If an attractive person flirted with you, but then mentioned, just by the way, "I've been sexually active with someone with chlamydia, but don't worry because I don't have any symptoms," would you have unprotected sex with them??
Hopefully you're aware that people can carry and transmit chlamydia without having any symptoms of it themselves. That's true of tons of diseases. It's very true of Covid, in which almost 60% of infections come from people without symptoms (pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic).
Hopefully, you'll also recognize that it doesn't matter how healthy you are, how many supplements or micro-nutrients you take, how much you exercise, or how smart and well-educated you are when it comes to catching an infectious disease. We have a weird association between diseases and people living in filth and squalor and ignorance, but that's likely from poverty making it very difficult to avoid exposure to other people. It's exposure to a virus that determines whether or not you catch it, not your diet.
And just maybe you're aware that Covid isn't like a cold. It's more like polio or HIV+ or chicken pox or any number of other viruses that hibernate in the body to come out later. With polio, only 0.5% of infected people were disabled by it; most people just felt a little unwell for a bit, yet we went to town to prevent even that small number from lifelong difficulties. I'm not entirely sure why we just don't give a shit about the lowest estimate of possibly 5% of people being disabled by Covid, but there it is.
Dr. Noor Bari further takes down the invincibility some people feel they have and believe that they can somehow bestow upon their precious children:
"Here’s the thing. There is a neat pyramid of wood, and a pile of kindling soaked in gasoline at the base. I’m telling you it will burn, and they are telling you “there’s no evidence yet”. That is how obvious the data pointing to blood and blood vessel damage, plus brain inflammation, plus immune system damage etc of C19 looks to me. That it will cause problems. That it is even now causing problems.
I didn’t need the data we have even now to know this would happen because we already had decades of data from other conditions that do similar things. You tell me something has activated macrophages? I’ll tell you there’ll probably be fibrosis. It really is as simple as that. We did not need to infect the world to count how many fibrosed organs there are. Endless examples (here and here). Upsetting the triad of clotting regulation is another one.
Anyway. COVID-19 is still a problem, and it’s going to remain a problem, and pretending that your qualifications are going to protect your kid is not going to work unless you use those qualifications wisely and appreciate the whole picture. The whole picture is that humans are not well designed to tolerate chronic C19 exposure or infection. We don’t have the antioxidant and tolerance systems to deal with it for the most part. Our big delicate brains aren’t designed to be assaulted like this."
It doesn't have to be like this.
5 comments:
No one is invincible, life is inherently risky and transient. Nature is no respecter of persons.
So how far can we extend this Sorites paradox and the COVID pandemic? I suppose the 1918 pandemic never ended. People still die of influenza A, as with RSV and many other viruses. At what point do we realize that our experience of life in 1980 or 2010 was no different than today.
So ask not what society can do for the immunocompromised and instead ask how the immunocompromised are keeping themselves from burdening the wider public.
carpe diem
Sure, what's a tolerable baseline number of children who will die or be unable to get out of bed anymore? The 1918 pandemic stopped taking significant lives, but polio wouldn't have stopped disabling people had we not acted on it. Covid cases are taking an increasing number of children's lives (see the graph here) and disabling more, and we're pretty easily able to dramatically decrease harm. So my answer is, definitely not yet.
I have two issues with asking the immunocompromised to stop burdening other people:
1. It implies that only the immunocompromised are at risk, missing the BIG point here that the Covid disables people in peak health. It can seriously affect top athletes, even more so. And it misses the reality that Covid MAKES people immunocompromised.
2. It suggests that anyone elderly, disabled, pregnant, or with any pre-existing conditions should just stay home because wearing a mask is annoying. It's childishly inconsiderate. It's tantamount to saying, "I want to be allowed to drive drunk at high speeds, so if anyone doesn't have good insurance and tons of airbags in their car in case I hit them, then they should stay off the road."
Would we rather live in a society in which we have a bit more consideration for one another, but then we also can feel more secure that people will be willing to take care for us OR live in a society in which we can do what we want, without consideration for others, but know if anything happens to us, we're fucked. People who choose the latter often run on the illusion that they're invincible - like teenagers who take ridiculous risks because they don't have a fully developed prefrontal cortex. They're still in that selfish stage of thinking they should be able to do what they want even when it has a harmful effect on others, like children pitching a fit for being stopped from running wild in a restaurant, effectively saying:"Don't make me have to think about other people!" In the face of wildfires and talk of annexing and everything else going on, we need to work on our capacity to make the world safer for everyone as far as we're able to.
But people do consider others. People do care. It’s understandable that you want others to do what you want. I can empathize that you want to persuade others to your reality. The problem is that masks are not the norm and they will never be normalized.
There will always be some subset of the community that will never emerge from the ephemeral pandemic crisis. Searching for evidence that there is still a significant risk, they will always find it.
We are not invincible and viruses can harm anyone in devastating ways. We suffer with one another. We live and love together. But with respect to care/harm, we take a wider view: there is more to life than just an invisible airborne enemy. To properly attend to our other existential communal needs and moral foundations, we do not forsake commonsense life.
I wonder if people are stuck in a false dichotomy between wearing a mask vs living life. I work, take classes, socialize, etc.with a mask on, or, if I go to dinner with people, we all test first and keep a CR box running. It's not the hardship some see it as (and I was very claustrophobic with it at first -- it's amazing what we can get used to -- I also thought a seatbelt felt like a straitjacket back in the 70s, and I got used to wearing one of those too). The only thing I don't do is go to restaurants or bars - places where I would go to eat or drink. I haven't been sick with anything since 2019, which increases my ability to enjoy more of my life. So I didn't choose to hunker down forever and do nothing else. I chose to protect others and myself so easily with a comfortable N95 to reduce the spread of infection.
I think restaurants/bars is one area where, since entry is a choice, masking isn't an issue, although they could definitely have better ventilation and filtration. There are some restaurants that have implemented better air quality and had no discernible spread from their establishment. But for schools, school busses, hospitals, grocery stores, etc. -- places people have to go, including immunocompromised people -- wouldn't it be a more caring act to wear a mask to prevent giving someone a potentially harmful virus?
The idea of "emerging from the pandemic" is just ignoring the rash of viral illnesses. We don't have to get sick several times each year with a brain-invasive virus. This university prof clarifies: "If you or your child is attending an Ontario university and they are not taking the proper precautions, they are at risk of graduating with worse cognitive performance than when they arrived....The responsibility lies with university leadership." Masks reduce the risk while we wait for better leadership, and in some places masks are becoming normalized in hospitals or in schools as people get tired of being sick or their mind is changed by knowing a close friend or relative suffering from the longterm effects.
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