Published on 12, July, 2020
Four decades of trying to get on. Fourteen years of school. Two courses of CBT. Surely, an abundance of clues given off by me… and nothing. *I* had to be the one to suggest autism. But not before all those decades of tacitly assuming and resolving that all the stress and anxiety were things I just had to be clever enough and strong enough to push through. Desperately trying to obtain and cling on to a shred of credibility, despite my weirdness. Being failed over and over again by a lazy, vacuous, uncaring, one-size-fits-all system. Having such a low opinion of myself for thinking I was a pathetic failure. And feeling so humiliated at being alienated by the ‘normal’ majority that this precious society is designed for. Trying so very hard to get on and succeed… denigrating and trying to push past my weirdness and difficulties. And internalising such nasty, cruel thoughts. Hating myself for being weak, stupid, gormless, needy… and projecting that onto strangers, because they represent the normal majority who seem to have it so easy by comparison and are so unguarded and homogenous in each other’s company. Is it any wonder I felt “f*** you, then” and kept them at arm’s length? And that was before covid AND the cladding scandal came along to terrorise me simultaneously, as I lived alone in this flat. You’ve really done it this time… you expect me to be like you? Shrug a shoulder and casually go wading back into social mixing despite the risk that remains? Like I cannot possibly do without you? After what you’ve done to me? Go f*** yourselves. That’s how I feel. I’ve had enough of the arrogant, flippant, lazy, casual, offhand, uncaring, vacuous, one-size-fits-all attitude. It got very old a very long time ago. And now, with this toxic, non chalant “we have to learn to live with it” attitude… they just expect me to swallow that? They expect me to need THEM so much that I’m prepared to risk getting long covid for the ‘privilege’ of their company in this shallow consumer culture that we cannot possibly do without? Either that or they expect me to be so flippant, casual or in denial about it (LIKE THEM) that when BORIS (that well-known philanthropist and teller of truths) comes on TV and says “you don’t have to wear a mask any more!” I’m supposed to be like them and say “oh, OK, great, let’s all get down bar and ‘ave a f***in’ brew!”? Er, no. You’ve really done it this time. How dare you expect me to come gormlessly sauntering back to your society after everything you’ve done to me. Shove it. I’m out.
Arx said:And now, with this toxic, non chalant “we have to learn to live with it” attitude… they just expect me to swallow that? They expect me to need THEM so much that I’m prepared to risk getting long covid for the ‘privilege’ of their company in this shallow consumer culture that we cannot possibly do without?
You know this is as good as it gets right? Covid is never going away just like flu, the common cold and all the other diseases you can catch jut by sitting on the same bus as someone. I'm not here to say anything good or bad about your friends but tbh if you think your life outside home is more in danger now than before the pandemic because of covid ... that just not born out by the facts.
It is an almost statistical inevitability that you will catch covid eventually. If you haven't already and been asymptomatic. You will almost certainly be fine as most people who caught it, especially those who had been vaccinated, were. It's no more rational to hide in doors from covid now than it was to hide indoors from seasonal flu before the pandemic.
It puzzles me. I don’t understand how people can conclude they should throw away their masks because covid is never going away. That’s like throwing away your sun tan oil because the sun’s never going to stop shining (in our lifetimes, anyhoo!) Feels to me like what they actually want to do is forget it exists. ‘Living with it’ actually means ‘pretending to live without it’. Which I can sympathise with… flip knows it’s been a horrible experience. But denial will only get you so far. But I’m also desperately concerned by just how many people think that the initial symptoms are all there is to it - people who may genuinely think that the virus has been made completely trivial, at least to them. I’m afraid they’re mistaken. Moreover, we still don’t know everything there is to know about this thing. Personally, it’s just too high a price to pay for a craft beer and gourmet burger with fairweather friends. Another common response is to say that it’s just one of a million things that could get you, so why resist? Well, that’s false equivalence. You can’t just lump every threat together, treat them the same and say there’s no point in resisting any one of them because we can’t resist them all. It just doesn’t work as an argument. And I think that’s because they’re not so much trying to present a robust argument than they are trying to rationalise pretending it’s 2019 again. Many of their arguments are thin because they haven’t put much thought into them or the situation. Perhaps because they don’t want to. I can spot a black-and-white / straw man defence mechanism response when I see one… I’m guilty of more than my fair share of those, I admit. Yes, I accept it’s probably impossible to avoid catching it unless you live alone on a desert island. But that doesn’t mean I should go mosh pitting. I want to minimise the number of times I catch it, because it is NOT the same as a cold or flu, even though the initial symptoms may bear some resemblance (as far as recent variants are concerned). Whoever heard of long cold? And that’s effectively a lifestyle choice on my part. I suppose in a way I’m lucky because I don’t have any kids going to school etc. I’m still able to control my environment to a large extent. Plus, I respect that different people have different social needs, so their choice of balance of covid risk vs risk of other types of harm is personal to them. I just worry that their choices are not as informed as I feel they should be, because if not then they’re potentially setting themselves up for a nasty surprise. I hope I’m wrong! But, to be honest, just as there is probably an emotional basis to many people’s post-lockdown mindsets, there is sure as heck one in mine… as I may have given away in my initial post! But I’m trying to work on it.
Well. My understanding is people who caught covid in the omicron wave were looking at an about 4% risk of long covid as opposed to 10% for those who caught it in the delta wave ... Now most of those were people catching covid for the first time. It's very hard to say because I can't find the figures but it's very unlikely the risk level for the 2nd infection will be as high as the 1st and like wise for the 3rd etc. After all we know all the other risks tend to go down with subsequent infections and predisposition to long covid is likely to play a role.
And bare in mind long covid is any case where you're having symptoms 2 months after infection. It will include less sever cases as well.
Anyone can get long covid, I’m afraid. The chances are reduced a little bit if you’ve been immunised but they are far from minimised. Long covid is still not fully understood and it may even turn out to be several different things. One such thing under investigation, with mounting medical evidence, is micro-clots that inhibit cell reoxygenation, which is one possible explanation for why some sufferers get so knackered so quickly. Also, various other forms of viral detritus can linger in the body and they can cause a chronic inflammatory response. Sometimes it can turn the immune system against the body. Covid generally can cause not just respiratory disease but vascular disease also. This leads to one of the current theories where one of the causes of brain fog is due to what is effectively a bit of brain damage. The vaccines reduce the severity of the initial acute symptoms and so have met their main goal of preventing hospitals being overwhelmed. Unfortunately, there is more to covid than those initial symptoms. I really wanted/assumed that the jabs would fully trivialise covid but, as ever, things turned out more complicated and nuanced than that. Also, covid mutates a great deal, even in viral terms, and the newer mutations have a degree of ‘immune escape’. Now, the jabs still provide ‘good protection’ against severe initial symptoms but evolution is allowing this thing to try to wriggle free. To make matters worse, it’s not a case of ‘one and done’ when it comes to infections. Reinfections can and do occur quite a lot and there is little in the way of a ‘grace period’. And every time you get infected, you might be unlucky. Covid also damages the immune system. The more you get infected, the more knackered your immune system may become. That means not only will it have a harder job fighting off a subsequent covid infection, it will have greater trouble fighting off ANY subsequent infection. This is a more serious problem than ‘immunity debt’ which sounds to me like a convenient rationalisation for mixing. I’ve spoken to several healthcare professionals this past year and each time asked them what their stance is. They ranged from a GP who was very bullish that ‘we’ have to get back out there again, to a nurse in Manchester council’s telephone covid advisory service, who wasn’t far off being as reticent as me. The devastating truth is that life really is more dangerous than it was. Different people are dealing with it in different ways. There’s the GP who chooses to minimise the threat in his mind and aggressively deflect doubt because he’d rather pretend it’s 2019. Then there’s the nurse, who grimly acknowledges the situation and tries to mitigate the risk where they can, without becoming too miserable in the process. Other people - very many people, it seems - just aren’t acquainted with much of the information I’ve gathered above, though. They’ve had their jabs, shrugged a shoulder and carried on, without giving much consideration to the gravity of the situation. You might argue what the point would be of giving it that much thought. Personal choice. I needed to know as much as possible. When Bulls*** Johnson said we didn’t have to wear our masks any more, I did not tacitly assume that that statement was equivalent to “it’s safe now”. No, I bore in mind that they are concerned greatly by The Economy and if x% of us get nobbled every year in the course of feeding it, so be it. It’s a cynical numbers game in which no single individual matters at all. We’re just a set of identikit worker-consumers, sleepwalking into danger. Much of the frustration I was venting in my original post is caused by a big chip on my shoulder about people expecting me to go along with something that they have decided for me because I’m apparently like them. I don’t like this supposition that I think and feel the same about it as the majority and its implication that if I don’t then I must be wrong or have something wrong with me. I’m not very inclined to surrender my safety to a society like that. They make too many tacit assumptions, they don’t care enough and they do not get to terrorise and humiliate me like that and then just expect me to come running back for more.
Arx said:I want to minimise the number of times I catch it, because it is NOT the same as a cold or flu, even though the initial symptoms may bear some resemblance (as far as recent variants are concerned). Whoever heard of long cold?
to be honest I'm not sure if anyone is getting so called long covid these days. The numbers are going up because diagnosis is complex and there is a diagnostic backlog but I'm not aware of any evidence that suggests people, vaccinated people, are getting covid and developing long covid symptoms now. My understanding is that long covid is just a form of Post-viral fatigue syndrome which is a rare complication you can get from most viral infections. And now immune systems are used to covid there is no reason to think Post-viral fatigue will be more common with covid than any other virus.