In April 2020 my father died of COVID. In February 2022 my uncle died of COVID. In between nearly 1 million Americans died of COVID. More than in any war in American history. Leaving behind an estimated 9 million family members mourning their loved ones. It’s estimated that one out of every 4 COVID deaths is a child losing a parent or primary caregiver.
Globally, the known Covid death toll is 6 million, but it’s also a massive undercount. The real number is likely more than 18 million, as determined by excess mortality at the end of 2021. Even if we take the reported 6 million at face value it would mean that 1 out of every 6 people who died of COVID on the planet did it in America.
In fact, our outcomes are astoundingly worse than our peer countries. “The coronavirus is killing Americans at far higher rates than people in other wealthy nations,” reports The New York Times. Two months ago we set a world record: 1 million cases recorded in one day. Go big or go home! America first, baby!
As of this moment there have been nearly 80 million documented infections in America from some variant of the SARS COV-2 virus, and more are on the way. It is estimated that up to 30% of infections lead to a post-viral chronic disease called Long Covid. Estimated because we still don’t have a full grasp of exactly what Long Covid is, how to diagnose it, or how to treat it.
Don’t worry if you don’t have a pre-existing condition or aren’t of certain age. It strikes down people in the peak of fitness as easily as anyone else. Though, like any serial killer, it seems to have a preference for women.
Long Covid can present as at least 205 symptoms across 10 organs systems including: Neuropsychiatric, Pulmonary, Head Ears Eyes Nose Throat (HEENT), Gastrointestinal, Cardiovascular, Musculoskeletal, Immunologic, Dermatologic, Reproductive/Genitourinary, and Endocrine.
On average, 9 in 10 of these organ systems are affected.
Frequently, the people who develop Long Covid had symptoms that were considered “mild” during the acute phase of initial COVID infection. They never needed to go to the hospital. Often they felt they had recovered before the onset of the chronic phase began a few weeks or even months after.
People with Long COVID experience excruciating pain, heart racing and tremors that make them unable to sleep, incapacitating exhaustion that makes them unable to get up. In the worst cases, which are not uncommon, this disease leaves people bedridden, unable to work or even take care of themselves.
Already, in the UK more than 1 in 3 working-age people now suffer from a long-term illness. Research indicates having COVID is associated with a 39% increase in not being able afford basic living needs and a 500% increase in long-term absence from work.
Because American society has no social safety net, there is a direct “it’s mild” to “you’re homeless” pipeline, and since being unhoused is, of course, its own onramp to mortality in our society, there are truly a myriad of ways to ultimately die of COVID.
Many people who are lucky enough to have insurance are nevertheless systematically dismissed by their doctors, who, anytime they are confronted with a patient they can’t conform to a neat box (due to like a novel disease whose real effects we barely know anything about) say: “It’s psychosomatic; you enjoy the attention of being sick.” “Its psychological” is just the diagnosis code doctors use for “I don’t know.” They gotta keep grinding through their allotted 7-minutes-per-patient and actually taking this litany of incomprehensible symptoms seriously is delaying them from telling the next patient it’s all in their head. People suffering with Long Covid being driven to suicide is not unheard of. Hyper neuroinflammation might make them more vulnerable to it, in fact.
Two years in, just as all basic precautious against infection are getting tossed aside, an onslaught of research is coming out that shows the horrific long-term vascular, cardiac, and neurological effects of COVID.
What is becoming unmistakably clear, if you’re paying attention, is that COVID isn’t simply a respiratory illness. It’s a vascular disease. This is why heart-disease risk soars after COVID. Even a mild case increases your chance of heart failure by 72%, heart attack by 63%, stroke by 52%.
It’s also neurodegenerative. COVID decreases brain size, shrinking grey matter. These brain changes can increase the time it takes to process cognitive tasks by as much as 30%. Other neurological effects include memory loss, psychosis, mania, and stuttering. Even in mild cases, research shows a worsening of executive function responsible for focus and organizing.
It’s cool, at least our society has humane support for people who have dementia. LOL!!!
Evidence from the first study of Long Covid in children suggests that more than half of children between 6–16 years old who contract the virus have at least one symptom lasting more than 120 days. 42.6% are impaired by these symptoms during daily activities.
By December of 2021 nearly 7 million children and teens in the US had already been infected. The rate of Long Covid among children is estimated around 10%, though it could be more. That’s at least hundreds of thousands of kids and teens impacted by a potentially lifelong disability and a shortened life span. COVID has resulted in the biggest drop in U.S. life expectancy since WWII.
For those happily “returning to normal,” a lot of people you know will die from COVID. It will be a heart attack, a stroke, a pulmonary embolism. Maybe they’ll simply fade out of your life, hidden away by debilitating disability that leaves them unable to get out of bed. Boo. I know you wanted to have fun. How annoying it must be for YOU.
Are you looking around at the people you know and preparing to lose them now?
Isn’t this what you asked for?
Isn’t this normal?
“The Pretendemic™”
People say they are tired of the pandemic, and this is news to me. I, whose father and uncle died of COVID, am surely NOT tired of it! Please, give me more pandemic. Can’t get enough! It’s my favorite! Could not be less tired of it!! MORE MORE MORE MOREEEE!!
The elimination of mask mandates is seen by many who prefer to look at the surface of things as a reason they no longer need to worry. Phew! Thank god that unbearable mask nightmare is over! Nothing could be worse.
For those who have not had the privilege of ignorance it is a sign only of increasing danger and degeneracy.
Perhaps even worse than COVID itself is what this new “Pretendemic™ phase,” as coined by Covid Long Hauler D_Bone, reveals about our society. Even if COVID disappeared tomorrow, the necrophiliacs who wanted to “live with it” would still remain. Is the prize of getting to participate in a death-loving society a worthy reward after the past years of loss?
It’s easy to remove mask mandates and announce that the scary virus is gone now to a nation of adult children who just want to hear daddy tell them it’s going to be ok, even though it isn’t. But who can explain how you’re supposed to live among monsters, completely unaffected by senseless death and suffering?
How are you supposed to stand it, being the last, remaining human among the walking dead?
There are two groups of people now: the ones who are unable to tolerate anything different, too lazy to adapt to radical change, demanding others perform for them the delusion that life has returned to the “normal” they feel entitled to from before. And the people who understand that the conditions for such a return do not exist. Everything in our society is being pivoted to privilege the first group at the expense of everyone else.
We are being told to doubt ourselves so that we will comply with the death fantasy. We are being told all the research on long-term effects of the disease is meaningless. We are told to accept that the virus is over now because the masks have are gone but to reject the evidence of our own eyes when the people we love disappear. We are told that ignorance is strength. Mass disablement is freedom. Mass death is living.
War is peace.
In Ukraine, a young democracy that only won its independence from the death cult that was the Soviet Union 30 years ago, a whole country is putting everything on the line for the sake of its future. While in America, the oldest democracy in the world, as it were, individuals would rather die than unclench their necrotic, grubby hands from a past that will not return.
As Ukraine fights the threat together, in America you’re on your own against the Russian army. And anyway, it’s only “mild Russians.” According to the CDC, the war is over now. It’s time to abandon even basic defenses and just surrender to the Russians. Is there a serious risk of long-term, lifelong debilitation if this turns into Long Russians? Yes, but don’t worry! It’ll become endemic Russians once you get used to all the death. Wouldn’t it be easier if you just learned to live with it?
It is only by a thin slip of history that the people who believe that Trump won the 2020 election didn’t get their way. If they had, the rest of us who know the truth would now be forced to live under the tyranny of their delusion. That is what is happening to the people who know that “The Virus Is Over Now” didn’t actually win in 2022.
Just as exactly 2 years ago, in March of 2022 China is once again shutting down cities, and a surge is once again sweeping through Europe, and Americans are once again dancing on their own ignorant graves. A nation of necrophiliac zombies who would sacrifice nothing for the sake of a better future. Who can see nothing other than what they would “go back” to. A nation that wants to make 2020 great again. Forever.
Living With It.
In 1849, more than 14,000 people died of cholera in London alone. Debilitating cholera outbreaks were a global scourge. People would come down with diarrhea, vomiting, get dehydrated and be dead within days or even hours. Pandemic waves would wipe out thousands.
Today we live with cholera.
Do you know how?
In 19th century London, people used cesspools underneath building cellars to collect human waste. This sludge would flow into sewers, contaminating their drinking wells. Because cholera is spread by ingesting the cholera bacteria, commonly found in water contaminated by feces, the bacteria from human excrement would find their way into human drinking water and the cycle would repeat over and over.
In 1848, England passed The Public Health Act, a groundbreaking move that set in motion an entire legislative discipline based on the impact of environmental factors on human health. The Public Health Act reframed the stewardship of the health of a public as the responsibility of a government. Shoutout also to inventing sanitation. No big. This is why you don’t have vibrio cholera coming out of the tap, or SARS COV-2 for that matter. One time, we raised the entire city of Chicago just to build a functionally draining sewage system.
This is how we live with Cholera. To live with COVID vaccines alone aren’t enough. We need masking policy in public spaces, improved ventilation systems everywhere, better testing infrastructure, readily available antiviral treatments, and widespread medical acknowledgement of, and funding for Long Covid research. LOL. Obviously we’re not doing any of that! Instead we’re dismantling the meager mitigation measures we used to have. Today we’d let Chicago drown in its own filth. Good riddance!
For people in the 21st century, “living with COVID” means pretending it doesn’t exist. It means rejecting even the most basic, simple, precautions. It means regressing back to the level of consuming our own shit.
Be Your Own Light.
Rochelle Walensky the director of the United States’ CDC, has said that “The scarlet letter of this pandemic is the mask. It reminds us that we’re in the middle of a pandemic.”
The reason masks remind people that we are in a pandemic is because we are. Masks are a confirmation that what is happening now is not normal. Should not be normalized. Simply deciding that you are done with COVID and pretending it’s gone now is not “living with COVID,” it is sentencing people to die.
The people who are not particularly worried about COVID are worse than the disease itself because a society willing to blithely accept mass death for the sake of personal convenience is a society that will tolerate absolutely anything.
People who can’t be bothered with the reality of COVID, who don’t care about anybody else but themselves, believing they will be unaffected, are directly helping to usher in this graveyard world where government polices that target and destroy “expendable” populations for the sake of authoritarian ideology are normal.
The virus has no choice. It’s just doing what it does. What’s truly more horrifying is living in a society of intentional collaborators. Necrophiliacs who love the virus so much they wouldn’t even use protection. It just feels better this way. Who would readily send you to your execution, calmly insisting, this is freedom; why are you freaking out? Death macht frei, bb.
For the rest of your life you’ll know now that when the only solution is unity there will be no solution. You walk among the already failed.
None of this is intended to change anyone’s mind if they don’t have the wherewithal (or maybe the cognitive resources anymore) to do it themselves. I am writing this for those who are actually COVID-smart. Who know the research and give a shit about other people and refuse to become moral zombies: You exist. You are right. You deserve better.
“My fellow Americans,” Sarah Kendzior, author, researcher, and scholar on authoritarianism, wrote in November, 2016, “I have a favor to ask you:”
I want you to write about who you are, what you have experienced, and what you have endured.
Write down what you value; what standards you hold for yourself and for others. Write about your dreams for the future and your hopes for your children. Write about the struggle of your ancestors and how the hardship they overcame shaped the person you are today.
Write your biography, write down your memories. Because if you do not do it now, you may forget.
Write a list of things you would never do. Because it is possible that in the next year, you will do them.
Write a list of things you would never believe. Because it is possible that in the next year, you will either believe them or be forced to say you believe them.
Authoritarianism is not merely a matter of state control, it is something that eats away at who you are. It makes you afraid, and fear can make you cruel. It compels you to conform and to comply and accept things that you would never accept, to do things you never thought you would do.
You do it because everyone else is doing it, because the institutions you trust are doing it and telling you to do it, because you are afraid of what will happen if you do not do it, and because the voice in your head crying out that something is wrong grows fainter and fainter until it dies.
We are heading into dark times, and you need to be your own light. Do not accept brutality and cruelty as normal even if it is sanctioned. Protect the vulnerable and encourage the afraid. If you are brave, stand up for others. If you cannot be brave — and it is often hard to be brave — be kind.
But most of all, never lose sight of who you are and what you value. If you find yourself doing something that feels questionable or wrong a few months or years from now, find that essay you wrote on who you are and read it. Ask if that version of yourself would have done the same thing.
And if the answer is no? Don’t do it.
