know someone who enjoys horror stories? share this one! it's true!
hahahahahahahahahaha aarrggghhhhhhhhhh 3,000,000 deaths due to COVID-19 last year. Globally. Three million. Case rates higher than 90% of the rest of the pandemic. The reason people are still worried about COVID is because it has a way of quietly fucking up your body. And the risk is cumulative.
I'm going to say that again: the risk is cumulative.
It's not just that a lot of people get bad long-term effects from it. One in seven or so? Enough that it's kind of the Russian Roulette of diseases. It's also that the more times you get it, the higher that risk becomes. Like if each time you survived Russian Roulette, the empty chamber was removed from the gun entirely. The worst part is that, psychologically, we have the absolute opposite reaction. If we survive something with no ill effects, we assume it's pretty safe. It is really, really hard to override that sense of, "Ok, well, I got it and now I probably have a lot of immunity and also it wasn't that bad." It is not a respiratory disease. Airborne, yes. Respiratory disease, no: not a cold, not a flu, not RSV.
Like measles (or maybe chickenpox?), it starts with respiratory symptoms. And then it moves to other parts of your body. It seems to target the lungs, the digestive system, the heart, and the brain the most.
It also hits the immune system really hard - a lot of people are suddenly more susceptible to completely unrelated viruses. People get brain fog, migraines, forget things they used to know.
(I really, really hate that it can cross the blood-brain barrier. NOTHING SHOULD EVER CROSS THE BLOOD-BRAIN BARRIER IT IS THERE FOR A REASON.) Anecdotal examples of this shit are horrifying. I've seen people talk about coworkers who've had COVID five or more times, and now their work... just often doesn't make sense? They send emails that say things like, "Sorry, I didn't mean Los Angeles, I meant Los Angeles."
Or they insist they've never heard of some project that they were actually in charge of a year or two before.
Or their work is just kind of falling apart, and they don't seem to be aware of it.
People talk about how they don't want to get the person in trouble, so their team just works around it. Or they describe neighbors and relatives who had COVID repeatedly, were nearly hospitalized, talked about how incredibly sick they felt at the time... and now swear they've only had it once and it wasn't bad, they barely even noticed it.
(As someone who lived with severe dissociation for most of my life, this is a genuinely terrifying idea to me. I've already spent my whole life being like, "but what if I told them that already? but what if I did do that? what if that did happen to me and I just don't remember?") One of its known effects in the brain is to increase impulsivity and risk-taking, which is real fucking convenient honestly. What a fantastic fucking mutation. So happy for it on that one. Yes, please make it seem less important to wear a mask and get vaccinated. I'm not screaming internally at all now.
I saw a tweet from someone last year whose family hadn't had COVID yet, who were still masking in public, including school.
She said that her son was no kind of an athlete. Solidly bottom middle of the pack in gym.
And suddenly, this year, he was absolutely blowing past all the other kids who had to run the mile. He wasn't running any faster. His times weren't fantastic or anything. It's just that the rest of the kids were worse than him now. For some reason. I think about that a lot. (Like my incredibly active six-year-old getting a cold, and suddenly developing post-viral asthma that looked like pneumonia.
He went back to school the day before yesterday, after being home for a month and using preventative inhalers for almost week.
He told me that it was GREAT - except that he couldn't run as much at recess, because he immediately got really tired. Like how I went outside with him to do some yard work and felt like my body couldn't figure out how to increase breathing and heart rate.
I wasn't physically out of breath, but I felt like I was out of breath. That COVID feeling people describe, of "I'm not getting enough air." Except that I didn't have that problem when I had COVID.) Some people don't observe any long (or medium) term side effects after they have it.
But researchers have found viral reservoirs of COVID-19 in everyone they've studied who had it.
It just seems to hang out, dormant, for... well, longer than we've had an opportunity to observe it, so far.
(I definitely watched that literal horror movie. I think that's an entire genre. The alien dormant under ice in the Arctic.)
Science fiction is rife with fanciful tales of deadly organisms emerging from the ice and wreaking havoc on unsuspecting human victims.
(oh hey I don't like that either!!!!!!!!!) All of which is to explain why we should still care about avoiding it, and how it manages to still cause excess deaths. Measuring excess deaths has been a standard tool in public health for a long time.
We know how many people usually die from all different causes, every year. So we can tell if, for example, deaths from heart disease have gone way up in the past three years, and look for reasons. Those are excess deaths: deaths that, four years ago, would not have happened. During the pandemic, excess death rates have been a really important tool. For all sorts of reasons. Like, sometimes people die from COVID without ever getting tested, and the official cause is listed as something else because nobody knows they had COVID. But also, people are dying from cardiovascular illness much younger now.
People are having strokes and heart attacks younger, and more often, than they did before the pandemic started. COVID causes a lot of problems. And some of those problems kill people. And some of them make it easier for other things to kill us. Lung damage from COVID leading to lungs collapsing, or to pneumonia, or to a pulmonary embolism, for example. The Economist built a machine-learning model with a 95% confidence interval that gauges excess death statistics around the world, to tell them what the true toll of the ongoing COVID pandemic has been so far.
Total excess deaths globally in 2023: Three million.
3,000,000.
Official COVID-19 deaths globally so far: Seven million. 7,000,000. Total excess deaths during COVID so far: Thirty-five point two million. 35,200,000.
Five times as many.
That's bad. I don't like that at all. I'm glad last year was less than a tenth of that. I'm not particularly confident about that continuing, though, because last year we started a period of really high COVID transmission. Case rates higher than 90% of the rest of the pandemic. Here's their data, and charts you can play with, and links to detailed information on how they did all of this:
Our daily estimate of excess deaths around the world
Here's a non-paywalled link to it:
https://archive.vn/2024.01.26-012536/https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-estimates
Oh: here's a link to where you can buy comfy, effective N95 masks in all sizes:
Family Masks is your authentic SAVEWO mask online retailer in the US. We are a family owned and operated small business based in Southern Ca
Those ones are about a buck each after shipping - about $30 for a box of 30. They also have sample packs for a dollar, so you can try a couple of different sizes and styles.
You can wear an N95 mask for about 40 total hours before the effectiveness really drops, so that's like a dollar for a week of wear.
They're also family-owned and have cat-shaped masks and I really love them. These ones are cuter and in a much wider range of colors, prints, and styles, but they're also more expensive; they range from $1.80 to $3 for a mask. ($18-$30 for a box of ten.)
One-of-a-kind protective ASTM F2100 Level 3 fashion masks and EN 149 FFP2 respirators, featuring designers from all over the world. Redefine
The vaccine is important because it makes it MUCH less likely that you'll have such a bad case of COVID that you have to be hospitalized.
Severe COVID causes way more damage.
But the vaccine doesn't give you much immunity.
Basically, it takes 2 weeks for your immunity to build, and then you have maybe 50%-60% immunity for a month before it starts dropping again. It ends up at about 20%-30% by month 3, then it drops to near zero after month 6.
Why yes, it IS fucked up that we can barely manage to distribute vaccines once a year!
Immunity from getting COVID is a little higher. But it drops in about the same amount of time.
There's some evidence that if you get BOTH -- COVID and the vaccine for the strain of COVID you got -- then you have good long-lasting immunity. But a shockingly low number of people have gotten the vaccine in the past year.
For me, the strongest reason to wear a mask in public is that it makes it easier for other people to wear a mask in public.
I've seen lots and lots of chronically ill and immune-vulnerable people say that wearing a mask is good allyship.
Because (1) it protects them from anything you might not know you have.
And (2) it makes it safer for them to be out and to wear a mask. It makes it more normal, it encourages others to do it, and it makes it less likely that people will be awful to them about it.
A mask protects both you and other people. If the last thing you heard about masking is that it only protects others, you are four years behind on any information about this stuff and you are in danger because of that.
(Doubly so if you think you know when you're sick/contagious. "It only protects others and I'm not sick, so" is a big part of why case rates have been so high.)
Even if I don't think I'm at risk in a given situation, someone else might be. I might be getting coffee at a coffee shop where someone's coworker has COVID and doesn't know it yet.
Which makes them very infectious.
I know that one from personal experience! My normally extremely-COVID-cautious ex went out to eat twice in one weekend, last fall. He didn't think he was at any risk. I guess because there weren't many people there?
Listen: COVID is AIRBORNE. Unless there's a lot of air filtration going on, IT HANGS IN THE AIR FOR 4-6 HOURS.
THAT IS WHAT AIRBORNE MEANS. THEY WERE NOT CLEAR ENOUGH ABOUT THIS IN THE BEGINNING oF THE PANDEMIC.
Anyway: he didn't think he was at any risk from that... so he didn't mention it, or wear a mask around anybody afterward.
Within 24 hours, he came to my house to pick up the kid, stood in the living room talking to my roommate for like 30 minutes, and gave her COVID.
Three days after that, both of them got sick, and he tested positive. and that's how I found out we were all getting COVID!
Maybe if I show up wearing a mask, at a coffee shop where one of the baristas is contagious, or at a grocery store where some other shopper is contagious, it'll inspire them to grab a mask and put it on. Or to get some and start wearing them.
Maybe it'll just brighten the day of someone else who's wearing a mask. Or who isn't right then, but does when they're around their immune-compromised friends.
Also, if you hate masks, consider whether that's because you only tried cloth or surgical ones.
Cloth masks are harder to breathe through. Surgical masks can be too. Both of them can make your voice sound muffled. Neither one is super effective, either; I think they average 60%-80%, depending on the number of cloth layers.
I haven't really had either of those problems with an N95/KN94 mask. Plus I really do love that I can mutter things to myself or pull a face without anyone knowing. And in cooler weather, they help keep your face warm!
My kid wouldn't wear them to school until I got him the cat-shaped ones. Now he's so comfortable in them that he frequently forgets to take them off in the car.
TL;DR: please help normalize mask-wearing by wearing a mask! wearing a mask is Cool and it Helps People!
