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Hey, are you tired of this pandemic thing that, four years after starting, is still killing about a 9/11’s worth of Americans every two weeks? Well have I got great news for you because there’s a new option available to everyone: just fucking ignore it like it isn’t happening. Just get sick, just pass it on to someone else, just die, who cares. Oh yeah it’s the same thing that we’ve been doing since 2020 so if you haven’t started yet, no time like the present!
It’s been a minute since I’ve talked about COVID-19 so let’s just do a quick catch-up: yeah, a lot of people are still dying from it, yeah it’s mostly older people and immunocompromised people, and yeah, we should still care about those people because they’re people and if you get lucky enough maybe one day you’ll be an older person, too, and wouldn’t it be nice if you helped build a society that gives a shit about older people by the time you become one? I don’t know, just a little thought I had.
I occasionally get questions from viewers asking if I’m still taking precautions against COVID, so let me state for the record that yeah, I am. I’m flexible based on current case loads (as best I can tell) wherever I am, but in general I wear a mask inside public places and on public transportation and I avoid eating or drinking inside bars and restaurants. I make occasional exceptions but that’s pretty much it, and I still have not ever contracted COVID-19 to the best of my knowledge, and I do test quite a bit.
Thanks to never actually contracting COVID, I had no idea what the current guidelines were for what I’m supposed to do if I get it, so I was very interested to recently read the news that insiders at the Center for Disease Control (CDC) here in the US were telling the Washington Post that the organization was planning to remove their recommendation that people try to quarantine for at least five days after testing positive for COVID-19. And like…this article is WILD. Absolutely wild. Let’s look at just a few things.
First of all it’s worth noting that this is all coming from leaks at the CDC, and the organization has publicly said they do not currently have plans to change their guidance, but even those articles quote other anonymous insiders who confirm that this is what they’re working on. So back to WaPo:
“Officials said they recognized the need to give the public more practical guidelines for covid-19, acknowledging that few people are following isolation guidance that hasn’t been updated since December 2021.”
This is just an incredible sentence, packing in several layers of fuckery into a relatively small package. For a start, December of 2021 was more than three years ago. The US’s national public health organization that is responsible for protecting us from DISEASES has not bothered to update its guidance on how we should survive a worldwide pandemic in THREE YEARS. 300,000 Americans have died since the last time the CDC gave us suggestions on how to not die from COVID. Cool it’s fine they were probably busy with other things, like uhhhhhhhh heart disease and cancer? Maybe they’re fixing those things?
Anyway back to that gorgeous sentence, that suggests the main reason for the CDC dropping the recommendation to isolate because “few people are following the guidance” anyway. Awesome. That reminds me of when I was a kid and my parents told me and my brothers that we should absolutely not drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes and then they went on a two-year long round-the-world trip without us and left no money or guardian in charge, and when they came back and found that we hadn’t followed the rules they changed the rules to be “well okay but don’t do meth, please.” Anyway that’s why me and my brothers are all meth addicts today and it’s 100% our fault. We made individual choices that resulted in this. There was definitely no abdication of parental or societal responsibility that resulted in this disaster.
What I found most nuts about the articles on this topic are all the experts that go on record to support the dropping of the quarantine recommendation, like Michael T. Osterholm, an infectious-disease expert at the University of Minnesota, who threw his hands in the air and said “In making recommendations to the public today, we have to try to get the most out of what people are willing to do. … You can be absolutely right in the science and yet accomplish nothing because no one will listen to you.”
Yeah it’s crazy how no one is listening to these three year old recommendations that, by the way, were established because billionaire business owners wanted the economy back up and running, and not because it was best for public health. As the Washington Post put it, back in December of 2021 “health officials cut the recommended isolation period for people with asymptomatic coronavirus from 10 days to five because they worried essential services would be hobbled as the highly transmissible omicron variant sent infections surging. The decision was hailed by business groups and slammed by some union leaders and health experts.”
It’s impressive that they admit that it was business groups in favor of looser restrictions and health experts against it, but when it comes time to loosen the restrictions even more, they managed to dig up at least one health expert. I found another on NBC’s article, where they point out that despite the fact that COVID has not become any less contagious or deadly,
“Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious diseases expert at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, said he and his colleagues have privately encouraged the CDC to drop the five-day isolation period, in part because there’s little evidence it’s stopping the spread of Covid.
The “rigorous recommendations that are currently in place do not reflect common practice,” Schaffner said. “It’s difficult to demonstrate that strict isolation has had a notable impact on transmission.”
I found that interesting because when I looked up previous interviews Dr. Schaffner gave concerning COVID I found this interview from November of 2021 (one month before the CDC last loosened their guidance) where he was asked when the pandemic could be said to be over. He replied, “When we say the pandemic is over, we have to make sure the public understands that that does not mean that the virus has disappeared and it’s all gone. It means that this initial stage, this horrific stage of intense transmission with consequent illness is over and we have this virus under better control. This virus is going to be with us for the foreseeable future. So moving from pandemic to endemic is what you and I are talking about now.
And for that, I think we’ll have a number of metrics. The first and most important will be, clearly, hospitalizations, hospitalizations across the entire age spectrum. The second will be the proportion of tests that are done that are positive. We want that to be lower than 5%. If it’s more than that, it really means this virus is still being transmitted quite readily in the community.”
I wanted to see if we had hit those metrics but of course he doesn’t say what level of hospitalizations he would tolerate. Hospitalizations are about the same as they were when he gave that interview in November of 2021, but back then that was just prior to a peak that we fortunately didn’t see this year, so they’re definitely not as bad as they were back then.
The proportion of tests IS a solid metric that he named: lower than 5% and “If it’s more than that, it really means this virus is still being transmitted quite readily in the community.” According to the CDC, the test positivity rate is 10%. Double his maximum.
But hey, people aren’t following the “strict recommendation” so we might as well throw them out, right? We have an organization that has experienced almost nonstop public relations fuck ups, from announcing that masks were useless and COVID-19 could only be controlled via handwashing, to quietly suggesting that actually masks do work, to failing to protect “essential workers” with decent pay and protective gear, to failing to launch an effective campaign to vaccinate as many people as possible, to removing full and easy coverage for people to get vaccinated or to get the drugs they need to keep them off ventilators, to then establishing a confusing system of booster shots in which no one is encouraged to get them as often as the science suggests (every six months) and instead barely reminding people that they should consider getting one every year, you know, if they want. Sorry but I’m actually not shocked that no one is following their guidance. I’d be more shocked if the average American could even tell you the CDC’s current guidance without an hour on a computer with a search engine that doesn’t use an “AI” trained on shitty social media posts.
A few weeks ago I got a cold. I’m not sure how as it’s a pretty rare thing for me but I did attend my local zoo’s outdoor light festival and it WAS infested with children, unfortunately. How dare they go to the zoo.
Tests showed it wasn’t COVID, flu, or RSV. Just a stupid, snotty cold. And let me tell you: it fucking sucked. I was a wreck. I got fuck all done for a week, and there was an extra week before and after the worst of it when I would just stare at the wall for an hour or two at a time, waiting for my brain to fire up again.
And I was talking to a friend about this and she asked me if I was isolating myself from my husband, and I was like, well no because it’s not COVID. And then I thought, what the actual fuck is wrong with me? Who cares if it isn’t COVID? It’s something sucky and I am in the best possible scenario in which I have a guest bedroom where I could just hang out and keep my disgusting germs away from the person I love the most in this world after Indy, who, yes, is a person.
The CDC insiders and the “experts” who agree with them cited by the media are all focused on bringing COVID guidelines into line with guidelines on other serious illnesses like flu and RSV. It’s the wrong move. The guidelines should go in the opposite direction: let’s stop treating all coronaviruses as necessary things everyone gets several times a year and bravely works through. I used to attend conventions like ComicCon and just know that I was going to come home with “con crud” and there was nothing to be done about it, but now I know THERE IS A BETTER WORLD OUT THERE! There is a world where if someone feels even a little sniffle they wear a cheap and easy-to-find face mask so they don’t get other people sick. I knew early on in this pandemic that I LOVED not getting even a common cold, and so I knew that I was never going to travel on public transportation again without a mask. I now wash my hands after I touch other people or random objects out in the world, not because it will stop me from getting COVID but because it will stop me from getting the thousands of other annoying bugs that I just accepted as a fact of life before. And sorry, I’m not going to pretend that doing any of that is difficult or weird. There’s always an N95 at hand that it takes me half a second to put on my face before I go into the grocery store. I don’t touch a handrail and then immediately pick my nose. And when I’m sick I stay the fuck home away from people. These aren’t draconian measures. If the Center for Disease Control actually wanted to control disease in the US, they would work hard to re-establish trust with the American people, put out timely and clear instructions that prioritize our health instead of business interests, make medicine and protective equipment free and easy to access for all people, and they’d advocate for our representatives to establish laws that allow people more flexibility when it comes to working from home, taking sick leave, and getting childcare.
In the meantime, yeah, everyone is going to keep ignoring them because why wouldn’t we?
If you’d like to let the CDC know how you feel about this, use their contact form.
