The Arctic Plague Ship That Disabled A Best Selling Author

In August more than one hundred writers, musicians and artists converged on Longyearbyen, the world’s northernmost town, before setting sail around Svalbard, a group of islands in the Arctic circle.

Designed to immerse passengers in the stimulating landscapes of the Arctic Ocean and provoke creative expression, the trip, described as a residency by organisers, has been a semi-regular feature on the itinerary of many creative types since it began in 2009.

Passengers on the 15-day August sailing included the acclaimed writer Deb Olin Unferth, the chart-topping jazz musician Kate Schutt and the novelist Isabel Kaplan, author of the best-selling books Hancock Park and Not Safe For Work.

This, then, was a ship stuffed with creative brain power, people whose brains have powered their careers, secured their livelihoods and made their names.

Yet despite this, the trip went ahead without any protocols to prevent contagion by a virus which, as shown by study after study after study, can, and often does, attack the brain. A virus which, at the time of the trip, was sweeping across the northern hemisphere. In August, the US was experiencing its fifth largest covid wave of the entire pandemic. 1.1 million people were being infected every day. At the peak of the wave, one person in every thirty-four was infected with the virus. In August, more than 5,300 people in the US died of covid.

Covid then was running rampant, a fact almost certainly unknown to many of the creatives when they stepped off the plane in Svalbard and onto the ship in Longyearbyen. With many of them having flown from the US, one of them (and most likely more than one), brought covid onto the ship.

The lack of any covid protocols and the absence of any pre-trip testing made this outcome a statistical inevitability.

“I feel immense anger and frustration with the Arctic Circle organisers,” says Isabel Kaplan, who I spoke to for this article. “It would been so easy for them to impose a negative test requirement to board.”

Of all the places that you could lock covid out of, a singular group of people on a ship sailing in the middle of the Arctic Ocean is surely one of the easiest. Almost comically easy. The flipside of that is that if you do get an outbreak in such a confined environment, it will spread hungrily.

Which is what happened.

By the end of the trip, Isabel says the ship doctor estimated more than half of the roughly one hundred passengers had contracted covid.

A doctor, who, as hard as this is to believe, boarded the ship without any covid tests, masks, Paxlovid or any medication at all to treat people in the event of a covid outbreak. All the doctor had, Isabel told me, “were throat drops for the most severe cases.” She says she had “naively assumed that the main thing I could reasonably expect the doctor to be prepared for was covid. I thought (as did others, I later learned), that I shouldn't expect this doctor to be equipped to treat all medical issues, but that she would be prepared for covid. I assumed that was one of the main reasons - if not the main reason - that there would be a doctor on board. In retrospect, I of course wish I hadn't assumed as much.”

This negligent attitude, Isabel says, worsened as the sick people started to pile up. “We were all summoned to a single room for the covid-on-board announcement, but people with symptoms weren't encouraged to wear a mask or avoid contact.” On the contrary, she says “they were encouraged to come to the bar for a cup of tea.” The only place you could go to avoid the virus-laden air, Isabel says, was out on deck, “but only for so long, given that we were above the Arctic Circle.”

Isabel says she later found out that a trip participant tested positive for covid the day before the trip and was told by the organisers she was still welcome to come on the trip. This person made the decision not to come, but it underscores the dismissive and shamefully ignorant attitude towards covid displayed by the organisers and the ship doctor. (I twice contacted The Arctic Circle organisers but they failed to respond).

And now Isabel, who is 34 years old, has long covid. The disease has a vast array of presentations, and Isabel has the more serious version, her symptoms akin to those suffering from ME.

“I've been essentially house-bound for three months, bed-bound during my crashes,” she says. “For the past two months, I haven't even been able to walk my dog. I have POTS, fatigue, post-exertional malaise, and MCAS. The PEM is the worst. On my rare 'good' days, I can write, and that's when I feel most like myself. But when I'm in a crash or recovering from a crash, it feels like I'm running on low battery mode, and I don't have enough battery to fully power my brain. I know there are lots of people who can't watch TV or read or have terrible brain fog, and I feel very grateful that I can still do these things, though my ability to focus on what I'm reading and find pleasure in it is diminished. It's disorienting and upsetting to no longer be able to consistently engage in activities that are so central to my sense of self.”

I stumbled across Isabel’s announcement of her long covid on her Substack, and in it she wrote that she had been hesitant about publicly identifying as ‘sick.’

I ask her why.

“To write about just how debilitating long covid has been would be to fully internalize the reality that so much of my life has been stripped away, subsumed by long covid. I hate that. But it has proven liberating to acknowledge it as opposed to trying to fight against it, and to have the opportunity to connect with others going through similar experiences. Now, I'm openly writing about my experience with long covid in real time, through my Substack, Good Material.”

Isabel’s long covid was initially dismissed by her doctor who told her ‘fatigue is fatigue, people get tired when they're sick, you just need to rest,’ a response that will be familiar to all long covid sufferers. She then specifically sought out a primary care physician with long covid experience who helped her. She is currently taking low dose naltrexone, ivabradine, H1 and H2 antihistamines for the MCAS, “and I just had a stellate ganglion block, which I'm hoping will help with the dysautonomia symptoms.”

Isabel’s debilitating long covid struck after her fourth infection. She was also up to date on covid vaccines. In popular medical and societal culture, if you didn’t get long covid after your first infection, you are unlikely to get it. Infections, they say, build antibodies, strengthening, not weakening your defences. Online epidemiologists have confidently but illiterately asserted you don’t need to be worried about long covid in 2024. If you’re vaccinated, especially if you’ve had the latest booster, especially especially if you’re young, covid can hardly touch you, we’re told.

In the real world, it appears likely that your risk of long covid actually rises with each covid infection as your immune system is progressively weakened/triggered/inflamed by infections. In the real world, vaccination is imperfect protection, only moderately reducing your risk of developing long covid.

Isabel says she knows of at least one other trip participant who is suffering from long covid after being infected on the ship.

Isabel’s story and the attitude of the trip organisers is tragically emblematic of the societal denial that swirls around covid and long covid. Think about it. Preventing a covid outbreak on that ship wasn’t even a question of cost, it was a question of vibes. And from how Isabel described it, the response of the organisers was a perfect example of not wanting to acknowledge covid for fear of ruining the vibes.

Got covid? Please, come on the trip and spread it to as many people as possible!

Got covid? Please, don’t be a stranger! Come and drink with us at the bar!

Isabel says that as people got sick, the person who runs the fellowship, “a man named Aaron O'Connor who was on board with us, did not once check in on anyone who was sick. He and the expedition leader were both dismissive of any and all complaints and concerns.”

This is a reaction that, to my mind, tells us a lot about vibe-keeping, denial and ableism around covid.

They knew something unpleasant was happening but didn’t want to confront it. They didn’t want to confront it because they knew they could have done something to prevent it. And when they didn’t prevent it, they didn’t want to be faced with the consequences of their inactions. They wanted to maintain the vibes.

Their refusal to check in on the sick may also, I suspect, have been garnished with a sprig of ableism and health supremacy. Because the eugenicist sentiment that sickness is only for the weak, not the strong, is growing rapidly. It is growing because country after country, from the UK to the US to Belgium is reporting a growing burden of ill-health, but social denial around covid prevents us from agreeing collectively on the cause. The story we’ve been pushed and many are happy to indulge is that covid is now mild, so covid can’t be causing these problems.

Under these conditions, people will increasingly be blamed for their own ill-health. People will lash out at the sick or deny they even exist. They will tell them they are just tired, or anxious. They should try yoga or deep breathing. That they’ll get better soon. (This is all especially pernicious in the long covid era because standard blood tests often don’t show up abnormalities triggered by covid).

No one who really understands covid would act like the organisers and the doctor on Isabel’s trip. The sadder truth, however, is that billions of people, including huge swathes of the medical profession, do act like this.

The Arctic plague ship is another example of how the covid-is-a-cold myth has burrowed its way deep into our collective consciousness, aided by official state and medical propaganda, individual cognitive biases and social constructions of reality, as I have written about before.

It’s pathetic, it’s childish, it’s dangerous and more organisations need to be liable for the harm they are causing, day in, day out, by refusing to face reality.

The virus didn’t disappear, it hasn’t been rendered harmless, and Isabel, alongside all those who caught covid on that ship, didn’t need to be harmed.

There was nothing inevitable about it.

But unless collective delusions about covid are cast off, unless our political and health leaders stop thinking about covid infection as inevitable, many millions will continue to be disabled by the virus in the months and years to come.

You can read Isabel’s Substack here and find her on Bluesky at isabelkaplan.bsky.social