Thinking About COVID in April 2022

Maybe it's because I've had my clearest covid exposure this week (three of them), but I thought this short Twitter thread was helpful. It's by Stephanie Tait, a writer and disability consultant: 

I know many of us who have been sacrificing to be careful for so long worry it was all a waste if we get Covid now anyways. But here’s the thing: it wasn’t just delaying getting Covid. It means you will have reduced the total number of times you get it — which ABSOLUTELY matters!

There is no limit to the number of times you can be reinfected, and there are a growing number of studies showing that the more times you get it, the more cumulative damage there is. So by delaying you or your family getting Covid? You lessened the damage. You lowered the risk of the worst outcomes. That sacrifice was NOT for nothing. It was worth it. And I truly believe that a decade from now that will be so glaringly apparent you’ll never regret any of it.

And if you do get Covid now despite all you’ve sacrificed? You have every right to be mad. The system absolutely failed you. Many of the people who claim to love you have failed you. It’s justified to feel angry, to feel betrayed.

But what I *don't* want you to feel is regret. What I *don't* want you to feel is the gaslighting that will tell you “see, you isolated all that time for nothing. Everyone was right — you should have gotten this over with long ago so you could get back to your life.” Because that’s simply not true.

So in case you don’t have anyone in your life to say it to you, I want you to hear it from me: You’ve done so well. Every sacrifice you’ve made, every gathering you chose to miss out on, every step you took to keep you/your family safe?

You were right, and it WAS worth it.

At the same time, I juxtapose it with these thoughts from Eric Reinhart, a physician and anthropologist who researches the political anthropology of public health. (For context, his words were retweeted by a person I follow who generally advocates reopening and thinks that many people are being too cautious. For instance, she frequently says that COVID is not serious enough to warrant measures like requiring masks of school children are not necessary or ineffective.)

It’s a public health comms disaster that masks have been the center of public attention. While useful, masks are the pandemic policy least demanding on policymakers, most individualistic, and that leaves untouched systematic inequalities fueling disease.·

Rather than linking public health to its most individual life-enhancing policies — paid sick leave, universal healthcare, ventilation + workplace safety regulations, etc. — we’ve instead allowed public health to be most associated with individual restriction, sacrifice, and unfreedom.

To which I say, yes, definitely. I want all of those societal-level changes, but could we have implemented them in a few months when the pandemic was beginning, or even over a year in the political reality we live in? Building ventilation is happening somewhat, but complete change would take huge subsidies to happen quickly and from a technical/logistics standpoint would have to compete with all the other construction and supply chain problems of the past years.

But I agree with Reinhart that the net outcome for the public health field and public health communication has not been good.