“The Unraveling of America” Anthropologist Wade Davis on how COVID-19 signals the end of the American era by Wade Davis for Rolling Stone, 2020 August 6
When we say that the United States is joining Syria and Nicaragua by not participating in the Paris agreement, I think it’s not fair to leave it at that, because neither of them refused to sign for reasons anything like the selfish ones of the United States.
Syria was under sanctions making it complicated to even attend, and on top of that were embroiled in intense civil warfare and not in a great position to make a commitment like that. They didn't disagree with it, but were never involved with the deal in the first place.
Nicaragua actually felt that the Paris agreement was not strict enough, arguing that they didn’t want to be complicit in a voluntary effort that didn’t properly allocate the responsibility to large countries for being the ones who poisoned the environment in the first place, nor impose a punishment on anyone failing to comply with the standards. Nicaragua is one of the countries that’s most affected by climate change but least responsible, and they felt that wasn’t fairly reflected in the accord.
The United States is the ONLY country that has rejected the Paris accord because of the belief that our environment is less important than our profit. Even oppressive regimes and the poorest nations in the world are smarter than that, or at least know when to keep their mouths shut and play along. The USA is not really in the league of Syria or Nicaragua, but alone in the refusal to cooperate out of pure greed.
Someday a child will learn about this year and ask “but if there was an epidemic killing people, and crowded spaces made it spread faster, why didn’t they open the prisons and detention centers and let the people inside go home? why would they leave people in there to die?” and their teacher or parent will feel the way we do, when a child asks how slavery or the Holocaust was allowed to happen: unable to explain in any way that makes sense, and trapped in the knowledge that history cannot forgive us
This is not normal. Mass captivity is not normal. A structure premised on the assumption that maintaining that captivity is more important than anything, more important than preserving life, is not normal. Writing people off in the millions is not normal. We’ve made it normal. We’ve suspended the basic human impulse for community and decency, but that suspension won’t last forever. The prison won’t exist forever, and when it’s gone, our grandchildren will not be able to understand how we could do this.
I keep trying to write something here about the outbreak in San Quentin* and I keep having to stop because my heart is breaking. I can’t remember a time in my adult life when I have felt this afraid. Someone I love is in San Quentin. He hasn’t called in two weeks; we’re pretty sure the prison’s gone into lockdown. If he gets COVID and dies from it, it could be without us ever hearing his voice again.
Like I said, I’m finding it hard to write about this, so I’m just going to link the article above and say, if you’re in the United States, whatever state you’re in, call your governor right now and tell them “Let everyone out right now.” Use the Justice Collaborative’s resources.
We have two choices: we release at least half of the 2.3 million people incarcerated in the United States right now, or we watch tens of thousands of them die, and then we watch hundreds of thousands more people die when the second wave of the epidemic strikes us from the prisons which it will do because that is how epidemiology works but I should not have to mention that because the people inside the prisons are people and their lives have fucking value whether they endanger the rest of us or not.
And I will say this part again,because this is what a fucking death camp looks likewhen it happens in your backyard, and your great-granddaughter will know it even if you don’t:
OUR GRANDCHILDREN WILL NOT BE ABLE TO UNDERSTAND HOW WE COULD DO THIS.
*As of June 25 the number is up to 505 cases, not counting staff. The article linked is a couple days old but the more recent articles have paywalls. The case numbers are doubling every few days.
From the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists have raised concerns about the potential for long-term health problems linked to SARS-CoV-2 and warned repeated infections are likely to increase the risk.
An association between COVID and cardiovascular disease emerged quickly.
And now — almost exactly four years since the first case was discovered in Wuhan — a growing body of scientific research is cautiously linking the inflammation caused by a COVID infection to diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's as well as autoimmune conditions from bowel disease to rheumatoid arthritis.
The virus has even been suggested to impact some pregnant women, associated with double the risk of premature delivery.
As the eighth COVID wave hits Australia, experts are taking notice.
...
When the first wave of COVID patients began reporting loss of smell and taste, Barnham's radar went up.
"Any time you see olfactory impairment it tells you that there's going to be neurological impact," he says. "Loss of smell is a cardinal, pre-clinical symptom of Parkinson's disease and it's been implicated in Alzheimer's disease as well."
The fact that COVID patients reported loss of smell not only during the active phase of the disease, but as a persistent symptom, suggested to Barnham that longer-term health consequences were likely. Loss of smell is associated with loss of brain volume.
[Image description: A photograph of a page from a spiral-bound sketchbook. The page has an illustration of the covid-19 virus and overlaid text that reads, "If I die of Covid-19 - forget burial - just drop my body on the steps of the C.D.C." A caption on the bottom of the page reads, "Ren Basel 2024. In memory of David Wojnarowicz and everyone killed by AIDS, COVID-19, and the government's negligence. Fight back!" End description.]
In 1988, AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz was photographed in a now-famous image, wearing a jacket that read, "If I die of AIDS - forget burial - just drop my body on the steps of the F.D.A.." I am far from the only person to adapt Wojnarowicz's words to COVID-19, but today I am feeling especially angry at the world. Holding the rage in my chest hurts--it hurts so fucking much--so instead, I've put it on paper.
Living through government negligence and community indifference during COVID-19 in 2024 fills me with rage and grief in equal measure, and as a queer person who studies queer history, I can see the echoes of AIDS in the way marginalized communities are being left to die.
COVID-19 is not over, and it is vital to take steps to protect yourself and others. Please, follow the work of the People's CDC, an organization dedicated to COVID-19 safety, activism, and education.
Our government has failed us. Our communities have failed us. For those of us who are immunocompromosed or otherwise high-risk, we only have each other.
Remember us. Fight with us. Mask up, get vaccinated, get boosted.
The United States has always been a terrible place to be sick and disabled. Ableism is baked into our myths of bootstrapping and self-reliance, in which health is virtue and illness is degeneracy. It is long past time for a bedrock shift, for all of us.
know someone who enjoys horror stories? share this one! it's true!
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3,000,000 deaths due to COVID-19 last year. Globally. Three million.
Case rates higher than 90% of the rest of the pandemic.
The reason people are still worried about COVID is because it has a way of quietly fucking up your body. And the risk is cumulative.
I'm going to say that again: the risk is cumulative.
It's not just that a lot of people get bad long-term effects from it. One in seven or so? Enough that it's kind of the Russian Roulette of diseases.
It's also that the more times you get it, the higher that risk becomes. Like if each time you survived Russian Roulette, the empty chamber was removed from the gun entirely.
The worst part is that, psychologically, we have the absolute opposite reaction. If we survive something with no ill effects, we assume it's pretty safe.
It is really, really hard to override that sense of, "Ok, well, I got it and now I probably have a lot of immunity and also it wasn't that bad."
It is not a respiratory disease. Airborne, yes. Respiratory disease, no: not a cold, not a flu, not RSV.
Like measles (or maybe chickenpox?), it starts with respiratory symptoms. And then it moves to other parts of your body.
It seems to target the lungs, the digestive system, the heart, and the brain the most.
It also hits the immune system really hard - a lot of people are suddenly more susceptible to completely unrelated viruses.
People get brain fog, migraines, forget things they used to know.
(I really, really hate that it can cross the blood-brain barrier. NOTHING SHOULD EVER CROSS THE BLOOD-BRAIN BARRIER IT IS THERE FOR A REASON.)
Anecdotal examples of this shit are horrifying. I've seen people talk about coworkers who've had COVID five or more times, and now their work... just often doesn't make sense?
They send emails that say things like, "Sorry, I didn't mean Los Angeles, I meant Los Angeles."
Or they insist they've never heard of some project that they were actually in charge of a year or two before.
Or their work is just kind of falling apart, and they don't seem to be aware of it.
People talk about how they don't want to get the person in trouble, so their team just works around it.
Or they describe neighbors and relatives who had COVID repeatedly, were nearly hospitalized, talked about how incredibly sick they felt at the time... and now swear they've only had it once and it wasn't bad, they barely even noticed it.
(As someone who lived with severe dissociation for most of my life, this is a genuinely terrifying idea to me. I've already spent my whole life being like, "but what if I told them that already? but what if I did do that? what if that did happen to me and I just don't remember?")
One of its known effects in the brain is to increase impulsivity and risk-taking, which is real fucking convenient honestly. What a fantastic fucking mutation. So happy for it on that one. Yes, please make it seem less important to wear a mask and get vaccinated. I'm not screaming internally at all now.
ALT
I saw a tweet from someone last year whose family hadn't had COVID yet, who were still masking in public, including school.
She said that her son was no kind of an athlete. Solidly bottom middle of the pack in gym.
And suddenly, this year, he was absolutely blowing past all the other kids who had to run the mile.
He wasn't running any faster. His times weren't fantastic or anything. It's just that the rest of the kids were worse than him now. For some reason.
I think about that a lot.
(Like my incredibly active six-year-old getting a cold, and suddenly developing post-viral asthma that looked like pneumonia.
He went back to school the day before yesterday, after being home for a month and using preventative inhalers for almost week.
He told me that it was GREAT - except that he couldn't run as much at recess, because he immediately got really tired.
Like how I went outside with him to do some yard work and felt like my body couldn't figure out how to increase breathing and heart rate.
I wasn't physically out of breath, but I felt like I was out of breath. That COVID feeling people describe, of "I'm not getting enough air." Except that I didn't have that problem when I had COVID.)
Some people don't observe any long (or medium) term side effects after they have it.
But researchers have found viral reservoirs of COVID-19 in everyone they've studied who had it.
It just seems to hang out, dormant, for... well, longer than we've had an opportunity to observe it, so far.
(I definitely watched that literal horror movie. I think that's an entire genre. The alien dormant under ice in the Arctic.)
All of which is to explain why we should still care about avoiding it, and how it manages to still cause excess deaths.
Measuring excess deaths has been a standard tool in public health for a long time.
We know how many people usually die from all different causes, every year. So we can tell if, for example, deaths from heart disease have gone way up in the past three years, and look for reasons.
Those are excess deaths: deaths that, four years ago, would not have happened.
During the pandemic, excess death rates have been a really important tool. For all sorts of reasons. Like, sometimes people die from COVID without ever getting tested, and the official cause is listed as something else because nobody knows they had COVID.
But also, people are dying from cardiovascular illness much younger now.
People are having strokes and heart attacks younger, and more often, than they did before the pandemic started.
COVID causes a lot of problems. And some of those problems kill people. And some of them make it easier for other things to kill us. Lung damage from COVID leading to lungs collapsing, or to pneumonia, or to a pulmonary embolism, for example.
The Economist built a machine-learning model with a 95% confidence interval that gauges excess death statistics around the world, to tell them what the true toll of the ongoing COVID pandemic has been so far.
Total excess deaths globally in 2023: Three million.
3,000,000.
Official COVID-19 deaths globally so far: Seven million. 7,000,000.
Total excess deaths during COVID so far: Thirty-five point two million. 35,200,000.
Five times as many.
That's bad.
I don't like that at all.
I'm glad last year was less than a tenth of that. I'm not particularly confident about that continuing, though, because last year we started a period of really high COVID transmission. Case rates higher than 90% of the rest of the pandemic.
Here's their data, and charts you can play with, and links to detailed information on how they did all of this:
Those ones are about a buck each after shipping - about $30 for a box of 30. They also have sample packs for a dollar, so you can try a couple of different sizes and styles.
You can wear an N95 mask for about 40 total hours before the effectiveness really drops, so that's like a dollar for a week of wear.
They're also family-owned and have cat-shaped masks and I really love them.
These ones are cuter and in a much wider range of colors, prints, and styles, but they're also more expensive; they range from $1.80 to $3 for a mask. ($18-$30 for a box of ten.)
The vaccine is important because it makes it MUCH less likely that you'll have such a bad case of COVID that you have to be hospitalized.
Severe COVID causes way more damage.
But the vaccine doesn't give you much immunity.
Basically, it takes 2 weeks for your immunity to build, and then you have maybe 50%-60% immunity for a month before it starts dropping again. It ends up at about 20%-30% by month 3, then it drops to near zero after month 6.
Why yes, it IS fucked up that we can barely manage to distribute vaccines once a year!
Immunity from getting COVID is a little higher. But it drops in about the same amount of time.
There's some evidence that if you get BOTH -- COVID and the vaccine for the strain of COVID you got -- then you have good long-lasting immunity. But a shockingly low number of people have gotten the vaccine in the past year.
For me, the strongest reason to wear a mask in public is that it makes it easier for other people to wear a mask in public.
I've seen lots and lots of chronically ill and immune-vulnerable people say that wearing a mask is good allyship.
Because (1) it protects them from anything you might not know you have.
And (2) it makes it safer for them to be out and to wear a mask. It makes it more normal, it encourages others to do it, and it makes it less likely that people will be awful to them about it.
A mask protects both you and other people. If the last thing you heard about masking is that it only protects others, you are four years behind on any information about this stuff and you are in danger because of that.
(Doubly so if you think you know when you're sick/contagious. "It only protects others and I'm not sick, so" is a big part of why case rates have been so high.)
Even if I don't think I'm at risk in a given situation, someone else might be. I might be getting coffee at a coffee shop where someone's coworker has COVID and doesn't know it yet.
Which makes them very infectious.
I know that one from personal experience! My normally extremely-COVID-cautious ex went out to eat twice in one weekend, last fall. He didn't think he was at any risk. I guess because there weren't many people there?
Listen: COVID is AIRBORNE. Unless there's a lot of air filtration going on, IT HANGS IN THE AIR FOR 4-6 HOURS.
THAT IS WHAT AIRBORNE MEANS. THEY WERE NOT CLEAR ENOUGH ABOUT THIS IN THE BEGINNING oF THE PANDEMIC.
Anyway: he didn't think he was at any risk from that... so he didn't mention it, or wear a mask around anybody afterward.
Within 24 hours, he came to my house to pick up the kid, stood in the living room talking to my roommate for like 30 minutes, and gave her COVID.
Three days after that, both of them got sick, and he tested positive. and that's how I found out we were all getting COVID!
Maybe if I show up wearing a mask, at a coffee shop where one of the baristas is contagious, or at a grocery store where some other shopper is contagious, it'll inspire them to grab a mask and put it on. Or to get some and start wearing them.
Maybe it'll just brighten the day of someone else who's wearing a mask. Or who isn't right then, but does when they're around their immune-compromised friends.
Also, if you hate masks, consider whether that's because you only tried cloth or surgical ones.
Cloth masks are harder to breathe through. Surgical masks can be too. Both of them can make your voice sound muffled. Neither one is super effective, either; I think they average 60%-80%, depending on the number of cloth layers.
I haven't really had either of those problems with an N95/KN94 mask. Plus I really do love that I can mutter things to myself or pull a face without anyone knowing. And in cooler weather, they help keep your face warm!
My kid wouldn't wear them to school until I got him the cat-shaped ones. Now he's so comfortable in them that he frequently forgets to take them off in the car.
TL;DR: please help normalize mask-wearing by wearing a mask! wearing a mask is Cool and it Helps People!
There’s a profound insecurity at the heart of any agenda that presumes that if kids aren’t spoon fed a black and white fairy tale of our national greatness, they’ll have no pride or loyalty. Arrogance isn’t patriotism, and education isn’t indoctrination. And anyone who doesn’t comprehend that difference doesn’t just need a history lesson, he needs a dictionary.
from a tumblr site perspective, because i did not add a title to it, so it didn’t fully register. from a supernatural perspective? because you can’t save him. because it’s always too late. because you always made that choice and said what you said and he never gets to hear anything different. because this is how the story ends. because this is how it started.
![[meme of that dog calmly drinking coffee in a room that's on fire, saying "this is fine"]](https://64.media.tumblr.com/a853b646b3ce4468351ea154bd074869/3823031794cdfc82-26/s400x600/f2ec596326fdbeed4e760fe7a44d02c141b1a3fc.png)
