Covid has been a huge success for mental gymnastics.
I’ve heard teachers say there was no school for two years. Teachers who were teaching full schools. I’ve heard people saying we were locked down for two years, conflating actual lockdown with periods where people would stay home if contagious. By that definition, we’ve been locked down for decades with chickenpox.
Numerous people, organisations, politicians and media remove long covid from the equation.
Overly stringent criteria for vaccination, whilst binning over £1bn of vaccines. One of the most stringent set of criteria in the western world. Different assessment criteria used to determine access to flu vaccination compared to covid vaccination. Some people still believe (or state they do) that there was no benefit to children of vaccination, that it was only for others. Long covid is ignored for assessing vaccination benefits, and vaccination was still found to benefit children.
Conflating the end of the emergency phase of the pandemic with the end of the pandemic. Deciding it would be one mild/like a cold/winter only etc based on what exactly?! Well after all this was decided and well after children were told to attend school with covid, many seem oblivious to the doubling of children with long covid in the space of a year.
I’ve seen newspaper articles conflate the fraction of in hospital testing with the number of covid cases.
A covid inquiry where abysmal infection control was still defended by the NHS, whilst recommendations go to the public inquiry graveyard.
The high number of nosocomial infections, affecting health outcomes, a proportion leading to death or disability.
A prime minister apologising for ignoring long covid as though that had since changed.
Discussions on the increases in disability and people out of work with absolutely no mention of the hundreds of thousands having to stop work due to long covid.
The increased sickness levels in NHS staff and teachers.
A framing that “bad” covid is in the past, that long covid was something people got in the first couple of years, rather than an increasing risk with each infection.
Shining a light on how a proportion of politicians, media and the population poorly value “vulnerable” people. It only affects the “vulnerable” whilst ignoring those who live or work with vulnerable people, staying silent on all those who have become vulnerable purely because of one of their covid infections, acting as though each wave doesn’t bring on a raft of health issues for a proportion of people affected.
People arbitrarily adapting the definition of “rare” when discussing covid. 1 in 2,000 is rare. Long covid disproportionately affects women. People assume it’s “rare” in children. If only one in 2,000 children (even previously healthy ones) was affected by long covid, even if we just counted those children who didn’t recover after two years, there would only be a fraction of the children there are right now with long covid.
Living with covid, but ignoring so many of the impacts of the way we live with it, acting as though there’s nothing between current strategy and a lockdown.
Then there are those who have their own issues, like belittling people who try not to spread it, which is a level of weirdness I’m not qualified to get my head around.
There are so many things, much more than this brain dump. We could have addressed this pandemic and helped mitigate some impacts of the next one, plan to reduce the costs on health and to the economy. A disease currently costing billions and billions a year, screwing up the health of millions and poorly bloody prepared for the next pandemic.