What The Media Should Shut Up About

I can't be the only person thinking this, so it needs to be said: I'm sick of hearing about long covid in the media. Yes, it's a thing, and on an individual basis we sympathize with the people affected. But we've known for a whole fucking year that long covid is a thing. In fact, long covid seems to be similar to "long-any-virus." We are constantly bombarded with stories about people suffering from long covid. Why is suffering from long covid any worse than people who suffer from other causes, that don't receive media attention? Is all this media attention really helping long covid sufferers? Or is the media using their suffering to continually instill fear in the population while the suffering goes on?

We know long covid is a thing. Let's direct time and energy to understanding this phenomenon better. Are there certain people more at risk for this? Are there treatment options that reduce the risk of long covid? Should long covid be treated as its own condition, or should people see different specialists depending on symptoms (for example, respiratory therapists)?

Better yet, why not capitalize on the public awareness of long covid to not only help out people with long covid, but to learn more and help people with long-any-virus, who have suffered for so long outside the glare of media attention?

laine lowe wrote:

No COVID means no long (haul) COVID. I have no problem with people being made aware that COVID is not only dangerous as an acute infection but can have long lasting, debilitating consequences. And the more the media reports on this phenomena as well as how more younger people are getting serious COVID illness, the better. Maybe the arrogant attitude at the start of the pandemic that only "old people" had to worry can be dropped for good.

Laine, I have to say that I am particularly disappointed in your posts on the issue of the coronavirus, to the point of supporting authoritarian restrictions that reduce my sociality because I live at home by myself while you shrug off any concerns about the negative impacts with a "let-them-eat-cake" attitude whenever they are brought up. We are all aware of long-covid. It has been reported in the media non-stop since 2020. Given the sheer number of people infected with the virus, there are going to be young people, some of them previously healthy, who fall seriously ill. It's not a surprise that the media is going to cherry-pick these very unfortunate cases to whip up fear in the population in order to get people to pay attention, because that is the business the media is in. So yeah, we know that long covid is a thing. These continuous news reports aren't going to make a difference. It will only inflame fear in people who are already afraid of the virus, and those who aren't will simply roll their eyes and move on. And I'm really tired about hearing about covid as if it is the only source of misery in the world that we need to address. So many other things are happening. And we are never going to get to zero covid. Once a virus makes it into the population, it ends up becoming endemic, and covid was likely endemic in the human population before it was reported to the WHO in December 2019. And all the news stories in the world aren't helping anyone in any practical terms. And the shameful bullying and strawmaning of lockdown skeptics who say things like "are we over-reacting to the threat," "these measures are causing more harm than good," and "care home outbreaks have happened even in lockdowns" is disgusting, espeically from people who present themselves as compassionate and caring. It's also particularly disgusting that lockdowners accused skeptics of not caring about old people when they asked if there are better ways to protect them. Which is ironic since their hero Andrew Cuomo is responsible for the deaths of literally thousands of elderly, while Florida did an objectively better job protecting its elderly popluation without lockdowns.

So yeah, long covid is a thing. People have also been suffering with lots of other "things" in silence for decades that nobody has cared about, as per that Vox article. You can't undo what has happened, and all the news stories in the world won't help those who have become ill. When a simple statement like, "I think we should learn more about long covid so we can design effective therapies" is problematic, we are in serious trouble.

Something else I'm tired of hearing about is "the next pandemic." Since they tend to happen a few decades apart, we forget that pandemics are naturally recurring phenomenon. Let's compare with hurricanes, which tend to happen along parts of the East Coast of the United States. They have protocols, warnings, and things they do when hurricanes happen. You know what you don't hear about in the middle of an active hurricane from the authorities? Talk about how "we need to prepare for the next hurricane." They simply deal with the threat at hand, and then move on. That's what we need to do here. Focus on getting us through the current pandemic (although the way the World Health Organization is talking I think there are a lot of people who don't want this pandemic to end), learn what we can, and apply the lessons so that when (not if) the next pandemic hits we can actually survive it without everything shutting down.

kropotkin1951 wrote:

Read how many deaths Cuba has had from hurricane's compared to the Eastern Seaboard. In the US they never look at what is wrong with their system because it is designed to give people the right to give their neighbours the finger.

Even in Cuba, when the hurricane is active, the authorities focus on the threat that is immediately in front of them. They don't talk about "we have to prepare for the next hurricane" right when the disaster is unfolding in front of them.

Same thing on the Prairies when a blizzard moves through. When the threat is active, we deal with it and stay in the present moment. We don't hear news reports about how "we have to prepare for the next blizzard" when the snow is still coming down and the ploughs haven't made it to our street yet.

Completely missing the point I was trying to make. Moving on.

Speaking of the vaccine, what is with all these stories in the news about regular people and celebrities talking about the importance of the vaccine? Yes, we get it, medical authorities have said it's important for us to be vaccinated, you telling your story is nothing new. And as for the experience of getting a vaccine? Basically, when you get a vaccine for anything, you tell the medical professionals you want a particular vaccine, they inject you according to their protocols, and then off you go. We've all had vaccines of some sort, it's not that complicated. Someone diggining in their heels and refusing to get the vaccine would be far more newsorthy in today's context than the many who want to take it.

I guess moreso at the start of the pandemic. See videos here, here, or here.

I haven't gotten into microchip discussion or anything on that. The fact is, his foundation is very actively involved in funding health initiatives, and is also a major contributor to the World Health Organization. This is very well documented. More concerning to me than just how much influence Gates has over global health policy is the seeming lack of interest in investigating potential conflicts of interests. For example, he has invested a great deal in vaccines, so when he says that everybody needs to be vaccinated, is he looking out for the health of the world or the health of his bank account? You don't need to go down the microchip rabbit hole to explore those very basic questions.

JKR wrote:

Future generations will hopefully be able to determine why so many people went down the microchip rabbit hole during the Covid-19 Pandemic.

Just the fact of Gates promoting vaccines as the only solution to the pandemic when he has heavily invested in vaccine companies is enough of an obvious conflict of interest to go after that you don't even need to go anywhere near the microchip talk.

lagatta4 wrote:

Most people have to get the jab - it is also the only way to protect the life and health of those who have legitimate medical reasons not to.

That is a lie put out by Big Pharma. The vaccine can be a tool to help with the pandemic, but it is not the only tool that is necessary. Given how new it is, there should be some caution with it, especially since we're unsure how it impacts people who have already had covid and are protected by natural immunity.

As for people who have legitimate medical reasons to not take the vaccine, do you think the drug companies aren't going to lobby to have as few such exemptions for people as possible?

Ken Burch wrote:

And I never said individual rights DON'T matter- obviously they do and obviously things like the surveillance state must be oppose- where you and I actually disagree is whether individual rights include the right to refuse to cooperate in basic, harmless public health measures, like masking and social distancing-not even lockdowns, but the simple decency of taking innocuous steps to protect our fellow human beings from the risk of infection- out of the reactionary notion- and this is the way the vast majority of anti-maskers/anti-distancers/anti-vaccers see it- that nobody owes anything to anybody else- this Ayn Rand delusion that freedom is the right to be a selfish jerk with no regard to one's fellow human beings.

It's not oppression to wear a piece of cloth on your face and walk a few feet apart from each other to stop a lethal virus, or even to take a vaccine that millions of others, including myself and everyone in my own family have taken.  To me, it's human solidarity.

Because I don't think those measures actually work and that they do cause harm. So many people who test positive with covid report that they washed their hands, wore masks, did social distancing, and the like. Furthermore, Winnipeg is now nine months into a mandatory mask mandate for indoors. Manitoba has had by far the worst outcomes for covid 19 of all the Western provinces, and that was even with Bonnie Henry resisting mask mandates well into last Fall in BC. BC also kept libraries and swimming pools open during part of this time, but they have been closed in Winnipeg since November. As for the harms? To see people wearing masks sends a singal that something is wrong and out of place, and that is very emotionally unnerving. Furthermore, you have vulnerable people wearing masks thinking they are protective (they are not) and they don't take other precautions and end up getting sick. Furthermore, the ability of children to see facial expressions is absolutely essential to their development. Face masks have absolutely no place in an environment where young children are present. Also, the particles in many of the paper disposable masks break off and end up in your lungs. This is especially true when you breathe in to speak through your mask, as unlike the nose, there is nothing to stop those particles on their way into your body. They are also piling up fast as garbage. So much for a "harmless" intervention.

Obviously people have to be responsible towards other people when it comes to covid. It is reasonable to expect someome who is ill to stay home until they recover, but that is about it. Even pre-2020 pandemic response plans in the Western world only call for voluntary isolation of ill people.

Ken Burch wrote:

I'm hard-pressed to see what difference there is between defending people's "rights" to refuse to do those things now, refusing even to mask and socially distance, on the one hand, and defending people's rights to refuse to wear a condom when having sex with a stranger they'd just met at a singles bar during the AIDS era.  How are those refusals not equally selfish, irrensponsible and potentially lethal?

For one, the science actually supports the use of condoms during sex, which is not necessarily the case with the interventions enacted in the name of stopping covid. You may be right about it being selfish, but if 2 people are aware of the risks and they decide to not use condoms anyways, is there really a place to try and stop them from doing that? Of course consent is an issue and there are laws in place to deal with it when it's not present (although that is far from perfect) but do you really want to go down the road of regulating individual human behaviour that tightly?