I’m Sick of Pretending Covid’s Over (And You Should Be Too)

How Covid Became Yet Another Doom Loop We’re Trapped In

Image Credit: Morgan Stephens on Twitter

It’s that time of year again. Christmas? The holiday season? No, the time of year when we’re all supposed to pretend…Covid’s over. Smile!! Hey, take a selfie while you’re at it!! We won!! Or did we? Me? I’m tired of pretending that Covid’s over, and you should be, too.

Pretending, after all, is what we’re supposed to do. It’s become a norm to have to think, say, express the idea that Covid’s over, and heaven forbid you say that it isn’t. People will literally lash out at you — perfect strangers, maybe just overhearing you, online, wherever. And that norm exists because our official public health policy pretends that Covid is over, in most parts of the world, at this point, with the exception of China, which we’ll come back to.

This fatal transmission isn’t of a pandemic, but of negligent policybecoming a foolish set of social norms. Because as anyone can see, well, cases are rising yet again, and hospitals are being swamped, and the whole nine yards.

It’s at this juncture that people tend to lecture me. You know the “arguments” they make by now, and I put that in quotes because, well, I’m about to debunk them, all of them. Covid’s just the flu! It…it became a common cold!! So what, it doesn’t even matter anymore! You’re not going to die, are you? LOL. Get a grip, you fainting Victorian bride. You woman.

The subtext of all this is eminently clear: the strong survive, and the weak…well, they perish. This isn’t reason, it’s just selfishness, restated. Worse, these “arguments” come masked in the guise of “science,” when in fact science says none of the above. These self-supposed scientists would do better to actually read the science, because what it really has to say? Is dire.

And yet — astonshingly — it barely makes headlines, because, like I said, the norm is to pretend that Covid’s over, so every winter, we have to endure this bizarre groundhog day of Covidiocy.

What does it say? Let’s catch up on a little bit of the latest science. This comes from a study done at the University of Washington Medical School, whose “researchers analyzed about 5.8 million de-identified medical records in a database maintained by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the nation’s largest integrated health-care system. Patients represented multiple ages, races and sexes.”

What did it find? If you don’t know this, you should, and you should ask yourself why you don’t.

The researchers found that people with COVID-19 reinfections were twice as likely to die and three times more likely to be hospitalized than those with no reinfection. Additionally, people with repeat infections were 3½ times more likely to develop lung problems, three times more likely to suffer heart conditions and 1.6 times more likely to experience brain conditions than patients who had been infected with the virus once.

That’s not just “a” study. These findings have already supported by others. Like this one. Here’s a snippet from a new study that examined Covid patients on autopsy. What does it find?

Others have previously reported SARS-CoV-2 RNA within the heart, lymph node, small intestine and adrenal gland. We replicate these findings and conclusively demonstrate that SARS-CoV-2 is capable of infecting and replicating within these and many other tissues, including brain…. [these] prove definitively that SARS-CoV-2 is capable of infecting and replicating within the human brain.

Now, this should come as no surprise to those who actually read the science.We’ve known for quite some time that Covid isn’t just the flu or a cold. It goes on to infect organs of all kinds, including the brain. And we’re still understanding what kind of damage, it does, exactly, there. But what we do know is that the damage is very real. Every time you get infected with Covid, you are incurring what’s known to us economists as conditional risk: having had it another time, your risk of all kinds of things, from lung problems to heart conditions to outright death…goes right on increasing.

And every winter, we’re getting it. Over and over again. We can pretend that we’re not, sure. But the fact is that many of us are. There’s a funny tweet from some lady that says something like, “Why, I’ve had a hacking cough for six weeks, and I feel terrible, I wonder what it could be?” LOL. Yeah, no, totally, I wonder. Here you see the norm in action — we’re supposed to pretend it’s Novid — Not Covid. Meanwhile, we’re all getting Novid over and over again.

Dr Al-Aly, who led the study at the University of Washington, puts it very well:

During the past few months, there’s been an air of invincibility among people who have had COVID-19 or their vaccinations and boosters, and especially among people who have had an infection and also received vaccines; some people started to referring to these individuals as having a sort of superimmunity to the virus. Without ambiguity, our research showed that getting an infection a second, third or fourth time contributes to additional health risks in the acute phase, meaning the first 30 days after infection, and in the months beyond, meaning the long COVID phase.

He’s observing the norm in action too — we’re supposed to pretend it’s all over, and meanwhile, science says that it’s not, by a long, long way. The more that we get infected, the more damage we’re doing, on an unknown scale, to ourselves, to our vital organs, and that could very well end up being another public health crisis to make this one look veritably tame. We’re playing with fire.

At this juncture, the exasperated readers on the side of “freedom” will exclaim, “So what do you want us to do about it!! You want everyone to be…to be…China!! Why, you’re a fascist!” Not so fast, there, Elon. I didn’t say anything of the kind. What should we do about it all?

Well, let’s begin by understanding that Covid’s become a fiasco — a public health failure of historic proportions — around the globe. There are a handful of countries that’ve handled it well, in Asia, but elsewhere, more or less, uniformly, it’s become a disaster on top of a catastrophe. What do I mean?

More than a million Americans have died of Covid, and there’s going to be more than a 9/11’s worth of them in the next few days yet again. Public health failure. In China, meanwhile, well, do I really have to point out how its zero-tolerance approach led to disaster, too? And then there’s a nation like Britain, which just…threw in the towel…to the point that it stopped collecting data, so I guess we’ll never really know, which prevents accountability. Meanwhile, in Sweden, something like 10% of the population is developing Long Covid — good luck having a healthcare system like that in the near future. Meanwhile, overall, something like 10–20% of people who’ve had Covid get Long Covid.