COVID AIN'T GONE YET So my wife has a colleague. Known her for... fifteen years? Trained under her backintheday, filled in for a couple years when her practice exploded, threw a couple employees her way, their network was built by me. Things have been congenial and polite through COVID 'cuz (A) they're Republican (B) they're anti-vax. So we don't hang out like we used to. Colleague has a 80-year-old mom who lives with them. And about a month ago they decided fukkit let's vaycay so they ran off to Hawaii for ten days, leaving our posse to cover half their practice. Came back not feelin' great. They decided to shine it on. So we've got one person coming into the office with active, confirmed COVID and another person who would if only she weren't so goddamn sick and we're trying to keep this from becoming a public health problem and counseling their one about-to-bail-now employee as to how to not end up in dire peril with the health department. None of this was direct, mind you, all of it was back-channel, our hands are scrupulously clean. Ain't nobody died, errbody on the mend, and when we asked "hey wanna go halvesies on a crate of medical supplies" the answer was monosyllabic. They ain't talkin' to us. Not because of anything we did, but because their worldview was wrong, our worldview was right, and now we're the bad guys. Got another friend. She's delivered every grandkid for her ex-boss from back when she was an EMT. Which is a tradition that meant that rather than sticking to her own back yard 80 miles away, she decided to come deliver 20 miles north of us... in our support structure, where we know the EMTs, we know the hospitals, yadda yadda. Home birth, which is always less of a controlled experiment, and the mom was acting woozy and weird. Things stretched out to the point where it wasn't happenin' so it's time to transport to the hospitals we use. At which point they show up, mom has a temp of 104, crash to emergency c-section, baby hits the NICU, grandma gets kicked out of the suite, and both mom'n'dad pop a rapid COVID positive. But not before they've tromped through half the goddamn hospital. Greetings from Big Brother! as healthcare providers we can look your ass up in the vaccine database. Which means we know that while this couple said they were vaccinated to the friend? They also said they'd NEVER get vaccinated to the grandma and as it turns out, dad was vaccinated, mom wasn't. 'cuz, you know, lying to your healthcare provider is small potatoes compared to I dunno sub rosa supporting treason. We'd been talking about going back to home births but we just had this catastrophe where another mom was so stoned out of her gourd that labor pain transmogrified into "my hip hurts" so they sat there smoking spliffs until we had to come crash their house because they weren't gonna make it. That combined with this "Patriots will happily lie to liberal traitors to get what they want" mentality is noping us the fuck out of that. Right now? 97% of COVID cases are among the unvaccinated. If you're in the hospital? With COVID? There's a 99.7% chance you didn't get two shots. So yeah we're rolling back protections but that's not because COVID is gone. It's because if you get COVID now it's because you fuckin' earned it and if you earned it, the hospitals now have the bandwidth to deal with your irresponsible, lying ass. The conversation between the friend and the dad (mom just got off Oxygen yesterday, is still in the ICU) was framed around "well we meant to get vaccinated we just... forgot." Which, okay, if that's what you need to maintain your friendship across the gap of "thanks for driving a hundred miles to leave a flaming bag of poo on the doorstep of one of your friends" more power to you. We'll just not mention the Big Gulp's worth of nyquil and other shit you shouldn't be taking in labor that y'all were using to mask your symptoms 'cuz at the end of the day they aren't our patients (except they are now because we have pediatricians so fuck us I guess). But fuckin' hell man my kid don't have a vaccine yet and neither do her friends, and the variants coasting around these days are mean. So also fuck off.
Hell yeah Covid's not done. We're almost out of the woods, with 67% for the population with one dose (i know it might not seem like much to you Americans, but still) and about 90-50 cases per day in my city of Montreal. Ya know - end of the tunnel kinda deal. Still careful about masks and distancing, but loosening it up within the bubbles. And then my dummy 23 year-old general director of our plastic non-profit calls me at the makerspace (and not my boss because he probably felt stupid, since it's the second time) to say he just tested positive for covid. He had no symptoms, but his coworker gottit so he got tested too. The first time we got a covid scare with him was a false alert, but this time was real and we had to pull out data of who was present at the makerspace when he was, and inform everyone and urge them to get tested if they interacted. My bet is that he fucking shared a joint with his coworker. Damn stoners - i've seen them all Covid-long being: eh, too late now, might as well smoke up.... That dude is such a nice, genuine pure soul. Charismatic, smart, loveable. But also such a naive dummy. Tries to do the right thing, over-promises, under-delivers, tries so hard. I don't know if it's age, inexperience, personality - I love him but the trainwreck of his life is painful to watch, when you want to be supportive but also just scream "get your shit together" from the sidelines.
The thing to keep in mind about America is we have bifurcated into "those who want and got the vaccine" and "those who will never get the vaccine." It's quite something to see someone walking around outside with a chin diaper - it's clearly not about them defying the law because the law says they can take it off. It's about them wanting to protect their health but having no real understanding as to how germ theory works. But I mean
I mean, what do you (society...not...you.) even do about about this? I haven't seen much improvement in the two distinct realities being observed by people after Biden was inaugurated, or as more developments around COVID have occurred. It feels hopeless.
I disagree. I'm coming around to the notion that Trump was an inoculation against totalitarianism, a weakened populist to awaken the antibodies of democracy. I think Trumpism falls firmly into the "that which does not kill you makes you stronger" category, but only for those aligned against Trumpism. The Republicans have been drifting towards fascism since Barry Goldwater. When they finally made the leap, they chose a venal, incompetent plutocrat whose primary characteristics are narcissism and vindictiveness. The real dangers to democracy - the Mitch McConnells of the world - definitely made hay while the sun shone but they did so knowing they were enabling a loyalty thief. And now they're stuck railing against Dr. Seuss and critical race theory while the Biden administration builds back the IRS and settles in to deposit monthly child subsidies into the bank accounts of every needy American family. I don't know if you've noticed, but most of the complaints from the Left are that the Biden administration isn't fulfilling its campaign promises fast enough. Meanwhile the complaints from the Right are... off-topic at best. The big fight right now is how fast to give away money, followed by how responsible the Republicans should be held for attempting to overthrow the country. The populist-in-charge, on the other hand, has shuttered his blog because it got fewer hits than chewy.com. The news media has generally determined that Donald Trump is not newsworthy. Q hasn't dropped in six months (and has been unmasked as a slacker kid from Mukilteo). And the Republican congressional constituency is, on average, slightly crazier and less effective as legislators than Lyndon LaRouche. goobster likes to pretend that there are nice, civil Republicans out there just aching to return to a non-conspiratorial Romney-flavored rightwingerhood as if the Democrats haven't been Conservative Lite for the past 40 years but I'm here to tell ya - when your party has decided Liz Cheney is guilty of thoughtcrime you're fucking done. Yeah they're making a run at eating democracy alive but when your choices are "politician" and "rabid fuckbat" the ideology can only take you so far. I don't think we're out of the woods? I think 2022 is going to be nailbitingly awful even though it shouldn't be? Shit, I'll go as far as predicting that Joe Manchin and Kristen Synema are itching to become that false oasis in the desert Goob still believes in, six months after the Beer Hall Putsch. But Oswald Mosely died in obscurity. The Trumpists made their move, it was beyond the pale, and the FBI are rounding them up one-by-one. You can build a conspiracy around charismatic political prisoners with drive, insight and cunning. You can't build a conspiracy around the Q-Anon Shaman.
Hey now ... my "centrist Republican" thing is just trying to figure out how to remain civil to my Mom on a daily basis. I have to believe there are more people like her out there, or else I'll just eviscerate her with the litany of shit her party and beliefs have buried our republic under, and we'll never speak again. And I still need her help on doing the finishing touches on my garden design! Maybe once we are done with that we will have The Reckoning.