a light that never goes out

Every time I reply or add commentary to a reblog, that’s five times as much man residue

Me following your blog means your whole blog has man residue

@jaekaeyay here ya go

Also real weird how those same people manage to understand that erasure is just as harmful as visibility when it comes to MTX nonbinary people, but also say that trans men/masc erasure isn't that bad or is even a privilege.

^^ yes!!! it's important to talk about ftx people experiencing misogyny & mtx people being discriminated against for being perceived as men/masculine but it's so important that we do not fall into the trap of thinking that's the only way things happen. ive seen a lot of posts talk about the exclusion mtx people face while implying that it Never happens to ftx people- why? ftx people can look entirely male. we can have deep voices, big muscles, we can even have penises. & at the same time, there are mtx people who look like cis women, who even have vaginas. there's an assumption that nonbinary & genderqueer people never transition physically and always look like [agab] But Weird.

I want to get a few caveats out there before I start:

I am aware that there are people who need to exercise extreme caution about Covid; I live with someone who has two solid organ transplants and who is at the most immune compromised level of immune compromised. *I* have to be extremely cautious about covid.

Masking does prevent a certain level of transmission, and people who think they may have covid should mask and people who are concerned that they may be at high risk for covid should mask.

You should be vaccinated and boosted with the most recent vaccines that are available to you; covid is highly transmissible and very serious, you do not want to get covid and if you do get covid you don't want it to be severe and if you do get covid you don't want to give someone else covid and up-to-date vaccinations are the best way to reduce transmission and help to prevent severe cases of Covid.

We should be testing before going to any gatherings, and informing people if we test positive after gatherings, and testing if we suspect we have been exposed.

It is bullshit that there aren't good protections for workers who have covid; you should not be expected to go to work when you are testing positive

It is bullshit that people who are testing positive are not isolating for other reasons; if you have Covid you should not be going out and exposing other people to it even if you are experiencing mild symptoms or no symptoms.

We do need better ventilation systems for many kinds of spaces. Schools need better ventilation, restaurants need better ventilation, doctor's offices and hospitals and office buildings need better ventilation and better ventilation can reduce covid transmission.

I want to make it clear that Covid is real and there are real steps that individuals and systems can take to prevent transmission, and that there are systems that are exerting pressures that needlessly expose people to covid (the fact that you can lose your job if you don't come in when you're testing positive, mainly; also the fact that covid rapid tests should be ubiquitous and cheap/free and are not).

All of that being said: I'm seeing some posts circulating about how we're at an extremely high level of transmission and the REAL pandemic is being hidden from us and, friends, I'm pretty sure that is just incorrect and we're spreading misinformation.

I'm thinking of this video in particular, in which the claim is made that "your mystery illness is covid" in spite of negative tests. The guy in the video says that there's nothing else that millions of people could be getting a day, and that he predicted this because a wastewater spike in December meant that there was a huge spike in cases.

I've also seen people saying that deaths are where they were in 2021-2022, and that we're still at "a 9/11 a week" of excess deaths and friends, I'm not seeing great evidence for any of these claims.

I know that we (in the US, which is where the numbers I'm going to be citing are from) feel abandoned by the CDC and the fact that tracking cut off in May of 2023. But that only cut off for the federal tracking.

I live in LA county and LA county sure as shit is still tracking Covid.

If you want a clearer picture, you can see the daily case count over time compared to the daily death count:

Okay, you might say, but that's just LA.

Alright, so here's Detroit:

Right, but maybe that's CDC data and you don't trust the CDC at this point.

Okay, here's fatalities in New York tracked through New York's state data collection:

It's harder to toggle around the site for South Dakota, but you can compare their cases and hospitalizations and deaths for early 2022

To cases and hospitalizations and deaths from early 2024

And see that there's really no comparison.

Okay, you might say, but people are testing less. If they're testing less of course we're not seeing spikes, and they're testing less because fewer tests are available.

Alright, people are definitely testing less than they were in 2021 and 2022. Hospitalization for Covid is probably the most clear metric because you know those people have covid for sure, the couldn't not test for it.

Here are hospitalizations over time for LA:

Here are hospitalizations over time for New York:

As vaccination rates have gone up, cases, deaths, and hospitalizations have gone down. It IS clear that there are case spikes in the winter, when it is cold and people are indoors in poorly ventilated spaces and people are more susceptible to respiratory infections as a result of cold air weakening the protection offered by our mucous membranes, and that is something that we will have to take precautions about for the forseeable future, just as we should have always been taking similar precautions during flu season.

So I want to go point-by-point through some of the arguments made in that video because I'm seeing a bunch of people talking about how "THEY" don't want you to know about the virus surge and buds that is just straight up conspiracism.

So okay, first off, most of what that video is based on is spikes in wastewater data, not spikes in cases. This is because people don't trust CDC data on cases, but I'd say to maybe check out your regional data on cases. I don't actually trust the CDC that much, but I know people who do tracking of hospitalizations in LA county, I trust them a lot more. Wastewater data does correlate with increases in cases, but this "second largest spike of the entire pandemic" thing is misleading; wastewater reporting is pretty highly variable and you can't just accept that a large spike in covid in wastewater means that we're in just as bad a place in the pandemic as we were in 2022. We simply have not seen the surge of hospitalizations and deaths that we would expect to see in the weeks following that spike in wastewater data if wastewater data was reflective of community transmission.

The next claim is that "there is nothing else that is infecting millions of people a day" and covid isn't doing that either. The highest daily case rates were in January of 2021 and they were in the 865k a day range, which is ridiculously high but isn't millions of cases a day.

But what we can see is that when people are tested by their doctors for Covid, RSV, and the Flu, more tests are coming back positive for the Flu. Covid causes more hospitalizations than the other two illnesses, but to be honest what the people in the video are describing - lightheadedness, dizziness, exhaustion - just sound like pretty standard symptoms of everything from covid to the cold to allergies. There are lots of things your mystery illness could be.

The video goes on to talk about the fact that people aren't testing, and why their tests may be coming back negative and I'd like to point out that the same things are all true of Flu or RSV tests. People might be getting tested too early or too late; getting a negative test for the flu isn't a good reason to assume you've got covid, getting a negative test for covid isn't a good reason to assume you've got the flu, and testing for viruses as a whole is imperfect. There are hundreds of viruses that could be the common cold; there are multiple viruses that can cause bronchitis; there are multiple viruses that can cause pneumonia, and you're not going to test for all of these things the moment you start feeling sick.

He then recommends testing for multiple days if you have symptoms and haven't had a positive test (fine) and talks about the location of the tests (less fine). Don't use your rapid tests to swab your throat or cheek unless it specifically says that they are designed to do so. Test based on the instructions in the packet.

He points out that the tests probably still pick up on the virus because they're not testing for the spike protein, they're testing for the RNA (good info!)

The video then discusses something that I think is really key to this paranoia about the "mystery illnesses" - he talks about how covid changes and weakens your immune system (a statement that should come with many caveats about severity and vulnerability and that we are still researching that) and then says that it makes you more susceptible to strep or mono and that "things that used to clear in a day or two now hit you really hard."

And that's where I think this anxiety is coming from.

Strep throat lasts anywhere from three days to a week. A cold takes about a week to clear. The flu lasts about a week and can knock you on your ass with exhaustion for weeks depending on how bad you get it. Did you get a cough with your cold? Expect that to take anywhere from three to eight weeks to clear up.

I think that people are thinking "i got a bad virus and felt really sick for a week and haven't gotten my energy back" but that just sounds like a bad cold. That sounds like a potent allergy attack. That doesn't even sound like a bad flu (I got a bad flu in 2009 and thought i was going to straight-up die I had a fever of 103+ for three days and felt like shit for three days on either side of that and took six weeks to feel more like myself again).

Getting sick sucks. It really, really sucks. But if you're getting sick and you're testing for covid and it's coming back negative after you tested a few times, it's almost certainly not covid.

The video then says "until someone provides evidence that it's not covid, it should be assumed to be covid because we have record levels of covid it's that simple" but that's not simple. We don't have record levels of covid and he hasn't proved it. We have record high levels of wastewater reports of covid, which correlates with covid cases but the spike in wastewater noted in december didn't see a spike with a corresponding magnitude of cases in terms of either hospitalizations or deaths, which is what we'd have seen if we had actual record numbers of covid.

He says that if you want to ignore this, you'll get sick with covid, and that about 30-40% of the US just got sick with covid in the last four months (which is a RIDICULOUSLY unevidenced claim).

He says that we need to create a new normal that takes covid into account, which means masking more often and testing more often and making choices about risk-avoidant behaviors.

Now, I don't disagree with that last statement, but he prefaces the statement with "it doesn't necessarily mean lockdown" and that's where I think the alarmism and paranoia is really visible here. We are so, so far away from "lockdown" type levels that it's absurd to discuss lockdown here.

What I'm seeing right now is people who are chronically ill, people who are immune compromised, and people who are experiencing long covid (which may not be distinct from other post-viral syndromes from severe cases of flu, etc, but which may be more severe or more notable because of the prevalence of covid) are talking about feeling abandoned and attacked and left behind by society because covid is still out there, and still at extremely high levels.

I am seeing people who feel abandoned and attacked because the lgbtq+ events they are attending don't require masking. I am seeing people who are claiming that it is eugenicist that their schools don't have a negative test policy anymore.

And this comes together into two really disconcerting trends that I've been observing online for a while.

The claim that the pandemic is still as bad as it's ever been and in fact may be worse but we can't know that because "they" (the CDC, the government, capitalist institutions that want you back in the office, the university industrial complex that wants your dorm room dollars) are covering up the numbers and

Significant grievance at the fact that people are acting like number one is not true and are putting you at risk either out of thoughtlessness (because they don't realize they're putting you at risk) or malice (because they don't care if the sick die).

And those things are a recipe for disaster.

I think I've pretty robustly addressed point one; I don't think that there's good evidence that there's a secretly awful surge of covid that nobody is talking about. I think that there are some people who are being alarmist about covid who are basing all of their concern on wastewater numbers that have not held up as the harbinger of a massive wave of infections.

So let's talk about point number two and JK Rowling.

Barnes and Noble is not attacking you when it puts up a Hogwarts Castle display in the lobby. Your favorite youtuber isn't trying to hurt you when they offhandedly mention Harry Potter.

If you let every mention of Harry Potter or every person who enjoys that media franchise wound you, you are going to spend a lot of your time wounded.

People are not liking Harry Potter at you.

Okay.

People are also not not wearing masks at you.

You may be part of a minority group that experiences the potential for outsized harm as a result of majority groups engaging in perfectly reasonable behaviors.

There are kind, well-meaning, sensible people who go out every day and do something that may cause you harm and it's not because they want to hurt you or they don't care about whether you live or die, it is because they are making their own risk assessments based on their own lives and making the very reasonable assumption that people who are more concerned about covid than they are will take precautions to keep themselves safe.

We are not at a place in the pandemic where it is sensible to expect people with no symptoms of illness to mask in public as a matter of course or to present evidence of a recent negative test when entering a public building in their day-to-day life.

I think now is a really good time to sit down and ask yourself how you expect things to be with covid as an endemic part of our viral ecosystem. I think now is a good time to ask yourself what risk realistically looks like for you and for people who are unlike you. I think now is a good time to consider what would feel "safe" for you and how you could accomplish feeling safe as you navigate the world.

I'm probably going to continue masking in most indoor spaces for years. Maybe forever. There are accommodations that SHOULD be afforded to people who have to take more precautions than others (remote learning, remote visits, remote work, etc.), and we should demand those kinds of accommodations.

But it is going to poison you from the inside out if you are perpetually angry that people who don't have the same medical limitations as you are happy that they get to go shopping with their faces uncovered.

So now I want to talk to you about my father in law.

My father in law had a bone marrow transplant in 2015. That's the most immune compromised you can get without having your organs swapped out.

The care sheet for him after the transplant was a little overwhelming. The list of foods he couldn't eat was intimidating and the limitations on where he could go was depressing. It cautioned against going to large events, it recommended outdoor gatherings where possible but only if he could avoid sunlight and was somewhere with no history of valley fever. It said that he should wear masks indoors any time he was someplace with poor ventilation and that he should avoid contact with anyone who had an illness of any kind, taking special note to avoid children and anyone recently vaccinated for measles.

It was, in short, pretty much what someone immune compromised would need to do to try to avoid a viral infection. Sensible. Reasonable. Wash your hands and social distance; wear masks in sensitive contexts and don't spend time in enclosed places with people who have a communicable illness.

This is what life was always going to be like for people who are severely immune compromised, and it was always going to be incumbent upon the person with the illness to figure out how to operate in a society that is not built with them in mind.

It is not the job of every parent I encounter to tell me whether their child has been vaccinated against measles or chicken pox in the last three months. That isn't something that people need to do as part of their everyday life. However it IS my responsibility to check with the parents I'm hanging out with whether their children have been vaccinated against measles or chicken pox in the last three months so I know if it's safe for my immune compromised spouse to be around them.

If you want an environment in which you feel safe from covid, at this point in the pandemic (when the virus is endemic and not spreading rapidly as far as we can see from case counts) it is your responsibility to take the steps necessary to make you feel safe. Some of those steps will involve advocating for safety improvements in public spaces (again, indoor ventilation needs to be better and I'm personally pretty extreme about vaccination requirements; these are things we should be discussing in our school board meetings and at our workplaces), some of those steps will involve advocating for worker protections, guaranteed sick time, and the right to healthcare. But some of the things you're going to need to do to feel safe are going to come down to you.

I have a couple of genuine questions that I would love to get your perspective on - I think we disagree about them, based on this post, but hearing you say that and explain why would be interesting to me and potentially shift my perspective. Obviously your post is super long and clearly represents a ton of work, and I suspect you're likely to get a lot of responses, so I totally understand if you don't respond for whatever reason.

My questions are:

1. The whole post mostly glosses over long COVID as something we just don't have good data on yet, which, fair. That said, I think that means that the post misses a lot of the rhetoric driving COVID caution in the communities I'm a part of, which, anecdotally, are not scared of huge rates of hospitalization that the government is theoretically covering up, but are scared of high case rates that we have little insight into other than wastewater (which we agree about the unreliability of, but I feel it's hard to say conclusively either way) and the possibility that those high case rates are translating into high rates of long COVID, especially given that some data suggests that long COVID and negative outcomes in general are more likely the more COVID infections you accumulate. Do you have thoughts about the fear that we are going to see skyrocketing rates of disability over the next 5/10/15/50 years if we don't get COVID more under control? Anecdotally, the number of young children I know who have developed long-term symptoms after their second or third or fourth COVID infection is much higher than I ever remember people having long-term symptoms from the flu, and they're getting COVID more often than people ever got the flu.

2. Your post says that people who think they may have COVID should mask but also criticizes telling people that if they are sick they should assume that it is COVID. Considering that tests are very inaccessible and many COVID cases are asymptomatic, especially in the early days of contracting it, why is it not reasonable to tell people that if they are sick they should assume it is COVID? In my experience, everyone is incredibly fast to jump to "it's not COVID" with evidence such as "I tested negative once the day after being exposed to COVID" and "the only symptom I have is a cough", so, in my opinion, I do not think we are in danger of too many people assuming they have COVID.

3. Why do you feel like we should be advocating for safety improvements for public spaces but that those improvements should not be masks? In my experience, it is much more feasible to make safer public spaces by requiring masks than by requiring vaccines or spending a ton of money on improved ventilation (that said, I am a huge huge proponent of improving ventilation)

1. The whole post mostly glosses over long COVID as something we just don't have good data on yet, which, fair. That said, I think that means that the post misses a lot of the rhetoric driving COVID caution in the communities I'm a part of, which, anecdotally, are not scared of huge rates of hospitalization that the government is theoretically covering up, but are scared of high case rates that we have little insight into other than wastewater (which we agree about the unreliability of, but I feel it's hard to say conclusively either way) and the possibility that those high case rates are translating into high rates of long COVID, especially given that some data suggests that long COVID and negative outcomes in general are more likely the more COVID infections you accumulate. Do you have thoughts about the fear that we are going to see skyrocketing rates of disability over the next 5/10/15/50 years if we don't get COVID more under control? Anecdotally, the number of young children I know who have developed long-term symptoms after their second or third or fourth COVID infection is much higher than I ever remember people having long-term symptoms from the flu, and they're getting COVID more often than people ever got the flu.

Long covid is extremely complicated and the research on it is also complicated. People who got covid earlier in the pandemic (pre-omicron strains) are more likely to have more severe long covid and were at higher risk of developing long covid; perhaps as many as 10% of people who have had covid will develop long covid, but about half of the people who ever have symptoms of long covid may stop having symptoms after several months. Long covid severity is different for different people because it is not one syndrome, but many, and people who develop ME/CFS or POTS as a part of long covid will likely have to deal with lifetime disability, while people who have persistent respiratory symptoms for some months may improve over time. There are many potential causes of long covid, and some populations are more likely than others to experience long covid, and MAYBE vaccination makes it less likely and MAYBE a less severe case of covid makes it less likely but there's conflicting research on all of that. Reinfection possibly does not appear to make it more likely that someone who did not have long covid will develop long covid and you may be less likely to have long covid if you have a second case of covid (this is the NPR report on that and these are the two studies linked in that report), however it is possible to end up with more systems involved with post-viral symptoms on reinfection (but that study is necessarily on people who were infected multiple times and susceptibility to reinfection may mean you're already predisposed to long covid and there's essentially no research done on what getting a different variant of covid or having years-long periods between infections does). Also there is emerging research that long covid may be about as likely to occur as post-viral syndromes from other respiratory infections it's just that there were so many covid infections that we saw a huge bump in numbers.

Like I said, complicated. But, that said, it (so far) seems like about 4-5% of people who have covid have post-viral syndrome experience persistent symptoms, and of those some people may develop a permanent disability. I am absolutely sympathetic to people who are concerned about lifelong disability as a result of long covid and that is a thing that happens (my sister was diagnosed with POTS after having covid; I know this happens) but it isn't as simple as "If 10% of people get long covid and it gets 50% worse with reinfection, my chances of becoming disabled long-term after a second bout of covid are at 15%". It is MUCH, much more complicated than that and I think that the idea that we're going to see skyrocketing rates of disability needs to be examined. For instance this Scientific American opinion piece that warns of "a tsunami of disability" does so based on early reports that saw long covid in 25-30% of patients (higher-end estimates in current research suggests 10% and the CDC study I linked earlier found that 9% of people had had long covid at some point but about half that had long covid at the time of the study) and this American Progress article is based on the same research PLUS BLS data that there were more disabled people in the workforce which could mean more workers reporting a disability or it could mean more disabled people forced to seek jobs to make ends meet in the pandemic or it could mean more people who became disabled through means other than post viral syndrome staying in the workforce to make ends meet in the pandemic. Additionally the definitions of disability are frustratingly vague in some of these discussions; I do believe that "shortness of breath" can constitute a disability but is that person still disabled if their symptoms resolve at the eight month mark post covid? Diabetes, anxiety, and ME/CFS are all disabilities that are possible post-covid but they are also all wildly different in terms of quality of life and ability to live independently.

The entire thing is, I think, more complicated than it is often made out to be but I think there's a general message that 25% of people who have covid will end up with a lifelong disability and that in the next twenty years we will see a quarter of people who had covid become disabled and that seems to be unlikely based on data available in 2023 and beyond. That is not to say that there are no consequences from covid infection, or that it isn't "serious" if you develop diabetes after covid, or if you have persistent neurological symptoms after covid. I genuinely think that people are looking at this as "there's a 20% chance that I'll end up with ME/CFS if I get covid and that will kill me" and if that's what the picture realistically looks like then I'd agree that it makes sense to stay indoors and keep masking, but if there's a 10% chance that you'll end up with a chronic cough and tinnitus for six months and a 3% chance you'll end up with an autoimmune disorder and your chances of either of those are lower with vaccination and are lower later in the pandemic and that is IF you get covid which you can take steps to prevent (getting vaccinated, staying in well ventilated areas, masking and asking people to mask, etc) then maybe it seems a bit less like playing Russian roulette.

I can't really speak to the anecdotal information about the children you know having post-viral symptoms, but it's worth noting that part of the reason the Queensland health minister (linked above as well) thinks that we should stop using the term "long covid" is because it has cued people to look for post-viral symptoms that may not be there and has caused an increase in paranoia that is detrimental to people who are dealing with post-viral condition and to people who are worried about post-viral conditions. And as to kids getting covid more; it is pretty unlikely to get the same strain of covid more than once in a 90 day period but it is possible and there are multiple strains of covid. The flu tends to be an annual thing and people rarely end up contracting two strains in a season; you may be seeing kids getting covid more frequently than the flu, I don't know the kids you know.

2. Your post says that people who think they may have COVID should mask but also criticizes telling people that if they are sick they should assume that it is COVID. Considering that tests are very inaccessible and many COVID cases are asymptomatic, especially in the early days of contracting it, why is it not reasonable to tell people that if they are sick they should assume it is COVID? In my experience, everyone is incredibly fast to jump to "it's not COVID" with evidence such as "I tested negative once the day after being exposed to COVID" and "the only symptom I have is a cough", so, in my opinion, I do not think we are in danger of too many people assuming they have COVID.

If you catch five colds in the winter and assume every one of them is covid, it's going to make it a lot harder for you to believe it when covid numbers are down. It is also going to make you a lot more paranoid about long covid, and it's going to potentially cause you to forego treatment for what's actually happening (if you think you have covid so you stay home and isolate and monitor for covid symptoms but you are actually delaying treatment for strep that is bad).

I suppose I should clarify something: If you have any kind of upper respiratory infection I think that you should stay home until you no longer have any symptoms or a fever and I think that you should try to isolate from people in your household and I think that if you are going to go out and be among people (maybe you've got to pick up some soup) when you're feeling ill you should absolutely be masking. People don't want covid, but they also don't want your flu or your RSV or your cold or your strep or your anything. I *DO* think we should work on further normalizing isolating and masking when we're sick and I *DO* think we've actually made progress in that regard compared to where we were pre-pandemic, but man we are just never (in the US) going to be able to do that in a serious way until we give workers protection from being fired for staying home when they're sick.

I think this may actually be central to the issue; if you have been getting sick and you think it's covid every time, even if you're testing negative, it's going to be very, very difficult for you to believe that it's *not* covid. The pandemic is not *over* but it is *different* than it was in 2021, however if you see every allergy attack or chest cold as covid, it likely still feels quite a lot like 2021 to you.

What's more, part of the problem that we're dealing with here is institutional mistrust. And look, I understand institutional mistrust. I am probably never going to be able to fully trust the CDC on their public health advice and I think they lost that fight with me with the paternalistic masking advice in 2020.

However the background implication here is "actually covid is just as bad as it ever was and everyone around me has covid all the time and doctors are lying to us and telling us it's the flu or a cold and it's not, it's covid, it's going to be covid forever, we will never be free, we can never open up" and that is a bad, scary, and unrealistic headspace to be in that leaves people vulnerable to all kinds of charlatans and grifters and extremists. I think that people in general tend to do better when they've got accurate information; if they're testing negative for covid, I don't think that it's a good idea to say "well it's covid anyway, the tests are wrong." (and again, I think tests should be free and everywhere all the time; i want you to be able to get tests at the post office, I want them federally funded and handed out like beads at mardi gras, I should be able to get a test for zero dollars that pops out with my receipt at CVS and is paid for by my taxes and I think vaccines should be the same way; free and ubiquitous there should be a truck that drives around the neighborhood playing cheerful music and handing out vaccines and tests three times a day; this got away from me but long story short i never want there to be another f-35 i want universal healthcare and guaranteed housing; i think you would get much higher levels of testing and therefore would ameliorate some of the need for masking if you handed out tests like candy so we should DO that)

3. Why do you feel like we should be advocating for safety improvements for public spaces but that those improvements should not be masks? In my experience, it is much more feasible to make safer public spaces by requiring masks than by requiring vaccines or spending a ton of money on improved ventilation (that said, I am a huge huge proponent of improving ventilation)

It's a lot cheaper for your school district to ask students to wear masks than it is to install better ventilation. It's a lot cheaper for your boss to ask everyone to wear masks than to install good ventilation (perhaps ventilation that could meet a hypothetical OSHA standard set for exactly this purpose) and you know what fuck your boss, paying to keep your employees safer is part of the cost of doing business.

I think that better filtration and the use of masks during periods of high transmission is going to be the way to go, and since you're not going to get 100% compliance on masks (people will not do it at 100%, and even in places with high levels of mask compliance, like Japan, there is a percentage of the population - 14% in Japan as recorded in this study - that will not do it), you should do the filtration anyway and take any people who are masking as icing on the cake.

It is better to do layers of protection than it is to do one layer of protection and if we don't begin to work toward institutional protections it's always going to be individuals and security theater (because it's also cheaper to wipe down surfaces and install plexiglass shields than it is to install decent HVAC).

I think that better air filtration means more protection and that we clearly know that we're never going to get universal masking so we may as well do the one thing that we can control for.

And I think there are several large problems with making this primarily about masking.

First off, it puts the onus for maintaining *your* safety on the people around you, which has problems of its own.

Some people are not going to care

Some people are going to care but do a bad job of it (wear masks improperly etc)

Second, this makes this an issue of individual choice rather than institutional changes. We shouldn't have to rely on the one shithead in the back corner to wear his mask to keep us safe in an outbreak, we should work toward a society that is safer from communicable disease regardless of the shithead in the back corner.

Third is compassion fatigue. I know there are people who are saying "I don't know how to explain to you that you should care about people" and I know there are people who are saying "masking simply isn't that hard" but actually three years of not going to restaurants or movies or clubs and wearing masks in classrooms and offices IS hard and we're running into a point where people are saying "I feel like a bad person because I want to go to a club and have a random hookup instead of meeting people through zoom forever" and *that is genuinely hard.* Dealing with low-level discomfort and increased acne because of masking for a few years is *genuinely hard.* Having trouble hearing people or making yourself heard for years is *genuinely hard.*

Asking people to do something that is physically uncomfortable while giving up things that they like for years at a time is very clearly a losing proposition and it makes people who are at high risk for bad covid outcomes feel like nobody cares about them and it makes people who have spent years not doing things they like feel like they're bad people because they want to go back to doing the things that they like; neither of these groups are in the wrong for feeling bad OR for wanting the things they want but I think both groups could feel less bad if it we hadn't decided that only selfish monsters go to restaurants.

(If you feel that everyone who does go to a restaurant is a selfish monster who is killing you, I think that is probably not an accurate reflection of reality and also probably not great for your mental health and how you relate to people and that you are probably going to feel better emotionally and be safer physically if your wellbeing isn't predicated on convincing people not to go to restaurants, which is why in the original post I make the point that it was always going to be on immune compromised people to be responsible for their own safety)

On an individual level I do not think that it is at all unreasonable to ask for people in your life to mask around you or to test before seeing you if you are at risk and they are engaging in high risk activities.

On a societal level it feels like there is a demand to give up certain things like live music and eating indoors forever, or until everyone feels safe, and I don't think people are ever going to feel safe if they think that every cold is covid and they think that everyone is indifferent to them getting sick.

And instead duking that out as individuals who are stressed for a variety of reasons, I think it's a better idea to demand worker's rights and better indoor safety standards and universal healthcare and vaccine mandates (with testing exemptions because I know we've already lost the battle on vaccine mandates).

I want to show you another chart. This is the comparison between projected and reported excess deaths from 2020 to early 2024:

The projected deaths (the green dotted line) [ETA: "green" as in olive green; projected deaths are green/brown, actual is blue] is based on the estimates from prior years.

After the end of nationally mandated Covid tracking, after the end of mask mandates, after years of a vaccination campaign and years of people masking (and a solid year of most people not masking), excess deaths in the US are pretty close to parity with projections.

That doesn't mean that people aren't still getting covid, that doesn't mean the pandemic is over, but it does seem like a pretty clear indication that things are very different.