This may be a record as I’ve been collecting information and reading about and adding info to the ongoing draft of this blog post, for oh, over two years.
I’ve been doing this, basically ever since society collectively decided that Covid was over and that we’d all stop masking, stop most precautions, and start acting like everything was back to “normal”.
Or at least whatever “normal” was before March 2020.
The problem is, Covid still exists, is still evolving and the information will never stop. (I searched for “Covid” in my library’s catalogue and got 1227 results which was way higher than even I expected!)
So I’ve decided that I’m just going to hit “Post” on this even though it doesn’t feel complete (because it can never be comprehensive and “complete”) and it may become like a couple ongoing posts I have – my annual “When Did It First Snow” post and my “Tropical Holiday History” one among others – where I go back and add and update regularly.
I initially thought about finally posting this when it was announced that our government would no longer be supplying free Covid tests which was another way to signal Covid was behind us and a very clear line between “during Covid” and “after Covid”.
(I mean, how do you know you’re positive with Covid and should stay home for 5-10 days if you can’t test yourself? Or does it matter anyhow since the majority of people seem to have bought into the myth that Covid is “just a cold”?)
It’s a small thing that’s gotten me to finally finish this never-ending blog post [edit: not really – I’m posting this months after I wrote this paragraph!] – I got called home from work as Sasha was sick at school and though it’s not Covid (maybe? Who knows since tests aren’t freely available anymore!), its so many of the things I want to talk about rolled up into one – increasing sickness that may or may not be related to Covid [edit: something I’m noticing an uptick in again as fall 2024 draws closer], either immediately or delayed affects, impact on workplaces, impact on working people who are caring for children and/or aging parents, etc. etc.
Because, of course, the reality is that Covid is not over – it (and the many many dominos created by the pandemic) is with us and will be with us for the rest of our lives.
(The rest of our lives, however shortened those may be, that is!)
That’s because Covid has gone from being a health emergency to an economic emergency as the working population has been decimated by deaths, early retirements, people leaving work due to their own new health issues or to care for others.
There is also the direct reality that sick time usage by those still working has gone through the roof worldwide as people are getting sick more, some people who used to come in when they “had the sniffles” have been taught (rightly!) to stay home when sick, both for their own health but also to minimize the domino effects of getting other coworkers sick. (The flip side of this is people – often who have limited sick time due to being new or just having employers who aren’t generous in this regard coming in when they’re sick as they need to the money instead of staying home and not getting paid at all.)
Employees who don’t have physical symptoms are also now more willing to use sick time to take a “mental health” day, both because society is increasingly open about mental health being as legitimate as physical health but also because, every single person on earth, no matter what they say out loud or how much they “believed” in Covid/vaccines/shutdowns, was affected by living through a WORLDWIDE MASS TRAUMA EVENT.
Still, the denial is strong.
I mean, this tweet below reads like a parody when a professor of Psychology and Brain Science at *Harvard* is openly wondering why, oh, why, the attendance at the classes of he and his colleagues is repeatedly decimated?
Another myth is that Covid only seriously affects older people.
One wild thing about Covid is the range of impacts it can have on all aspects of the human body – lungs, heart, blood, brain, etc. etc.
The deaths from Covid are tragic but the impacts on the living are actually worse.
Another contributing factor is that Long Covid is new, real and sometimes manifests long after someone has “recovered” from their initial infection.
And Covid has all sorts of indirect impacts.
We’ve been trying to figure out some ongoing stomach issues for Sasha that have seen us visit multiple family doctors, specialists, have her undergo various tests, diet changes and more.
One of our visits was to a pediatrician and in the course of chatting about the impacts of the pandemic and the stress it causes for kids, he said he’d seen more anxiety and depression issues in the past couple years then in the previous 20+ years of his career combined!)
One final reality is that Covid is like a horror movie monster, moving and mutating on a completely different timeline than humans use, relentlessly stalking us and reinfecting us over and over – each time with an increased risk of it “getting” us with something more serious than a few days of feeling unwell and making humans the proverbial “boiling frogs” who don’t know what is happening to us until it is too late.
