It's Too Hot Everyone's Got Covid Cheney Loves Kamala It's Normal
I’ve had family visiting hence the two week break between pieces and even this is a bit of a filler, some collected thoughts and ramblings just spilling out (I’m working on a meatier science thing which I should have up later this week).
Historic September heatwaves are striking the planet. From Africa, to China to South America, to North America, Australia to Europe. It’s hotter in the Arctic circle than Spain.
I live in a dry, water-stressed patch of the planet. Not far from us villages have been under water rationing measures this summer, although so far we’ve been spared. A friend messaged me the other day asking about my predictions for water availability in the future. I suggested it would eventually run out but with ‘false’ years where things look normal and everyone forgets it’s a problem and then next year it’s worse than ever, then it gets better again for a bit and so on. Authorities will react minimally, afraid to take on big agriculture that drains so much water, and will apply temporary fixes. I said we’d have enough notice to plan, or not plan, or react, or not react. Irrigated fruit tree agriculture will end. Eventually most agriculture will end. But we’d know months in advance that a bad water crisis moment was approaching. I said that what we should be really worried about, the thing we’d have only days to plan for, is a catastrophic heat burst that took temperatures close to 50C (122F) for weeks on end, buckle the infrastructure, stop the AC, dry the land, spur mega fires, cause many thousands to drop dead within hours, cooked from the inside out, our bodies unable to shed heat in overheated homes. I said this would happen in the nearer term than the water crisis, but that both would happen in our lifetime and then I went back to watching US Open tennis highlights on youtube.
And it got me thinking about how we’re supposed to live now. About the facade of normality that envelops us in every moment despite the planet collapsing conditions we live within. A facade that all of us to some extent can’t help but engage with, whether that’s tennis on youtube or netflix or any of the other million little treats that make up the normal of the abnormal, distracting us by necessity. We can’t internalize the catastrophe every moment of every day, we have to embrace distractions, but be cynical enough to recognize them as distractions, enjoy them nonetheless, then selectively engage and internalize the catastrophe. If that makes sense.
We’re not the first people to live at the end of a world. I’ve argued before that the world has been ending for a long time, and for some people it ended a long time ago. The world wasn’t an Eden then the modern climate crisis came along, or then genocide came along, or then covid came along. These are all products of underlying conditions, of enclosure, capitalism, imperial relations, colonialism, supremacy (human over nature/other animals, white, other kinds), eugenics, of social structures and psyches of denial, good vibes, middle class comfort.
Or then covid came along.
Half of all Americans will have been covid infected by the end of this summer wave, many for the second, third, fourth, god-knows what numbered time. Assessing waves around the world is a sketchier job, with patchy wastewater tracking, but it appears that in Europe the wave has been smaller than in the US, with outliers, including Scotland, where the wave was huge (and likely reflected the situation in England too, but that failed state long ago scrapped wastewater monitoring).
As this wave winds down, another wave will start. The covid variant tracker Ryan Hisner puts the likely arrival of a breakthrough, new-wave-causing variant around end February. Then maybe half of people will get infected again. Maybe fewer, maybe more, depending on the nature of the variant and the immune profile of a given population. Then we rinse and repeat. Remember when breakthrough infections were rare and if they happened we’d probably only get it once, we’d likely not die, then it would be 2019 again? Remember, we were told this because just a few short years ago it was considered bad to get covid even once. The good old days.
As soon as it became clear that wasn’t going to happen, that vaccines were not going to stop transmission, public health bodies, rather than implement a new model for a new situation, shifted all language and messaging on covid to what had been tried and tested for the flu. Which is to say they did nothing apart from tell us to get vaccinated annually and wash our hands (for an airborne virus).
I’ve been thinking about how once it became clear covid wasn’t going to pan out like we had been promised, the application of the mental and practical model used for flu to covid was the ultimate public health disaster move. And it was done not as a reflection of the properties of the two viruses, but solely for back-to-normal reassurance.
"We lived with the flu, we have to live with covid." How many times have you heard this? Maybe even told yourself? It sounds sounds reasonable and logical on its face, doesn’t it? But it obscures an ocean of difference. We lived with a legitimately seasonal winter virus which possesses lower transmissibility, of which there are only a few strains, which often were predicted and vaccinated against ahead of time. This lack of flu strain diversity is why most people only get the flu a handful of times in their lives.
Covid is not seasonal, there are so many strains it’s hard to keep up and the same ones, unlike the flu, don’t recirculate. They die off and get replaced, so we can’t vaccinate ahead of time and infection immunity doesn’t last. Covid vaccines can only chase strains, they can never get ahead of them, and your infection doesn’t protect you against the next variant. How many people have really sat for a few minutes and thought about why they keep getting infected with the virus that causes covid but never kept getting the flu? Most people don’t think about this because it’s not their job. They expect to be guided by public health, and they expect public health bodies to be doing The Right Thing. Well that era is dead, if it ever existed. Now more than ever we need to inform ourselves. The world has changed.
Applying the flu model to covid has been the death of public health as an idea. When people say public health has died with covid, they mean it literally for these reasons. Nothing about the science of covid says we should be dealing with it like the flu. From the acute harms to the longer tail of harm it can cause. Institutional governance is dealing with covid like the flu only to avoid disrupting business-as-usual and the interests of capital. To avoid spending money on cleaning the air (totally doable with air filtration and UV light) and to avoid putting ‘burdens’ on business to do so.
Public health died for capitalism and our health was the price. Always has been really. It just becomes more obvious as conditions deteriorate.
We’re also pretending covid is the flu to avoid putting the social mechanisms in place that such a virus requires, mechanisms that promote the idea of a society in which our individual actions form an ecosystem, from which consequences, both good and bad, arise. To avoid the charge of moralizing that comes with telling people they have responsibilities for the health of others. If you get on a plane without covid and get off a plane with covid and give it to someone else and you did nothing to try and stop that happening, that’s bad. People should be told that’s bad, shouldn’t they? Did anyone tell Hillary?
Ultimately covid is one of the events of the 21st century that has further peeled back the curtain on what kind of system (when system means the economy plus the social culture plus institutional governance) we really live in, and the deep, existential trouble we are in due to this system.
A system Kamala Harris or Bernie Sanders or any other American Democrat isn’t going to change btw. The latest in this starred and striped clown show, in case you missed it, is the oil company, million-person-killing war criminal Dick Cheney endorsing Kamala Harris, and Bernie saying how great that is for efforts to defend democracy.
Want to vote against genocide? Sorry. You can only vote for a pro-genocide president. Corporate lobbyists spend $4.3bn a year buying Congress and corporations are people now, with more rights. AIPAC brags about spending millions to install pro Israel lawmakers, most Congress people are millionaires and Cheney himself hadn’t been elected for over a decade and was parachuted into the VP slot from oil demon Halliburton. I’m going to need an update on the A. democracy part of this and the B. worth defending element.
Oh and Macron in France did the meme, striking a deal with Le Pen’s far right bloc to install a right-wing prime minister rather than back a prime minister from the leftist bloc that actually won the election. (The new prime minister is from a party that came 4th with 5% of the vote).
More democracy in action from the good guys!
The good guys we have to vote for to stop the bad guys who the good guys always vote with to stop the left.
Revolution or cooked.
Told you it was a bit of ramble.
Back with more form-fitting nerd science soon.
Maybe this is "filler" and "ramblings" - but it's important and needs to be said, all of it. It's interesting how often those who support mitigations for pandemics also oppose genocidal slaughter.
On "just the flu", yes SARS-2 (should probably be -4 by now given the spike strain jumps for BA.2 and JN.1) is much worse for the reasons you give. But influenza is also bad and regularly causes tens of thousands of premature deaths. It, too, is unnecessary as shown by the 2020-2021 season which had very few cases and caused the extinction of the B/Yamagata strain. The same mitigations that could tame SARS also could tame influenza.
Wish we as a species could learn something.
Thanks for writing.
Nate, thank you for writing about what my friends and I learned in 2020. We worked for the state of Minnesota public health department. We learned that our jobs were jobs in name only. We were not allowed to do our jobs. We sat and watched people die. People who believe all of the covid lies. Or, people who still are washing their hands for an airborne illness. No one has told them how to protect themselves and their families. Many of the children who died from covid in 2020, were the children of “essential workers”, first responders, health care workers, meat packers.
I tried so hard to get the attention of leaders in the agency to put together a plan to protect these children. Black children were hospitalized with MIS-C at 5 times the rate of white children. The leaders told me that Black children were getting sicker cause of genetics and they weren’t going to do anything. This broke me. I have always been able to influence leaders to do the right thing, or gone around them to make the right thing happen. I couldn’t do anything to save the children. They were simply numbers in a report.
So my friends and I quit. We couldn’t do our jobs. There is only an illusion of public health.
Oh, in 2020 when the Navajo Nation asked the Feds for Personal Protection Equipment (PPE), the Feds sent them body bags.