COVID-19 is Killing Performers

And we fans must stop infecting them.

Charles A. Waltz, Founder: #FansMASKUP

COVID-19 is a serious vascular infection that causes cumulative, long-term multi-system damage. In unprecedented numbers, performers such as actors, musicians and athletes are becoming seriously and chronically ill — and even dying — as a result of reinfections. To keep our favorite performers (and our community) safe, we need to mask and advocate for HEPA air purification/filtration at live events. This is what “protecting them at all costs” means.

This article, while laying out the settled knowledge about the damage caused by the unchecked spread of SARS-CoV-2, is ultimately about fandom as the heart of an increasingly heartless world. Consequently, it has three functions.

*An explainer for the state of research of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic (Spoiler: it’s bad.)

*Sounding the alarm for how COVID-19 reinfections are destroying the health of our favorite performers

*A call-to-action for safer event spaces

Fandom love in the COVID-19 pandemic

If you’re a fan like me, you probably care about the wellbeing of your favorite performer. As we like to say, this performer is a “precious bean who must be protected at all costs.” And their heart may hold special significance as the symbolic and, according to emerging neuroscientific research on the heart-mind connection, the material seat of love. If there is one experience that binds together all fans, it’s what mainstream culture too often misperceives as an excessive, irrational outpouring of love.

Despite this tendency to devalue fannish devotion, those in fandom know that special feeling of having that tender part of your heart touched by a performance. And, having one’s heart touched, experiencing an upwelling of desire to pay that feeling forward: making art, writing fiction, sewing costumes, even engaging in activism.

You can even think of fandom love as an instance of Audre Lorde’s powerful, expansive eros, a world-transforming energy — borne of deeply sharing collective joy. Particularly queer joy, as its routine suppression means it tends to burst forth in catharsis that can alter the fabric of the universe. Just look at the collective energy generated by Ed and Stede’s kiss in Our Flag Means Death in, for example, the fandom’s logistical support of the WGA/SAG-AFTRA strikes. Fandom love can change the world, and the world needs changing.

Even if you don’t think of fandom love in quasi-theological terms, as a fan you will at least have felt this sense that your favorite performer, and the community of devotion around them, is precious, and we want and wish the best for them.

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is perhaps the most urgent crisis facing our favorite performers, our community, and literally everyone who we care about. Now, many of us have the habit of ignoring or minimizing the ongoing pandemic, so the first step is approaching our own accumulated cognitive dissonance, and perhaps even guilt for our own roles in its unchecked spread, with care and compassion. For this, I find the loving-kindness meditation to be a useful tool.

It’s a secular meditation that requires no belief system, and I invite you to give this meditation a try with me, and after we can examine the crisis in front of us, and the best collective means for transforming it. If you’re not in fandom, I invite you to bring to mind someone who you cherish deeply. All of us are someone’s biggest fan.

Loving-kindness for your “precious little bean”

I invite you to bring the image of your favorite performer (or loved one) to mind. Whether they conform to normative beauty standards or not, they are gorgeous to us. Their dynamic personality shines through when you think of them.

Now, imagine their heart. The heart is really a wonder. It is the wellspring of our shiniest emotions, radiating out in the most evocative performances, and in the deep sharing of joy in community. Having a heart is an experience that binds all people together. It has beat for us every moment of our lives; even when we sleep, the heart has no rest.

Have you got the image in your mind? Now, experience the tender feelings that your favorite performer’s heart brings up for you. What sensations do you feel in your own heart? Is it like a “precious little bean” of light? (I jest… mostly.) Allow that sensation to expand like a drop of oil on water.

Now, widen your perspective to all of the hearts around the world who have been touched by this performer’s. Bring to mind every beautiful thing you’ve seen or made as a result of this feeling. What a rarefied connection we all share as fans.

Now hold tight to that image as, with a quite literally broken heart, I tell you a devastating piece of news.

In the words of the Tenth Doctor from Doctor Who (played by my favorite performer, David Tennant), and with an equal amount of sorrow, I will start with: “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry…”

COVID-19 is a serious vascular disease.

I repeat: COVID-19 is a serious vascular disease.

It literally attacks the DNA in the heart. And via the endothelial lining of the blood vessels, it damages all of the body’s systems. The damage is severe and cumulative, and it is disabling and even killing performers.

Your heart, the heart of your favorite performer, and the heart of the community of devotion around that performer, are in immediate danger. And they are not having their health destroyed for anything resembling a noble cause. They are being sacrificed for business-as-usual and the compulsion to pretend that everything is normal. Our favorite performers are dying of others’ greed.

If you’re like me, this news has turned your world upside-down. I’m quite conscious that I’m bearing devastating news to fans who might attend live events unmasked. It’s painful to realize we may be transmitting a serious vascular infection to our favorite performers, not to mention the wider fan community. I’m also aware that in the fourth year of this pandemic, most people have had at least one known COVID-19 infection, and many have had several. With the realization that the damage is cumulative, descends an existential terror that we may be carrying serious systemic damage in our bodies, now and into the future.

Again, I am so, so sorry. I am with you. This news sent me into a tunnel of despair, generating uncountable panic attacks, PTSD, derealization and near-constant passive suicidal ideation. I know how devastating this news is. And I know why fans are afraid to join-up the dots and see how their actions, and the actions of our community, are impacting our favorite performers. No one believed that we could live in a world where not wearing a medical mask, an apparatus that most of us only saw in hospital emergency departments before 2020, could literally kill someone. And not just one someone, but countless someones in the chain of transmission. If this isn’t hell, at best it is purgatory.

But purgatory has an exit.

That is why I started this article with a meditation. We already hold within us a love so powerful that it can energize a movement. It has done so for me. My despair has transformed into motivation to change the situation, beginning with raising awareness in my fan community so that together we can protect our favorite performers, each other, and literally everyone with whom we come in contact.

Some of these actions we can take to protect performers are simple, like wearing N95/FFP3-type respirator masks at live events. Others are more complex, and will require more collective effort, like advocating for air purification/filtration with HEPA filters at performance venues. This has been proven to reduce the transmission of SARS-CoV-2.

It’s no small task, but having spent decades in fandom, I have witnessed the transformative power of that very devotion in fans’ hearts. In my wildest dreams, I think the advocacy of fans for the safety of their favorite performers can break the wall of silence around the ongoing pandemic and lead to more systemic changes that will have profound knock-on effects for the world’s other emergencies.

So, what are we up against?

What does it mean that COVID-19 is a vascular disease?

Let’s start with the fundamentals, and apologies in advance if this explanation is too basic, but I want the information to be clear to all readers. The vascular system, also known as the circulatory system, is the network of vessels that carry blood and lymph through the body. It’s comprised of the heart, as well as arteries, veins and capillaries. It’s also an important component of the body’s other systems, including the respiratory, digestive, immune, and nervous systems.

Though it was initially thought that COVID-19 was an upper-respiratory illness like influenza (flu), mainly affecting the lungs, we now know that COVID-19 is a vascular, multi-system disease that damages the endothelium, the lining of the blood vessels. Endothelial damage wreaks havoc in literally every part of the body, beginning with heart and circulatory conditions, like the formation of plaques in the arteries, which can rupture and create heart attacks and strokes. Endothelial cells pave the blood vessel highway to all of the organs, and when these are attacked it causes long term-damage through inflammation and internal scarring.

While there is a mountain of research on the damage to the body’s systems, perhaps the most vivid accounts are coming from medical examiners, who can paint a picture of what this damage looks like post-mortem, and how it correlates to some of the most common COVID-19 symptoms. In “How COVID-19 Attacks the Body: Lessons From the Morgue,” Medical Examiner Judy Melinek, MD, describes the potentially irreversible damage resulting from COVID-19 infections

“Brain Fog? Pathologists put brain tissue under the microscope and see dead nerve cells and inflammatory cells where they shouldn’t be, surrounding blood vessels.

Heart palpitations and fainting spells? There could be pale white scars in the red heart muscle, which interrupt signal delivery in its electrical system.

Shortness of breath and fatigue? Pink and white patches clog up parts of the lung tissue that should be empty spaces ready to fill with air.

Persistent loss of smell? Recent studies have shown that in some people the nerve damage associated with this long COVID symptom is severe and irreversible.”

COVID-19 also differs from influenza in its severity. Its Biosafety Level (BSL), a 1–4 scale used to identify the protective measures needed in a laboratory setting to protect workers, the environment, and the public, is BSL-3, microbes that cause serious or potentially fatal illness as a result of inhalation. Tuberculosis, for example, is another BSL-3 pathogen. One step down, examples of BSL-2 pathogens are the herpes-simplex virus and rhinoviruses. One step up, the most dangerous pathogens in the BSL-4 category are smallpox and ebola.

If that seems a bit dense, the takeaway is that SARS-CoV-2 is in the same risk category as tuberculosis: literally consumption, which killed one out of every seven people living in the United States and Europe, infecting or killing such literary fandom favorites such as Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, Albert Camus, John Keats, Franz Kafka and George Orwell. Incidentally, in 2021, it was the second leading infectious cause of death in the world, after COVID-19.

COVID-19 is also much more contagious than influenza. There seems to be confusion about the mechanism of transmission, but unlike influenza, which spreads as droplets, Coronavirus transmits through aerosols. This is what the hashtag #CovidIsAirborne refers to. The virus is expelled just by the act of breathing, accumulating and remaining suspended in the air for hours, like cigarette smoke. According to the EPA, “particles from an infected person can move throughout an entire room or indoor space.” Being indoors, activities that increase the emission of respiratory fluids (like singing), and crowded spaces, increase the risk of transmission. Also, and this is vital to understand for fans and creating safer event spaces up to 60% of transmissions are asymptomatic: they happen either before symptoms present themselves, or in asymptomatic infections. This means that even if you are not showing symptoms, you may infect others around you, and the self-monitoring suggestions adopted by most event spaces are inadequate to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

Another worrying feature of COVID-19 as a vascular illness is the cumulative damage. SARS-CoV-2 seeds itself in the organs as viral reservoirs that continually attack the body. Let that sink in for a moment. The virus continues attacking the body even after someone has seemingly recovered from an infection. This is believed to be the mechanism of Long COVID, and why Long COVID symptoms may not manifest for months or years until after an initial infection. It is also why adverse health events caused by the multi-system damage of COVID-19 such as heart attacks, strokes, organ failure, new-onset autoimmune diseases and even cancers are not necessarily being correlated with the initial infections. Longitudinal studies are now showing that Long COVID occurs in between 1/10–1/3 infections. This is why, in terms of conceptualizing COVID-19 as a disease where the initial infection is just the beginning of the damage, HIV is a better comparison than influenza. And though the mechanisms are different, research now shows that the cumulative immune system damage produced by SARS-CoV-2 can be considered an AIDS-defining illness, in the sense of an acquired immune deficiency.

The final piece, one which is particularly urgent in this moment when most people have had at least once COVID-19 infection, is reinfection. A mountain of research now shows that each reinfection creates more significant damage. But, given viral persistence, and the attack on the immune system, this is perhaps not surprising. What’s worrying is that longitudinal studies are as yet unable to tell us just how bad this could be.

To summarize: COVID-19 is a serious and highly-contagious vascular disease. It attacks all of the body’s systems and persists in viral reservoirs, wreaking havoc months and even years after the initial infection, and each reinfection creates cumulative damage.

If you’re with me so far, you’re probably already connecting the dots for how a highly-contagious virus that creates worse outcomes with reinfections, and persists in the body for an indefinite period of time, puts performers at particular risk. In fact, you would expect that performers would be experiencing some scary outcomes as a result of COVID-19 infections. And you would unfortunately be correct.

COVID-19 reinfections are killing performers.

Right now.

The combination of performing at large events, and a lifestyle that requires frequent travel and face-to-face contact with the public, means that performers are getting infected with COVID-19 again and again. Before vaccines were available, many performers died from acute COVID-19 infections. Now, performers are less frequently dying from acute infections, but more are developing Long COVID, or experiencing adverse health events as a result of COVID reinfections, leading to canceled events, retiring from performing due to new-onset chronic illnesses, and even sudden deaths.

I know. I maintain the google doc that color codes COVID-19’s devastating effects on performers. Yellow for canceled events. Orange for severe or new-onset chronic illnesses. Red for deaths.

You might be asking why this narrative hasn’t coalesced in the news. One answer is that, for a variety of reasons, including stigma, insurance not covering canceled events due to COVID-19, and a failure of public health authorities to correlate COVID-19 infections with new-onset chronic illness and sudden deaths, the illnesses and deaths are not always linked to COVID-19 infections. Some performers have confirmed the link between COVID and their illness, like actress Alyssa Milano, athletes Avery Henry and Mark Bavaro, and Hailey Bieber, who had a “mini stroke” following a COVID-19 infection. Others have canceled events due to “illness” or a “mystery virus,” or have developed new-onset chronic illnesses.

A-list musicians are becoming seriously ill: Lorde has a debilitating, new-onset autoimmune condition, Billie Eilish was “suffering terribly” from an illness while touring, and Harry Styles required supplemental oxygen while performing. And an increasing number of performers are simply dying. Many passed away in the period before vaccines, like Broadway actor Nick Cordero, but as we are discovering that vaccines do not prevent the cumulative damage from COVID-19 infections, now young and relatively healthy people, like WWE wrestler Bray Wyatt, are dying following complications from the effects of COVID.

You may also be asking yourself, if the emergency is so bad, then why is this allowed to continue? Why do venues not create safer conditions for performers, especially because they are so profitable? And why are performers themselves not sounding the alarm?

The first is easier to answer. A tragic combination of cowardice, inertia and greed. Masking has been so politicized by bad faith right-wing propaganda, that many venues do not want to enforce mask requirements. Other measures which might keep performers safe, like air purification/filtration with HEPA filters, cost money. Not a lot of money, but this is capitalism, and if a corner can be cut, particularly if the consequences of cutting that corner are not immediately evident and will not create financial liabilities, it most likely will be cut. Despite the public adoration for performers, harming them for profit has always been part of the business. Think of all of the performers who have suffered from sexual assault and rape, as well as physical and mental illnesses, as a result of participating in their profession. I am still haunted by a comment on an article about one performer’s Long COVID diagnosis: “They kill racehorses, don’t they?”

The second question: “Why aren’t performers advocating for better COVID-19 mitigations?” is more complex. The short answer is that a growing number are. Some public figures, like author and TV creator Neil Gaiman, have requested voluntary masking at his events because the venues themselves will not enforce mask requirements. Let that sink in. Neil Gaiman doesn’t even have the power to ensure basic mitigations for his tour.

Other performers have had more success with ensuring COVID-19 mitigations. Singer and songwriter The Anchoress requires masked rehearsals, testing and air purification for performances. Actress Morgan Fairchild requested masked rehearsals and testing for a play. The band Belly has requested that fans mask at their performances. But there are also forces pushing back against performers advocating for themselves. Some are explicit: insurance in many instances will not pay for canceled concerts due to COVID-19. And performing takes place in the context of hierarchical industries where it’s often important to not be perceived as “difficult,” so few performers have the power to advocate for their safety. But probably the biggest reason is also the most insidious: the public health messaging has so downplayed the risks of COVID-19 reinfections that even A-list performers who could advocate for themselves are not aware of the danger.

What can we as fans do?

If what we’re up against is the greed and callousness of industries who are willing to kill performers in the name of short-term profits, what can we as fans do? To begin, we as individuals can wear masks at live events. Up to 60% of COVID transmissions are asymptomatic, meaning they happen in the complete absence of symptoms. So anyone at an event without a mask could spread a COVID-19 infection to the performer, not to mention countless other fans. As a collective, we can also pressure event organizers to make safer conditions for performers, like requiring masking and vaccinations, as well as using HEPA air purification/filtration in event spaces. This would keep performers, and the community, safe and it is achievable.

While creating safer spaces for fan events seems like a small intervention in a problem that is systemic, I believe that fans are uniquely situated to create wider public health changes. There is currently a wall of silence around the seriousness of COVID-19 reinfections. But performers, especially high-profile performers, are inherently newsworthy. And while the stories of their declining health is trickling out in the news media in drips-and-drabs, a concerted effort by fans to ensure their safety could lead to greater public awareness of the continued need for masking, vaccinations and other mitigations. We as fans are in a unique position to change the narrative in the public sphere.

Here are some actions that we can take right now.

1. Mask at in-person events.
In October, I’m running a raffle from the @Fans_MASKUP account on Twitter (some now call it ‘X’), Instagram, and Bluesky. Take a photo of yourself masking at a live event, post with the hashtag #fansmaskup and you’ll be entered to win $100. Refer a friend who tags you in the photo and you’ll receive two entries.
[NOTE: I’m a broke student and the prize money is coming from my stipend. But it’s worth it for me if it motivates people to mask at fan events and encourage others to do the same.]

2. Contact event organizers and ask them to require masks and invest in air purification/filtration with HEPA filters.
These can now be rented and are proven to reduce COVID transmission.

3. Share this article with your fan community and, if you feel able to do so, with your favorite performers.
Not only to raise their awareness of the ongoing pandemic and the risks they’re personally facing, but also because performers are uniquely situated to sound the alarm in news media.

Working together, we can all make a significant difference.

Protecting your favorite performer’s heart means protecting yours, mine, and everyone else’s

Let’s return to the heart of your favorite performer.

Incidentally, mine is Scottish actor (and heartthrob) David Tennant, best known for his roles in the TV series “Doctor Who” and “Good Omens.” I’m well-aware that, from one perspective, it’s odd to fixate on the safety of one person’s heart, and more specifically their endothelium. David Tennant probably has never thought about the lining of his own blood vessels. And, moreover, he’s just one person who I’ve never met, and probably never will, in a global pandemic that has already claimed over 25 million lives. I’m also hyper-aware of the question of agency: he is an A-list actor who could potentially mask in his personal life and insist that fans wear masks when meeting him at events, like his colleague Nick Offerman. Isn’t it presumptuous to make a call-to-action to protect someone who has made his choices and has not expressed a desire to be protected in this capacity?

And the answer is: yes, it is incredibly presumptuous. On some level, I’m just some rando who cares too much and is screaming into the void. And yet, our individual choices are always enmeshed in the collective. With COVID-19, the exhalation of someone in the UK can expel a new variant that kills millions in India. The Butterfly Effect, previously seen as a metaphor for the unpredictability of complex systems, is nightmarishly literal in the pandemic.

So, how do we reconcile the agency of a person with collective responsibility, not to mention fandom’s core value of performer privacy? Well, the first is respecting that no one has an obligation to reveal their personal medical history. My speculations about the state of David Tennant’s health are really generalizations about the damage anyone who has been infected with COVID-19 has sustained. Personally, I’ve had at least one known COVID-19 infection, so I have skin in that grim game.

We can also acknowledge how, with COVID-19, we are all uniquely enmeshed. Though I’m quite diligent about masking, in a one-way masking world, even wearing N95/FFP3 masks will not prevent all infections. So, quite pragmatically, there is no separating the protecting of David Tennant’s heart from yours, mine, or anyone else’s. This is why the advocacy effort is ultimately community advocacy. Protecting David Tennant’s heart at all costs entails protecting the heart of the whole community at all costs. In its widest implications, it means protecting the hearts of the whole world at all costs. And given our collective anesthetization to the escalating crises around us, our hearts should be protected at all costs.

Why should David Tennant’s heart be central to this activist effort? In some ways, it’s totally arbitrary, and the heart of your favorite performer, or in fact the heart of any person in this world, is equally valid and vital for this effort. On another level, David Tennant’s heart is a symbol for our capacity to love and take action, even against a global emergency like the COVID-19 pandemic. Personally, even though the pandemic makes me cry in public every single day, I find strength to continue because he has touched my heart, again-and-again, for more than a decade.

They say that loving David Tennant never goes away, it just goes dormant until his next phenomenal project. And it’s absolutely true. From Doctor Who, to Shakespeare TV adaptations, to Good Omens, David Tennant is a passionate performer. As a human, according to his father Sandy MacDonald, “[David] does love people. And that’s a great gift. In this day and age, to love people makes the world a better place.”

I find it a poignant metaphor that David Tennant became a cultural institution by portraying The Tenth Doctor in Doctor Who, a time-traveling alien from the race of Time Lords who have two hearts. So it’s only appropriate that David Tennant as a human has enough kindness and compassion to fill two hearts. He has been a steadfast advocate for LGBTQIA+ people, especially trans youth, which has made him the occasional target of the far-right. But David Tennant, like kittens, orgasms, and comfortable cardigans on a cool autumn day, is so universally-beloved that these bad faith attacks inevitably backfire. He truly is a National Treasure. But, unlike The Doctor, David Tennant only has one heart.

To do this activism, I live with the awareness that David Tennant’s heart has already sustained long-term damage from COVID-19 infections and that, at best, what I’m advocating for is that in the next ten years cumulative damage does not create a heart attack, stroke, organ failure, or another terminal event. I wish this were hyperbole, but this is the nightmare in which we’ve awakened, and radical acceptance will produce better results than denial. And yet, like this world, just because something has been damaged, does not mean it isn’t worth preserving and cherishing and, yes, protecting at all costs. Protecting by wearing masks, advocating for safer performance spaces with masking requirements and HEPA air purification/filtration, and taking actions which will lead to systemic public health changes.

On the widest scale, we need a structure for human life that shifts from production and consumption to simply being. “Being” may sound scary because so many of us carry trauma, and society has conditioned us to fear silence, so we equate being with the moment when our pain catches up with us. This is why all of us who have been harmed by this global system need to stop, rest and heal, and on the other side we find that “being” means nothing more than subsisting in the medium of love. It is clear as day to me how advocacy for a society which protects and cherishes our COVID-damaged bodies may just put the brakes on our most existential crises as humans. Yes, it is cliché, but clichés are that for a reason. Love is the answer, a love so excessive that we have the inner resources to truly protect and deeply share collective joy in that which we most cherish.

This is precisely why fandom is a visionary space for the world we’re reaching for. It is the rarefied experience in which cherishing something with one’s whole being is not only permitted, but celebrated. Fandom love is a microcosm of what kind of world we’re fighting for.

Because, at this point, black-pilled misanthropy is so rampant that, if you ask many people whether we should save humanity, they’d say: “Let ’em burn!” But if you point out that whoever they cherish most in the world is a human with a human heart, that David Tennant has a human heart, that changes the conversation. Fandom can lead the way in demonstrating to the world how to dwell in the state of love. And it starts with acknowledging this crisis and advocating for safer spaces.

So, ask yourself this question:

Are you willing to protect your favorite performer’s heart at all costs?