Soft Covid
In the beginning, when news of the outbreak raced ahead of the outbreak itself, we heard about all sorts of diverse symptoms, from chills and aches to strange bunions and unusual lesions. Before it’s canonisation of symptoms into the tell-tale tickly cough, chest pain and loss of smell, Covid-19 presented as a syndrome, a co-occurring set of symptoms with complex and perhaps diverse causes. As with ME or Lyme’s Disease, the co-occurrence of the symptoms does not mean one causes the other. An underlying cause may be postulated.
Whether or not it is medically accurate, I want in this article to consider Covid-19 as a syndrome rather than a disorder, or at least as a syndromic disorder. I want to think about Soft Covid, a syndrome that seems to transcend the matter of whether one has it or not. We might say that it is there one day and gone the next. We might wonder if it is a thing or not. We might say that it is something that hovers more than it is there.
So what is it?
Whether we have had Covid or not, whether we have been vaccinated or not, whether we believe our natural defences are the best defences, whether we believe the vaccine is marvellous or flawed, or flawed but nonetheless the best defence we have against viral harm to ourselves or others, whether we think humanity and its cutting edge science is the best chance we have, or whether we think it is misguided, deluded, hijacked by some dark order or just plain old human greed…
In other words, whether we are V or —V medically, philosophically, politically, chances are that we have Soft Covid.
As a parent, or the child of an elderly or otherwise vulnerable parent, our welfare and that of those near and dear to us is a concern. Whichever side of it you are on, vaccinate or no, the V looms large. Forget loom, at any moment it might be shoved in your face by friends or family or members of a social group. The other mums at the school your kid goes to, say. The gal pals you used to hang out with and talk books and movies or whatever.
If Facebook and Google have led the way with workplace vaccination policy (do it or go) we will hardly be surprised when others follow suit. Imagine then you have a job offer. The vaccination policy is not mentioned in the letter. You wonder, if you are vaccinated, is that a boon to your future employer? Or if you are not vaccinated, should you declare it?
Or perhaps there is a note from your kid’s school. Attendance will require vaccination from next month. Will you agree to your child being vaccinated? Will your child agree? The UK government has set the age for vaccine self-determination at 12.
Perhaps you have taken the vaccine and not looked back. The future looks bright. You can go to school, go to work, get on a plane, go on holiday, drink coffee in a cafe, go to a music festival.
Yet you have friends or family members who have not taken the same route. Some are compelled to explain their reasoning to you. Some may do so in forthright terms. You have compromised your immune system, they say. Just as Monsanto and others worked for decades to figure out how to insert themselves into the natural cycles of plants and crops, so Pfizer and others have worked for decades to insert themselves into the natural processes of organism, pathogen and immune system.
I don’t want to play into the V divide, but, going by reactions I have encountered among the vaccinated to the slightest shade cast on the parade of science, your reaction may be to shut down. Abort conversation. If necessary abort social connection.
Conversely, it may be that you, for various reasons, have decided not to vaccinate but a good friend of yours has decided to take it. Or they have taken the decision for their child, to whom you are an auntie or uncle or godparent. They haven’t had the jab yet and so you feel compelled to at the very least express your doubts. The whole thing is a live trial. It hasn’t yet been trialled on children. If it’s safe then why did they pass legislation immunising the manufacturers from being sued, should anything untoward happen. And untoward things are happening. Why take the risk? Why not wait and see?
And if you have taken the vaccine you might reply, wait and see what—the numbers of cases going through the roof? The emergence of new variants?
Whichever side you’re on, you do see that you are waiting and seeing?
If you have taken a taxi recently, you will be familiar with the plastic sheeting that now separates you from the driver. If you have been to a shopping mall you will be familiar with the plastic face shield. All but the hardiest of libertarian warriors have at one time or another worn a face mask.
You will have wondered if such measures really work. Or perhaps they work but only to an extent, and statistically speaking, that is better than nothing. One can go to a restaurant if one wears a mask, but one must take it off to eat. One might sneeze in a maskless moment, or someone else might, and that moment might be all it takes.
In terms of Soft Covid—and this is a soft argument—it seems that these measures function more as tokens of social compliance. In times of previous corona viruses, the 2003 SARS outbreak, a mask said its wearer was infected and was therefore dangerous. In current times the meaning of the mask is more complex. For some, wearing a mask suggests putting the greater good before one’s own. It means compliance with a social order. In more traditional societies, compliance is tradition, community, cohesion. In more modern societies, compliance suggests slumber, enslavement. It is the anti-word of the defiance of anti-vax.
We could, as Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and other, generally right-wing leaders have variously done, say the hell with it. Masks don’t work, even statistically. Lockdowns piss everyone off and stall the economy. So let the bodies pile up.
It might be that the palpable illogic of social restrictions betray a much larger falseness. There is a spectrum of possibilities. Something is afoot and its agent—Pfizer, The Billionaires, Bill Gates or the people behind the people behind the people [repeat] that tell him and Mark Zuckerberg what to do, Satan, Wetiko, The Predator from the Depths of the Cosmos—whatever your flavour of They, They are up to something and it’s not good for you or me.
Or it might be that the palpable illogic of social restrictions, if a mess, is the best we can do, given the complex balance of viral mutation, new advice from the scientists, new signals from the economy, the movement of goods, customs, Brexit, China, Russia and the mounting pressure of inaction over climate change. All of that of course with the baked-in slant of capitalism. It is easier, says Slavoj Zizek, to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. It’s too big to fail.
All of which hangs over us—vaccinated, unvaccinated, believer, unbeliever, spiritual, atheist, scientist, poet—like a cloud. It touches everything and everyone. Directly and indirectly.
Is it not true that Covid has brought us all together? Even if Sars-Cov-2 is the conspiracists’ Problem to the killer vaccine’s Solution, no one can say that it has not, far more than any Olympic Games, made the world a stage and all of us on it, even those who would rather remain in the wings, its players.
The other day I attended an Andean funeral. The deceased had suffered for many years from diabetes. Some months previously he had contracted Covid and had recovered. It is not clear what he died from, or what cause they put on the death certificate.
At the end of the church ceremony and again after the customary slap-up meal of cuy (guinea pig) and papa (potatoes) everyone went around and hugged everyone else. I noticed I was often held at arm’s length. It was nothing personal, of course. It was Covid. For all anyone knew, including myself, I might have the virus. And perhaps foreigners and viruses is a special story here in South America.
Some people wore masks. Some didn’t. Some didn’t and then did. And vice versa. The on/off of the mask is an intensely personal affair, even in an intensely collective Andean community. There are moments when removing the mask is necessary—e.g. to eat or drink something—and there are moments when removing it is less necessary, e.g. when speaking. It is natural that in the course of a day, or a social gathering, mask wearing will be intermittent.
It would take, I think, extreme discipline for it to be otherwise. One would then have to ask what was driving that discipline, and, if a mask was all that stood between health and illness, whether the social mingling was worth it.
Many have argued strongly and passionately that it is. Covid is a plot to strip us of our civil liberties. If there are too many of us, They know it better than anyone else, and, rather than attend to the problem some other, longer, softer, way, they have hatched a plot to get rid of most of us.
Some of these voices are right-wing or neo-libertarian, sharing platforms with pro-gun, pro-life voices (love that irony) working either to conceal or trumpet their foundations in Rapture. This is western liberal fundamentalism, and it is every bit as fundamental as the Islamicism of the Taliban.
Many people attending festivals in restriction-lifted Britain this summer have contracted Covid. Some will say, told you so. Others will suspect the government of a cynical strategy allowing Covid case numbers to rise, therefore enlarging the mutation platform, leading to a crisis come the autumn, when, lo and behold, new and tougher lockdowns will be necessary, probably including vaccination requirements for boarding a plane or having a cup of coffee.
What then? Pro-vaxers will double down, no doubt happier than ever to scapegoat the unvaccinated. We may also find that the virus itself increasingly transcends the divide between vaccinated and unvaccinated. Will we trust our natural defences? Will we trust the vaccines?
And of course none of us is an island. Do I trust my natural defences not only to cope with Delta and Lambda variants, but all future variants, including any split off or mutated as a result of the vaccination programme? If one has been vaccinated in this first wave, will one trust the mechanics of the mRNA vaccine in all circumstances? What if unvaccinated festival-goers are cooking up a viral storm? What if all of us, vaccinated and unvaccinated, infected, uninfected, post-infected are the biological surface upon which something terrible is assembling itself? One virus to rule us all and in the darkness bind us.
I say this not to generate fear, but to bring our attention to a fear that is already there. A syndromic fear with many facets. Fear that we might fall ill, or that we might die before our time. Or that a loved one will. Or that our family or community, country or world will collapse around us. Our kids may never return to school. They might die, or develop mysterious symptoms, like Josie, the ‘lifted’ girl in Ishiguro’s novel Klara and the Sun.
We do not know which way to turn. We might make it to Portugal, Bali, Mexico, only to find ourselves marooned in a future lockdown. Sooner or later the economy will collapse. There will be no petrol, therefore no lorries, therefore no food on the shelves. Therefore I should be prepping a cabin with guns and beans. But everyone is thinking of that, and land prices have rocketed. And besides, who will live there with me? We may review our favourite zombie movie for ideas as to the outcome.
All of this. All of these fears impact our health. Every sore throat, headache or mood swing might be Covid. Or a side effect of the vaccine. The possibility, the thought of it, is more than enough to generate disorder among our cells.
Is there not a psychic spike protein in the air?
It seems to me that from the microbiological level to the sociopolitical level, virus and vaccine resemble one another. The virus enters the cell, and instructs it to manufacture more virus. The mRNA vaccine’s famous protein spike, copied from the virus, does something similar. The reported side effects of the vaccine seem to be at least as diverse as those early, pre-canonical symptoms of the virus. Both virus and vaccine stand accused of being bioweapons.
Given this symmetry, it is tempting to say, let us come together. Who dies, dies. Who lives, lives. Perhaps this is the message from Mother Nature, a reminder that we are not immortal, at least not in our bodily, natural resource-chomping form.
Or am I being duped? Is it a message from They? Remember the spin, first one way and then the other, over whether Sars-Cov-2 came out of the lab in Wuhan or not?
I think I have a headache coming on.
I have written elsewhere in this blog about the post-truth paradigm. Rather than see the impossibility of truth as part of the Soft Covid syndrome, I want to see it here as a cure. Or at least as a coping strategy.
As a minimum we can take heart from the uniting factor on both sides of the V: Vaccinated or not, we are afraid. We may not know it yet but we are afraid that something big is coming or is already here. The juggernaut of Normal has hit something and is foundering. The paroxysms might be slow today but the ship could capsize at any moment.
When we advise our friend, then, that they should or should not give their child the vaccine, and have the door slammed in our face, we should take a moment to see our reflection in the shut door before storming off.
For were we not looking for affirmation in the first place? Affirmation of something that we do not, perhaps cannot, truly know.
Underneath the hardness of the information war that caused it, there is a softness to post-truth. A softness we can push gently into. As cracks appear in the narrative of normal, new flows begin. If we can’t push the river, we may seek new rivers. Or we may stay put and let it all wash over us.
I mentioned Lyme’s Disease and ME earlier. Both have extensive support resources. One mainstay of those is information. If that turns out to be difficult in the case of Soft Covid, we can certainly rely on the other mainstay, that we are not alone. If information has been weaponised, let us find places where it can be decommissioned, where we can, by bringing the underlying fear to light, see it for the evolutionary impulse—the initiation—that Covid the syndromic disorder really is.
