What has changed??
*hint*It isn’t Covid
I don’t need to tell anyone that, judging by social media, mainstream media, water cooler discussions, etc that it appears the pandemic is over. Poof!
“New normal”.
“ learn to live with it”
“ it’s no worse than a cold or the flu”
Sorry to be your cold splash of reality, but covid is still here. It’s still causing around 100,000 cases a week and around 1000 deaths, on a good week.
Other things that haven’t changed?
Covid is airborne. The virus spreads through the air, much like cigarette smoke. If you are standing close enough to someone to get a face full of their “smoke”, then you are close enough to get a healthy dose of their Covid as well.
Masks are still the single best tool we have right now to reduce the amount of virus particles that get into our body. Masking works best when everyone is wearing one, but there is still protection for one-way masking, especially if you are wearing a well fitted, high-quality mask (N95, KN 95)
You still want to avoid getting Covid. Even more, you want to avoid getting a second, third, fourth or more Covid infection. We know that Covid is not just a respiratory disease. It damages your entire vascular system, and seems to particularly like to destroy heart and brain tissue.
At this time, we know that we cannot build lifelong immunity to Covid through either infection or vaccine. The virus is just too smart. It is able to mutate faster than we are able to currently create variant specific vaccines. There is currently lots of work being done to create a “universal” Covid vaccine. But until that time, we know that immunity wanes about three months after either an infection or vaccine. Getting Covid three or four times a year is not a sustainable public health plan. Your chances for developing long Covid increase with each infection.
Covid is still classified as a bio safety, hazard level 3 pathogen. In order for scientist to work with this virus, they must be dressed in full PPE with specific air filtration and airflow requirements. But somehow people have been convinced that wearing a mask to prevent exposure to a BSL 3 pathogen is too much of an infringement on personal freedoms?
Covid hasn’t changed.
Months, years, generations from now when people ask, how was this allowed to happen, the answer is frighteningly simple.
Last year, a political, and economic decision was made to downplay the seriousness of this deadly virus. You no longer heard about Covid cases and deaths. Masking requirements changed or sometimes just disappeared without any reason. A collective decision was made to ignore the facts. Here is the playbook that was presented to Congress a little over a year ago
https://docs.house.gov/meetings/VC/VC00/20220302/114453/HHRG-117-VC00-20220302-SD009.pdf
But the problem is, Covid hasn’t changed.
The reason I decided to write about this tonight is because of this story that came out today.
The absolute absurdity that our highest level public health organization, the CDC, tried to hold a conference, where are the impacts of Covid and long Covid were the highlighted subject, without any safety mitigations. There were no masks. There was no social distancing.
And the CDC conference became a Covid super spreader.
Not even sure what else to say.
Protect yourself, your family, your friends, because it’s obvious no one else is going to.
Wear a mask when indoors .
Advocate for better air filtration in our schools, businesses, public gathering places.
Stay home if you are sick.
Stay safe.
Stacy
That White House memo is enough to make anyone sick. And it IS, quite literally, making people sick. Just, ugh. As for the CDC superspreader event - this is the sort of thing I'd expect to read in The Onion, and yet here we are. How did we get to a place where public health is all about optics and politics? We're building a nation of immunocompromised citizens, and that, to me, is just unreal. Thanks for writing this, Stacy. Please keep up the good work, and we, your readers, will keep trying to spread the word to whomever will listen.