I watched the government hamstring itself in response to covid. masks were mandatory unless you didn't want to, vaccines were mandatory except for this one because something about this one in particular is special (the answer, of course, is that conservative babies threw an extra big fit about this one). i watched government officials claim that if a pregnant woman takes the vaccine her baby will be born with a full head of hair, a full set of teeth and eyes that are black from corner to corner. I watched them tell us to stay home, but we have to go to work, and we have to go out and support small businesses, but then we have to go right back home. I watched government officials say that the key to getting the numbers down is to test less, and tell people not to report their positive tests.
But I think the thing that gets me the most, the thing that has eroded my trust in government as an entity able to organize and manage a population rather than just in the bad actors that were in place during covid, is that IT'S STILL FUCKING HAPPENING. The answer to "How did the government handle the pandemic?" is "They haven't yet." We just did covid exactly the same way we did Vietnam: we realized that it's expensive and people don't like it, so we gave up and declared victory.
if a pregnant woman takes the vaccine her baby will be born with a full head of hair, a full set of teeth and eyes that are black from corner to corner
Watching people making claims that are this easily disprovable and getting away with it has been feeding my cynicism like nothing else. People are still having babies! My vaccinated friend had a baby and it was fine! Where are all the demon babies? Show me a demon baby so I can pledge my fealty!
Couldn't agree more. And the government/media outlets all seem to treat covid like a forbidden word. You'll see all sorts of stuff about how people are sick all the time and hospitals are filling up, but all the focus will be on RSV and flu with maybe one mention of covid (ignoring the fact that we KNOW covid weakens the immune system, so it's contributing to the other two being worse than pre-2020). You'll see it in articles talking about flu and RSV vaccinations as well. Covid is a forbidden word and only allowed to be said as an afterthought.
I'm disabled and this article I posted hit home in some real unfortunate ways.
I haven't checked the wastewater numbers recently but people have been throwing around "amost as bad as omicron. I'm going to christmas, sure, but i'm wearing a p100 full face mask on the plane.
The biobot numbers have been weird - Northeast region is way up, but the south and west are below where they were this summer. EG.5 and HV.1 are the dominant strains, which is strange given that the CDC reports that JN.1 currently accounts for almost a third of cases.
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It's very upsetting that it's so hard to get meaningful information now. : (
It's really unnerving to have access to so much information but then feel completely in the dark. BioBot doesn't have that many sampling locations and there's obviously a lot of variability even within a region, so even our best look is pretty imperfect. This sort of thing should be inexcusable in an era of cheap data.
Anecdotally: I got my first covid infection as part of that spike, despite getting the latest booster a month prior and being fully vaxed. I did manage to avoid giving it to my wife, though, so based on my sample size (n=2) the new variant(s) driving it are indeed immune-invading, but don't seem to be more obscenely contagious than normal for covid.
(I unironically blame dialing back my cannabis use for the infection)
The northeast has had a couple weeks lead on the south for a while now. Speaking as someone that's been religiously watching the numbers here in Florida. With so many competing variants out there our immunity among wide swaths of the population is wildly out of sync and causing all sorts of lags and unexpected spikes. I feel ya on being in the dark. Florida has 67 counties; we were monitoring 9, got a tenth, and we're now down to getting data from only 4.
And the super fun part is, if you look at the missing data for some of our counties it seems like they saw a spike and decided to stop sending samples in response.
Disabled people who are still shielding from Covid have far less trust in the government than the general public and are far more likely to believe it handled the pandemic very badly, a survey has found.
Are we in the middle of a counter-terrorism operation that gives the whole country COVID in an attempt to wipe out all those dangerous, disabled insurgents?
The reason the US is giving the whole country COVID is simply because the bourgeoisie are not human.
That is to say, the only concern here is capitalist economic self-interest. We live in an era of quarterly earnings reports. Even though mass death and disabling is obviously bad for the economy in the long-term, sufficient disease response appears more expensive to the capitalist due to short-term up-front costs (same reason America still uses diesel locomotives). To the inhuman bourgeoisie, the "culling" of "expensive" disabled people is beneficial. This is also why assisted suicide in Canada has been expanded into a eugenics program.
Now I emphasize "concern" because there are two reasons for why the capitalist world system has gone with infinity COVID over zero COVID. They can be summed up as capitalism, however.
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As mentioned, a perverse focus on the short term gets you perverse results.
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Capitalism is inherently incapable of dealing with pandemics. You need a global, centralized response.
I can hear them oinking about it now.
: "Think of how much the economy will be boosted when every one of those proles is dependent on our medicine."
: "I know, this is an excellent entrepreneurial opportunity. We can't just be leaving money on the table like this and have a healthy population."If I ever hear that it is my 'patriotic duty' to get COVID...
If I ever hear that it is my 'patriotic duty' to get COVID...
That happened in 2020.
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Didn't one of those freaks also do the whole "I regret that I have but one grandparent to give for my country" and somehow that was supposed to inspire you into going out and spending money on small businesses.
I don't recall, but if you find out please post it so I can gaze upon the statement in despair.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/24/i-regret-that-i-have-one-grandparent-give-my-country/
Found it. Of course it's from WaPo
You didn't read past the headline. It's ridiculing the lieutenant governor
Probably. The paywall prevented me from reading the part where she explained her thesis, so I had to go from memory and I think it was her article that got posted here 3 years ago.
The paywall is a major pain. Had to try three archive links until I found one without it.
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On the plus side, wearing a gasmask in public is very on brand with the other slow-rolling apocalypses going on. Can't brief in wild fire smoke and tiny metal particulates from cars if you're filtering everything above and below (due to the weird physics of filters) 3 microns.
It's hilarious how people will gladly huff in all kinds of pollutants but will point out your tofu and say "doncha know veganism is bad for you? Listen to Joe Rogan."
complains about diet soda then immediately goes and eats processed meat
bootlickers were the ones who wanted to drop the masks as soon as possible so they could get back to slathering their tongue all over those government boots
Well, yeah. But there's a lot of interesting stuff in the article. It made me feel less alone as a disabled person.
To expand on what another poster said, the problem people are seeing with government response is that it was never driven by a desire to accomplish any public health goal, but instead was primarily based on what the Protestant ethos would allow to be proscribed. Oh we actually need people to do things for the economy to stay running? Okay you’re allowed to go and work, but you can’t have any fun.
The only policy available to the us government was based on shame and valorization of work (not workers), so it required that people to forego any pleasure to stop the virus.
As it turns out, morality is not a very good prophylactic.
I've said it before, Long-COVID sufferers are a desperately untapped revolutionary source
They know their government failed them, and when I was on reddit a lot of them even agreed that the virus probably wasn't Chinese in origin (because you know, it's not: https://imgur.com/a/CRwan3n)
I was upvoted for saying that LC sufferers should form their own communes, and then I was banned from reddit for this
To some extent I think recognition of long-covid is already a selective bias for potential comrades. I know people who are almost certainly suffering from long covid (I know you can't armchair diagnose people but the timelines and symptoms line up perfectly) that are unable to entertain the idea that they could have long covid or even just to recognize that they have been complaining about the same fatigue for months and instead continue to insist it's an isolated thing this week/today no point seeing a doctor.
Yup.
Long COVID is also curable btw, you just have to not ever be exposed to COVID again. I was able to function great for 1 year straight by avoiding all public buildings and people who go into public buildings.
For a lot of Long COVID sufferers, some type of COVID-focused farm commune literally is the only available solution other than suicide.
And BTW the tests don't work, they often show up negative when the user is actually positive. The reason I know this is because my brother visits twice a year on holidays, and I always get sick after this, with symptoms identical to COVID, even though he tests negative. Keep in mind I have the privilege of living completely alone, so there's literally no other possible explanation
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"Those still trying to protect themselves from a threat that the government has condemned them to have less trust in the government, turns out"
Masks are the only way to shield ourselfs from the mollifying effects of government toxoplasmosis
