"Actually existing Covid is bad enough...millions dead, billions infected, a new endemic virus to manage in perpetuity, a largely indifferent ruling class facing zero repercussions for their crimes, and a society still feeling every single after-effect possible. Indeed, it's the sort of event that should inspire a mass movement to address the shortcomings of our political economy and ensure that we're in a place to actually confront the next such challenge, whenever it happens. But the fear-mongering doesn't just not help with this, it actively works against this. It creates a reality so perilous, so fraught with certain doom, that fighting for change becomes inherently impossible. It's effectively a call to inaction. I still believe that we can use the shared suffering of the past three years as a rallying cry to demand something better, but we're never going to do that if we can't engage with reality as it actually exists. And that means never, ever resorting to fear-mongering."
That said, it doesn't seem like the worst impulses of the doomer crowd are going away anytime soon. Just the other day this exact contingent of people casted aspersions over this eminently reasonable article where the author appears to care deeply for and go out of her way to accommodate the needs of her partner. If even the most milquetoast sentiments presented with nuance and compassion have become cause for suspicion, then we probably need to spend a little extra time understanding the specific social corrosion that has led us here.
Suspicion of Others
A good place to start is with this post about the death of a former polio patient from the misleadingly named newsletter "Do Not Panic." There's a lot I could address here, but I'll limit myself to a notable contradiction that I feel is illuminating. Early on he proclaims that "All it would have taken to keep Paul alive was a mask. That’s it." This seemingly frames the cause of Paul's death as a family member or caretaker who carelessly passed along a deadly disease. Which is a strange assumption to make in the absence of direct evidence, but we'll come back to that. What makes this even stranger is that he later walks this back saying "This is not to blame his death on any one individual. We don’t know the details of his interactions or the precautions that were taken." If we assume he is genuine in this subsequent statement, then it renders the previous statement as nothing more than a naked appeal to suspicion to anyone who may have come into contact with the deceased.
What's more is that this appeal to suspicion barely makes any sense, even taken at face value. While it's good to mask, especially in specific scenarios where risk of contagion is high, the certainty of his statement ("all it would have taken") belies the fact that masks are a relatively crude tool with variable efficacy against a highly contagious virus. Ignoring that it's entirely possible the person who transmitted the virus in this instance may have been masked, it's also clear that a person looking to understand the root cause of this specific death should be concerned with several other problems before even considering who was or was not wearing a mask. Why is vaccine uptake so low? Was a care worker forced to work while contagious? Why was money appropriated for ventilation upgrades that would mitigate the overall spread of disease spent on cops? What unites these questions and others is that they do not scapegoat or focus on individual decisions, but rather seek to address the clear systemic reasons that the majority of people are subject to a power structure that shows little to no concern about their health and well being. Put another way, if we have a genuine interest in minimizing the death and illness that come with respiratory disease, what purpose does hectoring anyone, let alone a hypothetical person, serve?
Epistemic Neglect
Another frequent source of fear-mongering is Julia Doubleday's The Gauntlet. A recent post of hers is illustrative of another problem with the doomer set: a default assumption that all problems since March 2020 are a result of COVID. In this case, it's right there in the title: "COVID is overwhelming hospital systems." A glance at basically any numbers show that this is not really the case, especially now in March 2024, so what is the cause for this disconnect? Well if you scroll down her article you will see the culprit: a big long list of tentatively connected articles and studies about overwhelmed hospital systems. Which is indeed bad and, taken as a whole, intimidating and scary. I don't even think it's unreasonable to see such a thing and hypothesize that the cause is COVID. But of course the next logical step is to actually read the articles, where you will see things like this:
"After a dramatic decrease in April 2020, emergency department visits in Canada returned to baseline volumes by the summer of 2022. Despite this return to baseline, the capacity of emergency departments to provide care has been outstripped. Hospital staffing shortages and resulting bed closures have meant admitted patients are subjected to much longer emergency department stays."
"Emergency departments have a crucial role in the healthcare system, serving as a safety net for uninsured individuals and providing care regardless of their ability to pay. However, the study revealed that California’s population grew by 4.2 percent, while the number of EDs decreased from 339 to 326. Additionally, the number of hospital beds declined by 2.5 percent, further exacerbating the strain on emergency services."
"The province made progress reducing ER wait times around that time. Between 2014 and 2017, waits in Winnipeg fell to 1.5 hours. More capacity was added to the system and a new electronic bed-mapping system was introduced. That, among other steps, freed up more space on medical wards for ER patients waiting for a bed. It allowed ER physicians and nurses to see more patients quicker because they didn’t have to tend to as many people warehoused on gurneys in their department.
Unfortunately, the gains made during those years were wiped out when the former Progressive Conservative government consolidated hospital operations in 2017 and cut funding for acute-care facilities. The median wait time returned to two hours by early 2018. It fell during the COVID-19 pandemic as patients were reluctant to visit ERs. But it shot up again to two hours by the spring of 2021. It jumped to three hours the following year."
To be clear, most of the articles in Doubleday's list simply describe the problems and do not attempt to even posit a root cause (something something about the decaying institution of journalism). This shortcoming makes it easy to point to the sheer scope of them and say something like "maybe everyone is dying of long COVID" without any direct evidence. While you certainly can do that, this sort of practice reminds me almost exactly of another COVID-related panic: the "died suddenly" trope where rabid anti-vaxxers attribute every random death to the COVID vaccine:
All this is not to say that people who seem to express genuine concerns others are as low and dastardly as anti-vaxxers. But if you subscribe to some sort of leftist ideology, I do think it is incumbent to base your pleas on robust knowledge and sound epistemology. Associating collectivist ideals with specious inferences and a questionable understanding of reality will do no one any favors.From Denial to Acceptance
To build on the last point, I think the problem with simplistic views and "investigations" in the doomer space is not limited to these isolated examples. Rather, I think the cart is leading the horse in a sort of existential manner. In the case of COVID, something spectacular, universal, and deadly happened, and our governments failed us in ways that are not difficult to grasp. Anyone with any revolutionary consciousness whatsoever should understand the opportunity, and perhaps should have even had some light optimism that things would change during the George Floyd protests. Since this did not come to pass, I can understand the impulse to hammer away at the one thing that provided a sort of perverse hope in recent memory. But while I would not abandon the push for better vaccine uptake, improved ventilation, or simply preparing for the next pandemic, I think there needs to be a reckoning that the moment for a COVID-specific mass movement has passed.
To be clear, this is not some sort of cynical defeatism (well, at least, it's mostly not). Rather, it's an acknowledgment of the simple fact that pandemics end. Specifically, they end because our immune systems work. Virtually everyone has immune memory from vaccine(s), infection(s), or both, and it's that memory makes us far less likely to experience damaging effects from the virus going forward. While I would not frame the enormous cost we were made to pay to get to this point as a "victory," we have arrived at this culmination nonetheless. Living as though it is still 2020 serves no one, and is most certainly not a prescription to rally people to your cause. Instead I think it is incumbent on those fighting for the disabled, the vulnerable, and the memories of the deceased to allow themselves at least some respite and relief from this psychic burden. It's the only way we're going to be able to continue the larger fight.
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