now petitioning to lower the speed limits and to educate others to the dangers of driving. It’s all good. But life goes on and things go back to the norms that were.

I’ve been back in office with bad ventilation for a few years. In close quarters with lots of random people. I haven’t been sick since 2021. It’s no different than 2018. Masks are very rare. You see the odd one in the mall. To each their own.

But there is something very important about what is normal. You are very right that normal can change. Some of us, rightly or wrongly, are far more cautious with changing what is normal. Truly, there is little in life that cannot be done while masking, but thinking of Levinas, I cannot not lose sight of value of naked face-to-face interactions. The lifting of masks in early 2022 was a unique and profound joy." 

Here's my point-by-point response:

"The pandemic was like a pile up on the 401. Everyone had to slow down and for a while we were all stuck. But now we're back to normal speeds. Some, though, are shell shocked."  

This seems to imply that people who want to prevent harm to others or themselves, or share knowledge of the means of prevention, have PTSD; there's something wrong with us. Regardless, the alternative response, after one pile-up after another, is that people learn to implement safer urban design and put on winter tires. With Covid, schools and hospitals threw out all precautions; it's as if they removed speed limits and lanes, disabled airbags, and made seatbelts and drunk driving optional. The lanes on highways enable some choice around risk exposure, but there's nothing comparable in schools or hospitals where people at greatest risk of harm are potentially adversely affected by the higher-risk behaviours of those around them.

"But life goes on and things go back to the norms that were." 

People learn, and things change. After Ralph Nader published on the risks of traffic in the 60s, new US legislation around auto safety was created in the 70s, and fatalities decreased by over 90%. In Canada, Mothers Against Drunk Driving affected the laws in the 80s. If things always go back to prior norms after new knowledge is acquired then we'd still be living in caves.

"I haven’t been sick since 2021." 

You've been lucky! A friend recently decided to stop masking at the gym and was sicker than he'd ever been within a week. Or maybe you haven't been lucky and just aren't aware of a case or more, since about a third of Covid cases are asymptomatic (but that doesn't mean it's not doing internal damage). Typhoid Mary never had symptoms of the disease she spread, and it's possible you were still a link in someone else getting sick as almost 60% of Covid transmission is from asymptomatic cases. It's so stealthy!

On Levinas and this bit from their first comment:

"Ask not what society can do for the immunocompromised and instead ask how the immunocompromised are keeping themselves from burdening the wider public."

Levinas's face-to-face isn't hampered by a mask. It's the presence of the other that makes us react, not whether or not we can count their nose hairs. The presence of the other interrupts our free activities and provokes us to account for ourselves. But could it be the case that asking for others at greater risk of harm to just stay home to lessen their burden on perfectly healthy people, is possibly in order to avoid that awareness, potentially revealing an obliviousness to the other and that call towards responsibility?

On the "profound joy" of a naked face: Some get joy from riding a motorcycle without a helmet and others from chain smoking, but we still advise the public on the dangers of it, even if we enjoy it ourselves, and even while continuing to promote tobacco products. I get that you're ranking your own pleasure above preventing harm to others because you really don't think the harm is substantial enough to warrant mitigations. Tracking of Covid is hard to find now, but in fall of 2023, over 1,500 died of Covid in Canada in four months, more than double the rate of vehicular fatalities for the same period. We all still wear seatbelts and want cars with airbags and some advocate for lower speeds despite the low risk of death. There are a growing number of journal articles that describe how Covid causes neurons to fuse into useless clumps and has myriad other effects on the brain, sometimes without people even noticing that their cognition has deteriorated, which adds to the dangers on the roadways. If that's not enough to take some kind of precautions, then things might change once you have people in your life who are seriously affected. Listening to moms grieving over the life their child could have had if not in and out of hospitals from Covid was enough to light a fire under me about the issue. 

If we're around kids, or around people who are around kids, and we're possibly carrying an infection, without taking any precautions, then we're deciding for the kids that they should accept this risk. It's like they're in the back of the car, unbuckled, with mom and dad chaining back Malboros. Lots of kids had to die or get sick or disabled before we decided to make some changes on those fronts. Wouldn't it be wiser to prevent deaths and disabilities for kids when it just costs us a little less pleasure in our day? Instead we've got kids rawdogging lung backwash with CO2 readings over 2,000 ppm in some classrooms without any CR-boxes allowed because it's just a little more pleasurable to ignore it. That's short-sighted and arguably unethical. One thing people are acclimatizing to, that IS becoming a norm, is having a good chunk of the class (and workforce) absent at any given time all year. That doesn't have to be the norm we accept.   

Just 0.5% of polio cases leading to disability was enough for us to want to stop polio - well, we used to want to stop it. Ten times the rate of Long Covid isn't enough to do anything further to stop the spread to unsuspecting people around us. An iron lung is more dramatic than staying in bed all day, unable to sit up for more than a few minutes at a time. We could clean the air, but instead it's up to individuals to protect themselves. So I, and other Mothers Against Covid in Classrooms and Hospitals (MACCH), will keep spreading the word that Covid has longterm consequences worse than chlamydia, and it's pretty easy to prevent getting it or spreading it with a well-fitting N95 (Covid, that is; use condoms to avoid chlamydia).