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.
I am curious as to whether the organizer and/or the physician had contracted COVID previous to the cruise. I have noticed a perceptible change in judgement with acquaintances that have been infected with COVID. The denial that there will be serious long term consequences is strong and adamant.
What I find most infuriating is that my acquaintances are elderly like me. To project their denial of harmful consequences onto children is for me, contemptible.
Thanks to Nate Bear for willingly salting the vibes! (Jessica Wildflower of sentinel-intelligence.com is another salt thrower.)
My elderly mother (89), who had covid and was in bed for a week (with paxlovid) 2 years ago and never recovered her sense of smell, does not want to accept that the life she has lived thus far, must now radically change. She thinks I am crazy for asking her to test before we visit. It’s not a political thing (she is fully vaxxed) or an ignorance thing (god knows I have informed her of the medical issues), it’s kind of a psychological thing I imagine was present during the black plague, “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die”. She says everyone else is getting on with their life and that covid should now just be “accepted”. She rarely masks and socializes a great deal. She is well aware she is at the end of her lifespan and I do not begrudge her this attitude, but for the life of me, I cannot understand how she cares nothing for those of us who can reasonably expect to live another 25-50 years (myself and her grandchildren).
I do not agree with Nate that it is all ableism, I believe it is narcissism.
I’ve been disabled by MECFS for about 12 years now and the amount of people who knew me before I got sick, who see how I live now, who still think it’s reasonable to convince me that it’s OK for me to get sick has been really shocking to me.
And after spending years trying to convince me that I should get Covid for Joe Biden’s economy it doesn’t even occur to them that that’s exactly why I won’t go near them.
They’re not going to protect me from catching Covid after spending years trying to convince me that I would be fine if I caught Covid. It’s almost like these people are trying to infect me on purpose so they can say see I was right. And if they were wrong it’s only my life, so who cares?
It’s gross I had a woman texting me a couple nights ago complaining about how bored she is recovering from an issue caused by a medication side effect.
She always loves to talk about how horrible it would be if she had to live my life, like “how can you stand just being home all the time?? Don’t you go crazy??”
And every time she does this I pretend she’s talking about how awful it must be to have a chronic illness, so I will reply and say “yes it’s really terrible being bored what’s even worse is when I want to do things but I’m too sick to even get out of bed. It’s maddening.”
I understand some people can’t entertain themselves so it must really be stressful to have to sit down and be in your own head for a couple days, yet they have no problem putting that on other people. She sees nothing wrong with going around breathing on other people potentially sitting them down for days or weeks or the rest of their lives.
She’s had Covid a couple times, she works in a nursing home so once they stopped mandatory testing them she never tested again. I’m convinced it’s like toxoplasmosis and once it gets in people it motivates them to spread it.
There are many ways to live one's life. That we choose a path that minimizes infection is our choice. To denigrate that is unseemly and frankly inhumane.
May you and all readers (and the author) of "Do Not Panic" have a great holiday season! (If you reside elsewhere, best wishes and stay safe!)
I don’t understand not even having masks or medication on the ship.
I had a friend invite me on a two week cruise from Hawaii to Australia a few months ago, there is no way I would have considered going without my own masks and texts and paxlovid. But also no way I am getting on a floating petri dish anyway. Plus even the CDC was saying covid was bad at that time.
I don’t know why he keeps going on these cruises because every time he does he complains about the limited services because of lack of staff. Duh. He’s on another one now, he’s elderly and says he’s had a good run so he doesn’t care if he gets sick and dies because of a cruise. My biggest fear is that it will get me but not kill me and I will be left more disabled than I am.
You have hit the nail on the head. Most elders can accept the idea of death, but have no clue about the implications of disability and helplessness. It is like a willful blind spot.
I'm in the elder cohort and have to disagree with the assumption that we're clueless. A lot of us are already disabled, many with ME or other post-viral syndromes that we've lived with for decades. We don't take chances on getting reinfected or spreading disease to others. We're informed, aware of routes of transmission, and more likely to stay up to date on vaccines. While I don't presume to speak for all of us, or to generalize about any age group, I can assure you that among my networks, COVID awareness and proactivity (or lack thereof) are much more a function of experience, temperament and peer pressure than age. The people I know who carry on like it's 2019 are mostly in their 40s or younger. They haven't experienced the long term effects of infection -- yet -- so assume that they never will.
I’m 68, so put myself in the elder cohort. But it does appear to me when I go out to indoor public spaces (grocery, bank, etc.) that many more elders are unmasked than masked, even ones with visible age-related challenges. In fact I am noticing a recent trend that many clerks and tellers in the under 50 group are starting to mask. But you are correct that this is not always a matter of age alone, but personal decision making. My opinion is mine alone based on anecdotal experience and I should not have implied generality.
Wondering how many who agreed to be on the ship were ignoring Covid and now are not. I wouldn't dream of going on any ship with a bunch of people who don't test and don't care. I puke on ships from motion sickness. Can't imagine being Covid sick on top of that.
Yeah I have to admit I kind of chuckled when I was reading the part about how this lady who now has Covid from the ship was really mad they weren’t testing people before they got on.
Yes they should have absolutely been doing this, but she knew they weren’t and she chose to go anyway. It’s not like they were promising to test people and then not doing it, she knew they weren’t going to do it. She entered at her own risk.
Excellent article. Many thanks it describes & highlights societal attitude to covid. Life as immunocompromised in today’s society is tricky & hard work. So need friends who understand & are supportive. Thank you
Thank you so much for writing this. Horrifying but sadly not surprising. I very much appreciate and am always inspired and informed by your work. I've posted and linked to the post on my Instagram and Facebook accounts. I don't think I can link to you directly from there. I wrote this in my comments:
The brilliant Nate Bear has written an insightful piece that exposes the not unsurprising COVID outbreak on a ship where an artistic residency took place in the Arctic Circle this summer. The still shocking COVID denial, lack of awareness of basic and successful mitigations to prevent infection, and complete disregard of human health and safety are still happening all over the place.
This is why I wrote to the @Wellcomecollection back in 2023 about their lack of mitigations for an airborne pathogen and received a wholly inadequate response which is shocking especially for a medical research institution and why I write to other institutions when I am invited to attend research events or to speak at conferences, receiving little or no adequate responses or promises to implement better protections to make spaces safe and inclusive for everyone and to prevent harm. I am still the lone voice in attempting to protect myself, my students, and colleagues on the university campus where I work.
This is also the main reason why I have been reluctant to apply to any artist residencies myself until people wake the fuck up. For, as Nate Bear writes, "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".
They were lucky. Lucky no one died on the ship. Didn’t check on the sick people? Shame on them.
There are 2 covid groups that I participate in on reddit- 1) zero covid- a group of people who around the world who are doing everything that they can to not get covid 2)a group of people from around the world with long covid
Both groups have people who are despondent and angry. The people with lc have to find ways to help themselves. Some are signing up for assisted suicide.
Have you noticed all of the stories about “mysterious” xzy disease increasing? Authors have no idea why many diseases are increasing!
And school shootings are twice what they were in 2018. What has changed from 2018 to today? Tiktok? A pernicious virus that many children have had multiple times that damages the brain stem of humans and destroys the gut biome that is responsible for making serotonin- could that be the cause?
The lack of basic knowledge of sarscov2 is astounding. If you google any disease state and type in covid, study after study and paper after paper, dating back
To 2020 can be found. There is no excuse for the ignorance of
Medical professionals. Alas, they don’t want to know what sarscov2 does to the following. If they did know, they might actually have to wear a mask and get clean air and do something…
I didn't read which port the Arctic cruise disembarked from but Sweden allowed Covid to take its course without intervention I believe, which may explain why the doctor and organisers behaved the way they did. This is an observation and not an excuse, as I am sympathetic having had Covid three times in 2024 in my mid 70's. I feel that it has aged me and feel diminished as the result, but feel lucky to still be living my life, pretty much as I did before. My sympathy to those who live in countries without socialised medicine, or whom Covid affected more profoundly.
Can you please help me understand why you used the phrasing "Isabel has the more serious version, her symptoms akin to those suffering from ME"
On her substack, Isabel says she fits the criteria for ME. Therefore, she has ME. Her symptoms are not "akin" to ME, they are ME. I am perplexed about how often I see wording like this in Long Covid articles or personal accounts, people just refusing to say they have ME, while describing all the facts that make it clear they have ME.
Also I would argue that ME is only one serious diagnosis after a Covid infection. There's other types too. Post ICU syndrome comes to mind as an example.
Because it is not entirely clear that they are the same diseases. Don't blame me, blame the researchers who left post-viral conditions understudied for so long
A diagnosis of ME/CFS does not require that the patient knows the full root cause of their symptoms. For diagnosis purposes, it doesn't matter if people with Covid-triggered symptoms have a different root cause or disease process than people who have their symptoms triggered by something else. The dx is entirely based on the symptoms experienced.
Do you think that no one with Covid-triggered symptoms is allowed to get an ME/CFS diagnosis? Because we haven't conclusively proven they are governed by the same disease process? That is how I am understanding your comment. That is not true.
I agree that yes, lack of research hampers things significantly. But we should be clear and use current terms correctly.
My goal with this comment was to try to educate, either myself or you. I've re-read my comment and I do want to apologize if I came off as angry or combative to you. I should have been a bit better with my tone. And I should say I don't know the full case with Isabel's health, but she does directly say "I meet the criteria for ME/CFS," that's a direct quote from her substack.
Thanks. I suppose I am left wondering somewhat about the diagnosis for a disease that may have different underlying causes and whether this in itself demonstrates the failure of the medical community on MECFS and lets them off the hook somewhat for that failure. But I appreciate the info
I'd suggest you c'mon over to a ME/CFS forum and work through your remaining questions there. I really think people who are in Long Covid spheres need to have more overlap with the existing ME/CFS community, it makes both of us stronger. I've had ME/CFS for over a decade, for reference.
I'm fond of the reddit /r/cfs personally, it's well moderated and in my experience people are generally happy to answer questions from others who don't have ME/CFS. If you want other non-forum resources, I think the journalist David Tuller or MEACTION are great resources for keeping up with ME/CFS politics, and the Bateman Horne Center has a lot of great layperson videos, talks, and written articles that talk about the medical side of ME/CFS.
I agree that it should be referred to as ME, which is for many of us a post-viral disease, and which has no single causative agent. (Like a lot of the PwME population, mine was triggered by a flu-like virus many years ago.) Both ME and LC have over 200 associated symptoms and there is significant overlap. It is possible to have LC with or without post-exertional malaise, or PEM. But that is the hallmark symptom of ME, so if it's present then it's usual for a person to be considered to have both diagnoses. This has become the case for half of people who develop long COVID.
I’ve counselled (healthcare background) elderly Oxbridge graduates not to do cruises only for them to book and do one this year. I know someone elderly on one lung who’s done a couple recently even 🤷♀️ Asking for trouble.. .
As a person who studies psychology and anthropology, I do not believe our species will last another 1000 years, even if we manage to get off our planet. It was a good run while it lasted. But our highly adaptable brains seem to have a fatal flaw; self-interest eclipses our foresight every time.
Noting that I totally missed that this was one of biggest waves in August. Most news stations treat it like a common cold. Can’t tell you the last time I heard someone talk about deaths or treating as though deadly. My husband got it in spite of being vaccinated and they didn’t give him paxlovid even though he has enough health issues to qualify
Hi there. I was on the ship too. While I’m very, very sad that Isabel got so sick with long covid, and wish her a full recovery, it’s pretty clear that you have left out a massive amount of balanced reporting in this article.
I also got sick onboard. The ship did a lot to mitigate the spread, including fumigation and cleaning of surfaces.
Aside from the fact that we all traveled from international locations, the only way to have prevented this would have been for us to remain in Longyearbyen for two weeks which is logistically a ridiculous ask for most people. Furthermore, we would have still been sick with the entire town (I say this because the entire town of Longyearbyen got sick while we were gone on the ship… a fact left out of your article do to lack of research).
Your reporting is irresponsible. You twisted what Isabel told you so that you could sensationalize something that is a fact of life in 2024, and potentially put a perfectly fine and amazing artist residency at risk. Shame on you and your “reporting.”
So yall brought the plague to a remote artic town...and yet you don't seem to care. so sad. and also. things have changed since 2020, you don't need to quarantine for 2 weeks. You just need to do staggered testing prior and during the trip, masking prior to the cruise, and had ANY minimal treatments and ppe on the cruise. Personally if this happened to me, I'd sue the hell out of them to start making people wake up to their gross negligence. This negligence and attitude like yours led to people being disabled. where's your empathy and care??!!
What would have been wrong with asking people to take a simple covid test before boarding the ship? It's not as if Nate is recommending extreme measures here. I'm also wondering why the organizers didn't request that people with symptoms wear masks in public areas. That would have stopped the spread more effectively than surface cleaning.
Oh this was excellent in the darkest way possible. Thank you for writing the truth!
Thank you!
I am curious as to whether the organizer and/or the physician had contracted COVID previous to the cruise. I have noticed a perceptible change in judgement with acquaintances that have been infected with COVID. The denial that there will be serious long term consequences is strong and adamant.
What I find most infuriating is that my acquaintances are elderly like me. To project their denial of harmful consequences onto children is for me, contemptible.
Thanks to Nate Bear for willingly salting the vibes! (Jessica Wildflower of sentinel-intelligence.com is another salt thrower.)
My elderly mother (89), who had covid and was in bed for a week (with paxlovid) 2 years ago and never recovered her sense of smell, does not want to accept that the life she has lived thus far, must now radically change. She thinks I am crazy for asking her to test before we visit. It’s not a political thing (she is fully vaxxed) or an ignorance thing (god knows I have informed her of the medical issues), it’s kind of a psychological thing I imagine was present during the black plague, “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die”. She says everyone else is getting on with their life and that covid should now just be “accepted”. She rarely masks and socializes a great deal. She is well aware she is at the end of her lifespan and I do not begrudge her this attitude, but for the life of me, I cannot understand how she cares nothing for those of us who can reasonably expect to live another 25-50 years (myself and her grandchildren).
I do not agree with Nate that it is all ableism, I believe it is narcissism.
I’ve been disabled by MECFS for about 12 years now and the amount of people who knew me before I got sick, who see how I live now, who still think it’s reasonable to convince me that it’s OK for me to get sick has been really shocking to me.
And after spending years trying to convince me that I should get Covid for Joe Biden’s economy it doesn’t even occur to them that that’s exactly why I won’t go near them.
They’re not going to protect me from catching Covid after spending years trying to convince me that I would be fine if I caught Covid. It’s almost like these people are trying to infect me on purpose so they can say see I was right. And if they were wrong it’s only my life, so who cares?
It’s gross I had a woman texting me a couple nights ago complaining about how bored she is recovering from an issue caused by a medication side effect.
She always loves to talk about how horrible it would be if she had to live my life, like “how can you stand just being home all the time?? Don’t you go crazy??”
And every time she does this I pretend she’s talking about how awful it must be to have a chronic illness, so I will reply and say “yes it’s really terrible being bored what’s even worse is when I want to do things but I’m too sick to even get out of bed. It’s maddening.”
I understand some people can’t entertain themselves so it must really be stressful to have to sit down and be in your own head for a couple days, yet they have no problem putting that on other people. She sees nothing wrong with going around breathing on other people potentially sitting them down for days or weeks or the rest of their lives.
She’s had Covid a couple times, she works in a nursing home so once they stopped mandatory testing them she never tested again. I’m convinced it’s like toxoplasmosis and once it gets in people it motivates them to spread it.
Thank you for a powerful and moving reply!
There are many ways to live one's life. That we choose a path that minimizes infection is our choice. To denigrate that is unseemly and frankly inhumane.
May you and all readers (and the author) of "Do Not Panic" have a great holiday season! (If you reside elsewhere, best wishes and stay safe!)
I don’t understand not even having masks or medication on the ship.
I had a friend invite me on a two week cruise from Hawaii to Australia a few months ago, there is no way I would have considered going without my own masks and texts and paxlovid. But also no way I am getting on a floating petri dish anyway. Plus even the CDC was saying covid was bad at that time.
I don’t know why he keeps going on these cruises because every time he does he complains about the limited services because of lack of staff. Duh. He’s on another one now, he’s elderly and says he’s had a good run so he doesn’t care if he gets sick and dies because of a cruise. My biggest fear is that it will get me but not kill me and I will be left more disabled than I am.
Able bodied people can’t even imagine.
You have hit the nail on the head. Most elders can accept the idea of death, but have no clue about the implications of disability and helplessness. It is like a willful blind spot.
I'm in the elder cohort and have to disagree with the assumption that we're clueless. A lot of us are already disabled, many with ME or other post-viral syndromes that we've lived with for decades. We don't take chances on getting reinfected or spreading disease to others. We're informed, aware of routes of transmission, and more likely to stay up to date on vaccines. While I don't presume to speak for all of us, or to generalize about any age group, I can assure you that among my networks, COVID awareness and proactivity (or lack thereof) are much more a function of experience, temperament and peer pressure than age. The people I know who carry on like it's 2019 are mostly in their 40s or younger. They haven't experienced the long term effects of infection -- yet -- so assume that they never will.
I’m 68, so put myself in the elder cohort. But it does appear to me when I go out to indoor public spaces (grocery, bank, etc.) that many more elders are unmasked than masked, even ones with visible age-related challenges. In fact I am noticing a recent trend that many clerks and tellers in the under 50 group are starting to mask. But you are correct that this is not always a matter of age alone, but personal decision making. My opinion is mine alone based on anecdotal experience and I should not have implied generality.
Wondering how many who agreed to be on the ship were ignoring Covid and now are not. I wouldn't dream of going on any ship with a bunch of people who don't test and don't care. I puke on ships from motion sickness. Can't imagine being Covid sick on top of that.
Yeah I have to admit I kind of chuckled when I was reading the part about how this lady who now has Covid from the ship was really mad they weren’t testing people before they got on.
Yes they should have absolutely been doing this, but she knew they weren’t and she chose to go anyway. It’s not like they were promising to test people and then not doing it, she knew they weren’t going to do it. She entered at her own risk.
Excellent article. Many thanks it describes & highlights societal attitude to covid. Life as immunocompromised in today’s society is tricky & hard work. So need friends who understand & are supportive. Thank you
I agree. Thanks for reading
Thank you so much for writing this. Horrifying but sadly not surprising. I very much appreciate and am always inspired and informed by your work. I've posted and linked to the post on my Instagram and Facebook accounts. I don't think I can link to you directly from there. I wrote this in my comments:
The brilliant Nate Bear has written an insightful piece that exposes the not unsurprising COVID outbreak on a ship where an artistic residency took place in the Arctic Circle this summer. The still shocking COVID denial, lack of awareness of basic and successful mitigations to prevent infection, and complete disregard of human health and safety are still happening all over the place.
This is why I wrote to the @Wellcomecollection back in 2023 about their lack of mitigations for an airborne pathogen and received a wholly inadequate response which is shocking especially for a medical research institution and why I write to other institutions when I am invited to attend research events or to speak at conferences, receiving little or no adequate responses or promises to implement better protections to make spaces safe and inclusive for everyone and to prevent harm. I am still the lone voice in attempting to protect myself, my students, and colleagues on the university campus where I work.
This is also the main reason why I have been reluctant to apply to any artist residencies myself until people wake the fuck up. For, as Nate Bear writes, "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".
Read the full piece for free via Substack: https://www.donotpanic.news/p/the-arctic-plague-ship-that-disabled
Layered mitigations work, people: Testing, masking, ventilation, and air purifying. Look after your brains! No one else is!
#Covidsnotover #covidsnotmild ##coviddamagesyourbrain #donoharm
#natebear
They were lucky. Lucky no one died on the ship. Didn’t check on the sick people? Shame on them.
There are 2 covid groups that I participate in on reddit- 1) zero covid- a group of people who around the world who are doing everything that they can to not get covid 2)a group of people from around the world with long covid
Both groups have people who are despondent and angry. The people with lc have to find ways to help themselves. Some are signing up for assisted suicide.
Have you noticed all of the stories about “mysterious” xzy disease increasing? Authors have no idea why many diseases are increasing!
And school shootings are twice what they were in 2018. What has changed from 2018 to today? Tiktok? A pernicious virus that many children have had multiple times that damages the brain stem of humans and destroys the gut biome that is responsible for making serotonin- could that be the cause?
The lack of basic knowledge of sarscov2 is astounding. If you google any disease state and type in covid, study after study and paper after paper, dating back
To 2020 can be found. There is no excuse for the ignorance of
Medical professionals. Alas, they don’t want to know what sarscov2 does to the following. If they did know, they might actually have to wear a mask and get clean air and do something…
Eyes
Hearing
Esophagus
Lungs
Skin
Heart
Arteries
Nervous system
Brain stem
CV system
Digestive system
Bones
Teeth
Tongue
Smell and taste
Nerves
Etc etc etc
.. ‘a case study - among ‘Case Studies .. ‘ship of fools is now boarding ! ?? 🦎🏴☠️🧨
I didn't read which port the Arctic cruise disembarked from but Sweden allowed Covid to take its course without intervention I believe, which may explain why the doctor and organisers behaved the way they did. This is an observation and not an excuse, as I am sympathetic having had Covid three times in 2024 in my mid 70's. I feel that it has aged me and feel diminished as the result, but feel lucky to still be living my life, pretty much as I did before. My sympathy to those who live in countries without socialised medicine, or whom Covid affected more profoundly.
Can you please help me understand why you used the phrasing "Isabel has the more serious version, her symptoms akin to those suffering from ME"
On her substack, Isabel says she fits the criteria for ME. Therefore, she has ME. Her symptoms are not "akin" to ME, they are ME. I am perplexed about how often I see wording like this in Long Covid articles or personal accounts, people just refusing to say they have ME, while describing all the facts that make it clear they have ME.
Also I would argue that ME is only one serious diagnosis after a Covid infection. There's other types too. Post ICU syndrome comes to mind as an example.
Because it is not entirely clear that they are the same diseases. Don't blame me, blame the researchers who left post-viral conditions understudied for so long
If you live in the US, this is the diagnostic criteria for ME/CFS: https://www.cdc.gov/me-cfs/hcp/diagnosis/iom-2015-diagnostic-criteria-1.html
A diagnosis of ME/CFS does not require that the patient knows the full root cause of their symptoms. For diagnosis purposes, it doesn't matter if people with Covid-triggered symptoms have a different root cause or disease process than people who have their symptoms triggered by something else. The dx is entirely based on the symptoms experienced.
Do you think that no one with Covid-triggered symptoms is allowed to get an ME/CFS diagnosis? Because we haven't conclusively proven they are governed by the same disease process? That is how I am understanding your comment. That is not true.
I agree that yes, lack of research hampers things significantly. But we should be clear and use current terms correctly.
My goal with this comment was to try to educate, either myself or you. I've re-read my comment and I do want to apologize if I came off as angry or combative to you. I should have been a bit better with my tone. And I should say I don't know the full case with Isabel's health, but she does directly say "I meet the criteria for ME/CFS," that's a direct quote from her substack.
Thanks. I suppose I am left wondering somewhat about the diagnosis for a disease that may have different underlying causes and whether this in itself demonstrates the failure of the medical community on MECFS and lets them off the hook somewhat for that failure. But I appreciate the info
I'd suggest you c'mon over to a ME/CFS forum and work through your remaining questions there. I really think people who are in Long Covid spheres need to have more overlap with the existing ME/CFS community, it makes both of us stronger. I've had ME/CFS for over a decade, for reference.
Happy to. Let me know what forum you recommend
I'm fond of the reddit /r/cfs personally, it's well moderated and in my experience people are generally happy to answer questions from others who don't have ME/CFS. If you want other non-forum resources, I think the journalist David Tuller or MEACTION are great resources for keeping up with ME/CFS politics, and the Bateman Horne Center has a lot of great layperson videos, talks, and written articles that talk about the medical side of ME/CFS.
I agree that it should be referred to as ME, which is for many of us a post-viral disease, and which has no single causative agent. (Like a lot of the PwME population, mine was triggered by a flu-like virus many years ago.) Both ME and LC have over 200 associated symptoms and there is significant overlap. It is possible to have LC with or without post-exertional malaise, or PEM. But that is the hallmark symptom of ME, so if it's present then it's usual for a person to be considered to have both diagnoses. This has become the case for half of people who develop long COVID.
I’ve counselled (healthcare background) elderly Oxbridge graduates not to do cruises only for them to book and do one this year. I know someone elderly on one lung who’s done a couple recently even 🤷♀️ Asking for trouble.. .
This doesn't bode well for our species😞😷
As a person who studies psychology and anthropology, I do not believe our species will last another 1000 years, even if we manage to get off our planet. It was a good run while it lasted. But our highly adaptable brains seem to have a fatal flaw; self-interest eclipses our foresight every time.
That fatal flaw is psychopathy.
Climate change will take 95% of us by the end of the century.
Noting that I totally missed that this was one of biggest waves in August. Most news stations treat it like a common cold. Can’t tell you the last time I heard someone talk about deaths or treating as though deadly. My husband got it in spite of being vaccinated and they didn’t give him paxlovid even though he has enough health issues to qualify
Hi there. I was on the ship too. While I’m very, very sad that Isabel got so sick with long covid, and wish her a full recovery, it’s pretty clear that you have left out a massive amount of balanced reporting in this article.
I also got sick onboard. The ship did a lot to mitigate the spread, including fumigation and cleaning of surfaces.
Aside from the fact that we all traveled from international locations, the only way to have prevented this would have been for us to remain in Longyearbyen for two weeks which is logistically a ridiculous ask for most people. Furthermore, we would have still been sick with the entire town (I say this because the entire town of Longyearbyen got sick while we were gone on the ship… a fact left out of your article do to lack of research).
Your reporting is irresponsible. You twisted what Isabel told you so that you could sensationalize something that is a fact of life in 2024, and potentially put a perfectly fine and amazing artist residency at risk. Shame on you and your “reporting.”
So yall brought the plague to a remote artic town...and yet you don't seem to care. so sad. and also. things have changed since 2020, you don't need to quarantine for 2 weeks. You just need to do staggered testing prior and during the trip, masking prior to the cruise, and had ANY minimal treatments and ppe on the cruise. Personally if this happened to me, I'd sue the hell out of them to start making people wake up to their gross negligence. This negligence and attitude like yours led to people being disabled. where's your empathy and care??!!
What would have been wrong with asking people to take a simple covid test before boarding the ship? It's not as if Nate is recommending extreme measures here. I'm also wondering why the organizers didn't request that people with symptoms wear masks in public areas. That would have stopped the spread more effectively than surface cleaning.