The pandemic isn't over

People don’t talk about Covid very much anymore. People either never believed it was a real threat, or they believed it was a real threat but that the vaccines made it harmless. Neither are true. Go get the vaccine, it’s better to be vaccinated than not. But the vaccine didn’t turn it into a cold. Personally, Covid scares me because it can cause brain damage and diabetes. I already have a mid IQ and pre-diabetes, so I can’t afford to lose any more brain cells or get worse at processing blood sugar, thanks. I already live alone and have no one to take care of me if I get a debilitating chronic illness. I’m just trying to take care of myself here.

I’m finding the online Covid cautious community to be a bit more insular than I’d like, and a bit too married and upper-class for me to relate to. I’m single and live alone, so living life exactly like it’s March 2020 doesn’t work for me. There’s some compromises I need to make. I’m not going to cut off my non-masking family, for example. I’ll wear a mask around them. I’m not going to eat my Thanksgiving dinner outside in the cold. I did that once and honestly, they were pretty cool about it but it just felt awful. It’s a holiday that literally revolves eating with your family, so yes, I’ll take the mask off and eat my turkey with them. I’m not going to eat in a restaurant, and trust me, it feels damn weird to be the lone masked person asking for their food to go. I think eating a restaurant though is basically right next door to just injecting yourself with actual Covid though, so I’m not going to risk it. If you talk to people online though, they mostly seem to have really solid Covid safe social bubbles and I don’t get the sense that a lot of them are making the kind of compromises I make on a regular basis. I don’t drive, so I have to take the bus sometimes even though masks aren’t mandated anymore. I have to trust my mask. As far as I know, I haven’t gotten Covid (knock on wood) so I think they work pretty well. A lot of people in the Covid cautious community don’t really seem to trust their masks though, judging by the fear they seem to have about being indoors around unmasked people. I don’t blame them for their fear, there’s a lot of good reasons for it, but if you’re going to encourage people to mask, well…maybe trust that your mask will actually protect you?

So I guess I consider myself “moderately” Covid cautious. It’s still too much for your average “you do you, except really not because I think your mask is a sign of neurosis” sort of person. But for a Covid cautious person, honestly, I’m a daredevil. As usual, I don’t really fit in anywhere. I’m sort of used to that, but as a human being with actual human emotions, I actually have never really gotten used to it. I see a lot of blaming of the individual in the Covid cautious community, and as a socialist I really have to push back against that. Placing all the weight upon people’s individual morality is the way of liberalism, not socialism. The socialist outlook is to look at material conditions and also analyze things like cultural hegemony and manufactured consent on the part of the mainstream corporate media, because people don’t solely function as independent agents free of influence from the outside. I’d like to get into this more in a future post but I’ll just say that most people don’t have the time or energy to keep up regularly with Covid news that contradicts what they see and hear in the mainstream media and it’s genuinely difficult to make the choice to not conform and be the lone masked weirdo. We should educate and encourage it, but I’m not going to judge the individual, I’m going to judge the society that’s pursuing this pro-infection agenda for the sake of corporate profits and the fragile illusion of normalcy and peace.

That’s all for now. One final thing: if you’re not wearing a mask anymore, it’s not too late to start again. If you can’t bear the idea of wearing a mask around your friends, consider at least wearing a mask in situations where you’re sharing indoor air with people that you don’t know. If you can’t give up restaurants, at least wear a mask to the grocery store and the doctor’s office. Every time you wear a mask, you’re protecting yourself, and every time you don’t, you’re not. Increase the time you’re protecting yourself, and decrease the time you’re not. Ok. That’s really it for now.