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.
Remember: when people say 'during Covid' what they mean is 'during the period when we had non-pharmaceutical interventions to mitigate the spread of Covid'. The narrative created by government /media has led most people to falsely assume that the end of NPIs = the end of Covid.
— Conor Browne (@brownecfm) March 15, 2024
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”?)
Ten things that are going to evolve into a cold
— tern (@1goodtern) March 27, 2024
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.
Those people who told you they had a nasty flu last month?
They had Covid.Those people who told you they had a nasty stomach bug last week?
They had Covid.— tern (@1goodtern) December 5, 2023
(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.
None of the people who pushed for widespread repeat covid infection predicted that we would be entering into a period of such widespread long term illness that it would effect whole national economies.
They said everything would go back to normal.— tern (@1goodtern) February 18, 2024
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.)
Orrrr… hear me out… we could try staying home when we are sick with any contagious illness. https://t.co/1sf0bmhpOH
— Dr. Adam Ogieglo (@AOgieglo) March 2, 2024
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.
Why Doctors Don’t Acknowledge the Dangers of C19
This is one of the best explanations I’ve come across. And it’s written by a doctor. pic.twitter.com/M6TWN6SZs7
— #9 Dream (@GayFabFourFan) August 27, 2024
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?
What's up with undergrads missing class constantly due to sickness? I've heard this is a thing at multiple institutions. My class has been repeatedly decimated.
— Sam Gershman (@gershbrain) April 14, 2024
Another myth is that Covid only seriously affects older people.
1. Sometimes I find it difficult to remain professional and measured on this platform. This is one of those occasions, as I watch politicians seemingly unable to grasp the fact that with Covid in a state of constant and unmitigated transmission, children will be sick more often..
— Conor Browne (@brownecfm) March 19, 2024
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.
Covid: A Brain Damaging Story
I believe that in the absence of large scale studies and conducting brain imaging on a mass scale, we have to rely upon ourselves to turn to real world examples we may already be witnessing.
Some questions about what you may be seeing…
?
— James Throt MBBS, MD, PhD, FRCPath (@JamesThrot) March 14, 2024
Millions of tweets like this and still so many not grasping the reason why this may be occurring. It’s a global issue.
How many times can I keep shouting the same thing and it not sink in?
COVID CAUSES DAMAGE TO THE FRONTAL AND TEMPORAL LOBES.
THIS CAN CAUSE SOCIOPATHY. https://t.co/szQoRRGaiq pic.twitter.com/hSCpoKqdYq
— James Throt MBBS, MD, PhD, FRCPath (@JamesThrot) March 16, 2024
The deaths from Covid are tragic but the impacts on the living are actually worse.
Why should we care about a virus with a "99.8% survival rate"?
This thread highlights the actual impact a virus with a high survival rate can have on the population and why it is all the people who survive that we should be most worried about. ?1/#covid #LongCovid #Health pic.twitter.com/IRB5D2sy0A
— Jeff Gilchrist (@jeffgilchrist) March 16, 2024
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.
1. The reason the pandemic is uniquely dangerous is because of its pace. That is to say, the changes it is causing in society (highly stressed healthcare systems, workforce issues etc) and the long-term effects of infection are accumulating slowly enough to be normalised.
— Conor Browne (@brownecfm) March 2, 2024
