#comorvidity

to the extent that that’s a psychological defense mechanism, I can induce some sympathy for it in myself. but in the end--even setting aside the whole “for whom is COVID ‘over’ or not over” thing--my reaction is always just, “tell me you got out of that time period without anything too huge happening to you without telling me.” like, I can’t cut that piece out of my life, because then I’ll need a fucking explanation for when my dad died. and why my dissertation project is completely different from what I’d always imagined. and why my relationship with my mother is the way it is. and why my family doesn’t play charades anymore. why I’m teaching online in the fall. all of that before I even touch the long COVID part.

I remember seeing an article about New Orleans and yellow fever - I would bet by the same author being interviewed here - early in the pandemic. It was very informative and prescient at the time, and this interview adds a broader context and some different details. The interview is also worth reading for conceptual resources: especially the concept of immunocapitalism and the way it brings together "capital" in a Marxist sense and "capital" in Bordieu's sense.

Anyway, an unfortunately relatable excerpt:

MH: Being a hub of global commerce, the city also becomes a center of disease and disease spread. We traditionally think about disease waves as public problems to be dealt with, or at least we used to. But you depict a situation in New Orleans where yellow fever becomes not only epidemiologically endemic, but socially endemic, too. How does this society become based around disease?

KO: Yellow fever radically transformed the lives of millions of Americans before the 20th century. The disease needs three things: a hot, humid climate; a sizable population of female Ae. aegypti mosquitoes; and a large population of non-immune people living close together. In New Orleans in this period, epidemics appear every two or three years in the summer.

After the Louisiana Purchase, thousands of people are pouring into the region because they want to get on the ground floor of this commodity revolution, or they want one of these good government jobs that they see as a springboard to slave- and land-ownership. And as more people are coming in, more ships are coming in too, carrying these mosquitoes from the Caribbean.

By the 1810s, the epidemic outbreaks were so frequent that they shaped the city’s calendar. The epidemics would generally be from June or July to November, when the first mosquito-killing frost came. That’s three or four months of fever season, so it obviously impacted people’s lives then but it really impacted their lives the whole year round. It greatly influenced the timing of the cotton market. Come January, the cotton and sugar and slavery industries were absolutely abuzz—but what would happen is suddenly one day in late June or early July a case of yellow fever would be reported or rumored, and eventually there would be a tipping point, where enough cases were reported and the entire life of the city would switch.

People who were rich and white—many of whom owned slaves and country plantations—were able to leave. You would get onto a carriage with your family, or perhaps with enslaved people whom you owned, and you would go to your country plantation. Or you would go to the north and you would take in theater and do business in New York. Some went to London or Paris to do their summer tours there. But that’s only for the very richest people, and many had no choice but to remain in town during epidemics because they did not have the funds or freedom to leave. And if you stuck in town, life would be very miserable. You would spend three months in utter fear that you were going to die. You would steel yourself to keep working because you would be fired if you didn’t, if you gave up your post in your grocery or wholesaler or merchant house. If you did get sick, you would spend all the money you had in the world and then some on doctors and nurses to try to safely take you through the acclimating process. If you survived, you would be known as an acclimated citizen; if you died, you were a poor and unfortunate unacclimated stranger. And you had about a 50% chance of living or dying of this disease in the 19th century.

i was just looking at somebody’s blog to decide whether to follow them, and the first post was about having been to 10 funerals in 2 years. brazil and india are being fucking mowed down and nobody who could do a thing about it is going to. i know so many people who have dead family members or family members in danger of dying, not all from covid--it’s just like everybody who had a black star on the horizon, some illness or something that could kill them, had that star suddenly shoot overhead this year. not even the pets are spared. i have my own damn dead family member. the cops ramped up their ongoing constitutional murder spree for the chauvin trial and they are going to kill and injure and (re)traumatize so many fucking people this summer. i had to turn down my friend’s very sweet offer to come all the way out here to where i live so he could spend one of his iftars this ramadan with just me because i haven’t had my second shot yet and i can’t cognitively process what is “acceptable risk” in the in between stage. people still want to fight about vaccines. crypto is negating what little dents have been made in energy consumption and yet my friends in the group chat have (tiny amounts of) money in it and joke around about the shifting prices. i am staring down a frankly horrific 4-5 weeks of workload and a similarly insane 9 months starting in august, and at best i can hope for a 3-week break in between when until recently i thought i’d have almost two whole months. protest is being further criminalized in 34 states. denmark is expelling its syrian asylees and no one will do anything about that either. the two places i care most about in the world are drowning in layer after layer of misery in a way i’ve never seen, and i have no idea when or if i will ever be able to go back responsibly. i got an email today that may mean i won’t get the summer money i have the past two years, and i am too exhausted to even contemplate how i would go about finding out if it does mean that. fascist zionists are terrorizing east jerusalem.

due to some stuff i won’t go into detail about, i am feeling Alone in a way i really haven’t the whole pandemic until the last few weeks. and this is made worse because the burnout of having been producing writing and intelligent off-the-cuff comments and research plans literally nonstop since fall 2019 is manifesting as an increasing inability to communicate--i can tell that my writing and talking make less sense than they used to, and that people are not always understanding me.