🟡 ⚪ 🟣 ⚫ PIP ZEROES 🟣 ⚪ 🟢

The following text is an excerpt from the linked article, posted 2023-09-10:

We don’t really talk about coronavirus at all... This has only been encouraged by the government, which has honed the message “Covid is over”, as if saying this somehow makes it so... the result is a kind of mass denial – an agreed forgetting. The subject crops up from time to time. A breaking news banner announces a new variant. A friend texts that she’s stuck in bed “with the worst summer cough”. Then we carry on – until we are forced to remember once again...

...the daily number of positive coronavirus tests in England has been increasing since the end of June – a trend that is likely to grow in the coming weeks, as we socialise more indoors and children mix at school... at last count, 1.5 million people [in the UK alone] were experiencing long Covid symptoms that adversely affected their daily activities, and the virus still poses a significant risk of death to many people...

While some healthcare workers are taking precautions at their own discretion, NHS staff in England don’t have to wear a mask, and the majority who have respiratory symptoms are no longer asked to test for Covid. That means a patient with lung disease could be forced to get treatment from a nurse with a Covid cough...

The trouble is, denial is not a long-term plan. Coronavirus is effectively a fire. Ignoring it doesn’t stop the virus – it just lets the damage spread. The paradox of the pandemic has always been that the only way to “move on” is to actually engage with it...

But it also means confronting our impulse to believe that all of this is unnecessary and arduous. Even the phrase “Covid restrictions” – a term used by almost every media outlet – is loaded, suggesting low-key mitigations are heavy burdens rather than simple ways to free clinically vulnerable people. That the virus primarily “only” affects those with underlying health conditions has always been the unspoken excuse for indifference.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/10/covid-coronavirus-disabled-vulnerable-people

#COVID #COVIDisAirborne #COVIDisNOTover #COVIDisOngoing

Covid’s back, you say? As disabled and vulnerable people know all too well, it never went away

The government’s policy is to pretend we’re getting ‘back to normal’. The result is millions of us live in fear of losing our lives, says Guardian columnist Frances Ryan

The Guardian
Sep 11, 2023 at 3:19pmWeb
Show thread🟡 ⚪ 🟣 ⚫ PIP ZEROES 🟣 ⚪ 🟢Sep 11, 2023

Re: the suggestion that "low-key mitigations are heavy burdens rather than simple ways to free clinically vulnerable people"

Not to downplay the very real issue of societal indifference to immunocompromised folks (if not outright hostility), but: we are all clinically vulnerable to COVID.

And with each COVID infection and re-infection, the likelihood increases that one not previously immunocompromised may become so.

Show thread🟡 ⚪ 🟣 ⚫ PIP ZEROES 🟣 ⚪ 🟢Sep 11, 2023
(And I think we should care about others, regardless of the risks we may or may not personally face! But for some, it does not seem to click until it's framed as "OH, I am at risk, too, and so are other previously healthy [and therefore worthy of existence?] people!")
Show threadjoeSep 11, 2023

@pip i think "low-Key Mitigations" should be in place for everyone... who wants flu/covid any sickness

im immunocompromised and have had covid twice (in the uk) now we had lockdowns during 2020 and at the time we were saying the same thing this is the "wellest" we've ever been... yes it was a pain treating everyone like they had the plague.

Show threadCindySep 11, 2023
@pip AMEN!!!!