One of the biggest cognitive dissonances I’ve had in this pandemic is seeing almost everyone I know – including the most intelligent and the most socially responsible – throw away all covid precautions and live like the pandemic is over. People like to use the word endemic as though a virus being endemic means it has become harmless. Putting long covid aside for now, people are still dying in large numbers across the world (probably under-reported). As of last week in Singapore, roughly 200+ people including 8 children under the age of 12 are hospitalised every day on average:
They make a big fuss when 1-2 people die from dengue fever in Singapore, but somehow when it is covid everything is magically okay?
no one cares about the vulnerable
Say an individual thinks they are healthy and they are able to survive all the infections that come their way. What about the vulnerable then? If we are contagious but unaware, who knows who we’re infecting? Who are we disabling or killing? Each time we are recklessly getting infected, do we think about people who are elderly or immunocompromised?
…or the potential for deadly mutations
Let’s argue that we don’t care about the vulnerable and that healthy people will survive. What about the risk of further mutations? The latest variant JN.1 is highly immune evasive – the latest monovalent vaccine barely works against it, which probably means whatever we had before the monovalent is ineffective. The speed at which we produce the current generation of vaccines means we are always too late for the vaccines to work on a systemic level in order to prevent more mutations. There is a considerable risk that the virus will mutate to be capable of wrecking more damage.
the role of governments and the media
Perhaps one of the reasons why there is such a wide chasm between my level of cautiousness and most other people is that they simply do not know. I am active on twitter and reddit so I get updates on the latest research everyday. Every time covid is being brought up on the local media here there is a concerted effort to dismiss it as mild and just like “the flu”, which by the way they mean actual influenza which can be deadly too and not the common cold as we commonly associate with. When they say it is “mild” they mean we probably don’t have to get hospitalised, and they also mean the acute sickness, but no one cares about the long-term effects of the illness.
I do have some sympathy for the governments and various institutions. First of during the initial phase of the pandemic people in many countries were not compliant with the vaccine program, so any chance of herd immunity was lost. Then we have to acknowledge that the pandemic measures was affecting the economy and people’s livelihoods badly. In Singapore we tried to hold out for almost 3 years before we opened our borders, but we are reliant on international trade for our survival. Even China being the last hold out had to wave the white flag because it became almost impossible to stop the omicron variant from spreading, their citizens were becoming non-compliant, and which country in the right mind is wiling to accept other countries progressing economically while they are left behind?
Does it mean that the virus is no longer dangerous because we can no longer hold out economically? No, it just means the unfortunate subset of the population who would go on to suffer negative consequences have to be the statistical sacrifice. If we think in the minds of politicians, I guess 10-20% damage is acceptable if 80% of the economy is thriving.
In our daily lives, we are not capable of thinking about the long-term as well. Most of us continue to indulge in unhealthy habits – who wants to think of potential diabetes and heart disease decades down the road? We put too much faith in our governments when they are made up of humans like us. When faced with pressing issues we don’t have the bandwidth to also try to protect the long-term. I am not absolving the responsibility of governments here, but I have to be realistic about the environment we are facing.
the potential cumulative damage
If I were them I would hope and pray even if I am not religious that the research demonstrating that cumulative infections can cause cumulative damage turns out to be untrue. Because it is one thing to have your 10% of your population disabled, and another thing to have this 10% grow over time. A study in Canada showed that people with 3 or more infections are way more likely to report long-term symptoms. Say most of us get infected once a year, we could see dire consequences in 3-5 years.
And that’s just for the visible long covid symptoms. The virus can cause endothelial damage and blood clots, leading to heart attacks and strokes. It is also known to induce damage in the immune system. Our immune system is supposed to fight off shit like cancer cells, other viruses, bacteria and fungus. Till now it is not known whether this damage is permanent. With HIV the damage becomes obvious 5-10 years down the road. What is going to happen to us in the next 5-10 years? I shudder to think, even for myself. But will they link these incidences to covid? We don’t even want to acknowledge the excess mortality for the past few years.
I belong to various health communities around the internet because of my chronic health issues, and it is astounding how people can be considered experts in a specific domain, be ultra-cautious about their personal health in myriad of ways, but pay zero attention to the dangers of covid. Why? What is the point of eating a clean diet and being ultra fit, to the point of going for several blood screenings a year, only to invite the virus into our respiratory system? Yes there is a chance that our immune systems are healthy and may fight off the virus, but why take that risk at all if it is preventable? I have lost count of how many accounts I’ve seen of previously-fit people being bed bound now due to long covid. How many of them saying they did not know prior.
We are only knowing about the severe long-term effects of “milder” viruses now, decades after believing they were mild. Even for HIV it took years for the US government to take it seriously. Why are we being so cavalier about a virus that we still don’t know very much about?
grief, loneliness and alienation
I have to admit it is easier for me to be covid cautious. I don’t have kids that will bring home weird stuff from school, and I am able to stay at home if I want to. I don’t live with any non-compliant people. I can afford the precautious I need, such as n95 masks.
At this point I am not sure what can be done on a systemic level. The disinformation is too wide and deep, people are too traumatised and fatigued. We can’t have any more lockdowns, and people are no longer getting vaccines. The current vaccines are not even that effective. Personally I cannot bring up and share the latest research of covid damage with people I care about without meeting great resistance and unhappiness. So I feel like the only choice left for me is to continue doing whatever I can individually, and accept the potential grief if terrible things truly happen in the years to come. It is not like I can force people to wear masks everywhere and avoid indoor dining. Or even warn others to wear masks when visiting their elderly relatives. They believe the government that it is mild, and I am the hypochondriac.
For their sake, I hope I am the hypochondriac. I’ll rather be proven wrong than to suffer that deep grief. It is not just the grief from loss, but the fact that so much of this can be prevented but I am realistically and practically helpless in this situation. It is like seeing people walk off a cliff in front of them but I have to respect their choices, even if their choices may be terribly misguided. This pandemic has taught me that there is no way to speak of truth to people when they need to be in denial, or that it doesn’t matter what the science says if the government is not saying it.
I am trying to accept this new, lonelier life. I was already lonely before, but now it is much worse. I am immensely thankful that my partner is on the same page as me.
I still try to share whatever research I’ve come across on some of my social media accounts. I hesitate a lot, because I know I risk further alienation each time. But do I think it is more important to be liked and accepted, or do I think it is more important to raise awareness about the actual risks of getting covid? If not for the early covid-cautious advocates all the way back in 2020 I would probably a lot less cautious back then too. And if they didn’t keep sounding the alarm bells for the past few years even as the world moved on it is also likely I would have relaxed my own precautions – to an extent maybe I did (dined at a few places with dodgy ventilation, thinking that I am safe as long as it looks like it has adequate ventilation), that’s why I got infected in April 2023.
It is very stressful and tiring to be constantly vigilant for the past four years, and now we’re going into the fifth year. Instead of being more at ease it has become the opposite – my partner and I are more vigilant than ever because of the apparent increased contagiousness of JN.1. For the first time ever in the pandemic we are wearing n95 masks on public transport in Singapore, when previously we had felt relatively okay with good quality kf94. Every now and then I go into a depressive pit thinking about the hopelessness of the situation. I have no positive coping strategies to share here, I still harbour no hope. Where is the hope, when the issues of human psychology is so deep rooted?
We feel alienated from most people, we’ve isolated ourselves from our own families because they do not take the same level of precautions – what is the actual choice here: kinship, or permanent health damage? It is a fucked up choice.
Fortunately or unfortunately I am used to being the alien from a very young age. So many times in my life I had to resist social pressure to keep myself sane. I had to keep choosing my own life or social acceptance. This is not new to me. It is definitely a whole new level, but not foreign. So I am not starting from zero, there is already some accumulated resilience. In exchange for that sort of resilience there will be scarring of course. But the choice is either scars that I get from other people, or scars that I will give to myself if I cannot be true to how I really think and feel.
what this tells me about hope and the future
Looking at the growing body of research we have of the harmful effects of covid and humanity’s response to it – I have given up any remaining optimism about humanity’s future. Our efforts at educating the mass population is a failure. We. Do. Not. Respond. To. Science. Human lives are mere statistics. The political and economic system we have built do not allow for us to protect our health.
I just don’t see a way out. Even if we manage to magically produce a true neutralising soon enough, I cannot imagine how can we navigate ourselves out of future crises like climate change and other pandemics.
Again, I hope it is truly my lack of imagination and that I will be proven wrong. I genuinely hope so. Because the alternative will be too difficult to bear.
courage & discomfort
I know I am writing a post that wouldn’t be read much. But this has always been the essence of my writing. I write because I need to write, not because I want my writing to be socially accepted.
For me, this is a form of documentation that is evidence that I am still standing firm here on my ground. I am not shying away from this unpopular controversial topic, and I am making the conscious choice not to avoid and deny this like the rest of the world.
I hope by continuing to make these conscious choices over and over again, I am developing the courage to be the person I wish to be. I am nowhere near though, and publishing this makes me feel extremely uncomfortable. But one can learn to be better at doing uncomfortable things, and this is what I wish to teach myself. At least before the virus potentially destroys me, and the world I live in.