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I was at the EDEN conference this week in Dublin (excellent conference by the way, congrats to EDEN and the DCU team). Although I’ve done a couple of conferences, this was the first time seeing a lot of people I used to bump into regularly prior to the pandemic. It made me reflect that much of what happened during that time (2020-2022) is already fading from memory. This prompted me to look back over some journals I kept at the time, and I was right, I had forgotten most of the unusual work and roles we took on then, plus the stress of worrying about family, and the continual stream of lockdown variants.
Michael Ward at Swansea Uni started an interesting Corona Diaries project during this period, which capture much of this sense of anxiety, puzzlement, anger and uncertainty. My daughter even did some work inputting the entries. Looking through those and my own entries made me think we should share some of our experiences from the higher education perspective, before our human capacity to recover and move on means all those moments are lost in time, like tears in rain, or at least face masks in the bin.
So here are some edited highlights of my covid diaries, I’d love to hear yours:
18th May 20 I have 8.30 scrums most mornings now for the microcredential course. I wrote for this until 5.30
had a day that covered all my academic roles today – course author, senior manager, researcher, journal editor, administrator, speaker, fund raiser. Finished after 6
I finished at 6.30 and went outside for a neighbour’s socially distanced 70th birthday. Everyone in the street came out and they poured champagne in glasses we left at the end of the drive.
Long working day again but then I’m on leave. I feel the problem of having too many roles at the moment – they’ve all increased by 20% because of the pandemic so I’m failing on multiple fronts. Went to bed by 9.30 and slept for 9 hours.
I did a webinar this evening for EDEN with Catherine Cronin on use of oer in the online pivot, then had a quick meeting with people from COL on doing another webinar. It is the year of webinars.
27th Sept [daughter] has had her first week at uni, she has settled in well with her flatmates. In Glasgow and Manchester Covid has spread wildly through student halls and it’s surely only a matter of time before it hits them.
18th Oct We are likely to be entering a short ‘circuit-breaker’ lockdown on Friday, for 17 days in Wales. Numbers have been rising and the hospitals are near to overload.
26th Oct [daughter’s] flatmate has been diagnosed with Covid, and [daughter] thinks she has it too. She rang me at 1.30 last night and today was in tears. It’s difficult enough learning to live with 6 strangers, but having to negotiate how they’ll all deal with pandemic and self-isolation adds another layer of stress and tension to it.
21st Nov I did an interview for the BBC and Natwest this week, both for web articles on the shift to online learning.
It’s been a busy week, we needed to get a microcredential course in presentation by tomorrow, which meant writing a week’s worth of work and doing some odd tasks.
6th Dec The Welsh government announced last Monday that from Friday pubs would close at 6 and not be allowed to serve alcohol. Most have sensibly decided that pubs not serving alcohol are rather pointless and have shut. I went to the pub last Tuesday, and that was it, no pubs for christmas or new years. There is a rumour that we will be going into full lockdown again on 28th December.
It was announced today that we’re going into full lockdown again on the 28th, and I rang my father today to say we’re not coming up before Christmas.
20th Dec Wales went into lockdown last night, unexpectedly and without warning – we had been told it was coming on the 28th. Shops are to close, no meeting up, no travel. It means I might not even get to see [daughter] over the xmas holidays. It plunged me into depression last night – not just the lack of contact but the necessity to keep finding ways to be positive, to dig again and manufacture methods of staying active, being supportive and restructuring the day.
13th Jan We’re deep in lockdown now, with around 1500 deaths a day, and 50,000 infections
I’ve had a few insomniac nights, getting 3-4 hours sleep each night, but it shouldn’t be a surprise really when ALL of this is going on.
17th Jan We’re still in lockdown now, I forget what it was like not to be in lockdown now. We’ve been in some variety of it since September and that was after a four month one.
I did a keynote for the H818 conference today. I’ve got another keynote on Monday for Belfast Met, and completed a review of e-learning rubrics for UNESCO this week.
Mar 14th (after getting a puppy) Yesterday I felt claustrophobic, trapped in one room mostly, still in lockdown, it felt like we’d been taken hostage by two canine terrorists
4th Apr I went to see [daughter] last week, as we’re now allowed to travel within Wales. We met up in Brecon and she walked Posey. I had my first vaccination jab on Friday. It was in a large leisure centre in Pentwyn. I found the experience strangely moving in its quiet efficiency.
I expect lots of you have more intense or interesting journals from the time, but I found it fascinating just how much of this I had forgotten.
A fiscal calamity awaits public schools once pandemic-related federal assistance ends.
By Maxwell J. Smith.
Consider: Kelly is a nurse who has been employed by her city’s general hospital for nearly thirty years. She is single, has two kids preparing to go to university, and a mortgage to pay. Her job is threatened when she is told that, as a condition of continuing her employment, she must be vaccinated against a novel pandemic virus. Kelly is unwilling to get the vaccine and is fired as a consequence.
Recognizing there are many considerations that should inform the ethical assessment of vaccine mandates, is it sufficient to simply point to the harms associated with Kelly losing her job to show that the vaccine mandate is unethical?
No, it’s not, because terminating someone’s employment can be justified irrespective of the harms that may be associated with their termination. In other words, failing to meet certain employment conditions, including health and safety conditions, can be considered disqualifying irrespective of the harms visited upon those unwilling to meet them. This is important to emphasize because objections to vaccine mandates grounded in the harms resulting from people being fired do not necessarily entail the claim that vaccination is unnecessary for the effective and safe performance of their jobs. If this were the case, the objection should centre on the baseless nature of the requirement, not (only) the harms that may be experienced by existing employees who are unwilling to be vaccinated. Yet, commentators frequently point to such harms as sufficient reason to object to vaccine mandates: “It’s not right that Kelly lost her job because of the vaccine mandate. She has two kids to feed and a mortgage to pay.” Alternatively, some argue the harms outweigh the benefits: “The harms to these people losing their jobs outweigh the harms they are apparently trying to prevent with the vaccine mandate.”
Instead, the pertinent question (which may in fact tacitly underlie objections to vaccine mandates grounded in the harms experienced by those fired as a result of them) is whether the mandate is justified in the first place. If a mandate is not justified (e.g., if it is useless, arbitrary, etc.), then firing people for failing to comply with it is clearly wrong. While this may seem rather obvious, what it reveals is that the locus of scrutiny shouldn’t be on the magnitude of harms associated with people losing their jobs as a result of mandates, but rather on whether such mandates are necessary and justified in the first place. If they are, then the harms employees may experience as a result of being unwilling to get vaccinated should not on their own be dispositive of whether or not such mandates are ethical. We should therefore be sceptical of arguments that simply count the harms experienced by those who are unwilling to be vaccinated as a sufficient reason to think vaccine mandates are unethical.
Now, this argument says nothing about the overall justification of vaccine mandates. And nothing I’ve said here should be taken to suggest we shouldn’t attempt to limit the negative consequences experienced by employees affected by vaccine mandates, for example, by offering reasonable and available alternatives, like remote work, or by providing reasonable accommodations to those for whom vaccination is medically contraindicated or in accordance with human rights obligations, or that we should be indifferent to the consequences of vaccine mandates for existing employees. What I have argued is more narrow, i.e., that the fact that people can lose their jobs as a result of vaccine mandates, and that these harms may be rather severe, is not on its own sufficient to tell us that vaccine mandates are unethical.
Paper title: The ethics of firing unvaccinated employees
Author: Maxwell J. Smith
Affiliations: Faculty of Health Sciences and Rotman Institute of Philosophy, Western University
Competing interests: None declared
Social media accounts of post author: @maxwellsmith
The post Vaccine mandates can result in people losing their jobs. Does that make them unethical? appeared first on Journal of Medical Ethics blog.
By Rebecca Farrington, Louise Tomkow, Gabrielle Prager, and Kitty Worthing.
Healthcare professionals are increasingly expected to be hardy and ‘suck it up’ to survive in complex and demoralising workplaces. As NHS clinicians, we saw staffing shortages and limited resources firsthand during the COVID-19 pandemic. These experiences magnified our scepticism about the onus on us, as individuals, to be ‘resilient’ as a solution to both the workforce crisis and wider societal problems.
Our paper ‘In critique of moral resilience’ describes the responses of NHS staff faced with navigating COVID-19 and caring for one of the most disadvantaged groups in our society – people seeking asylum housed in contingency accommodation. The staff we interviewed provided a social commentary on the state-sponsored neglect of vulnerable migrants in the UK. We don’t overlook this, but we focus on healthcare professionals’ understanding, responses and negotiation of their roles in this ‘Hostile Environment’.
Resilience was clearly important to staff for self-preservation, but so was an ability to see the limits of a biomedical approach to social suffering. The concept of moral resilience helped to unpick this but was not enough to describe the ideological changes and challenges to systems made by staff using their new insights. They did put up with the difficult bits of their work, and we describe how they survived. However, these coping actions alone did nothing to change the status quo in the political and social systems causing the underlying health problems. Some staff we interviewed made positive changes in the lives of the people seeking asylum through activism to improve their health and wellbeing. We found that the concept of resilience failed to capture these important moral actions: advocating beyond the clinic, beyond just doing their best on the job.
The popular focus on resilience is here to stay in much of our work and home lives, but we encourage caution in using it as a broad-brush solution to complex problems. Healthcare providers who see and yet continue morally problematic care in the name of resilience might be thought of as complicit in social suffering. Does moral resilience just promote acceptance of the status quo, even when it feels unbearable? What cost does this fixation on resilience bring to both care providers and patients?
Reflecting on our work in clinical medicine, research, and medical advocacy, we recognise that some of our most effective improvements to social conditions have been through collective action and joint resistance. In times of increasing moral outrage, such as against the UK government’s illegal migration bill, this feels a more appropriate response than just sucking it up in the name of resilience in the hope that we will survive.
Authors: Louise Tomkow1, Gabrielle Prager1, Kitty Worthing2, Rebecca Farrington1
Affiliations:
The post Does our preoccupation with resilience mean we must tolerate the morally intolerable? appeared first on Journal of Medical Ethics blog.
Guest post by Vilde Lunnan Djuve and Carl Henrik Knutsen
In March 2020, COVID-19 generated a major emergency in countries across the world with public fear of the virus, lockdowns, and economies going into a tailspin. Yet, observers and citizens in many countries were worried about one additional thing, namely that their leaders would use the ongoing crisis as a window of opportunity for concentrating power in their own hands and thereby (further) undermine democracy. This was the case in Hungary, for example, where Viktor Orban’s government was granted the power to rule by decree. Such fears are not unfounded: History suggests that whenever leaders declare states of emergency in response to a (perceived or real) crisis, democratic decline becomes much more likely.
The COVID-19 crisis, in many ways, was unprecedented in its global scope and wide-ranging ramifications. Yet, even more conventional crises such as a “regular” economic recession with increased unemployment and reduced incomes, could have notable political consequences. From previous research, we also know that crises are related to various tumultuous political events such as civil war, coups d’état, and revolutions.
But very often regimes are changed not by some outside force such as military officers conducting coups or by revolutionaries in the streets. Instead, global data from the last two centuries show that the incumbent regime elites, including the sitting leaders themselves, are very often involved as key actors in processes of regime change. Does economic crisis increase the chances also of such incumbent-guided transitions?
In our new study, we investigate the relationship between economic crisis and regime changes driven by regime incumbents. We find that the relationship between economic crisis and incumbent-driven transitions (when treating them as one category) is very clear and at least as strong as the relationship between crisis and coups d’état. In other words, the risk of regime change driven by sitting presidents or other top leaders increases just about as much as the risk of coups, in the wake of economic crisis.
Why do we find such a robust relationship between economic crisis and incumbent-guided transitions? We propose two complementary explanations:
First, we argue that economic crises can work as windows of opportunity for incumbent leaders who are eager to expand their grip on power, make sure that they stay in power in the future, and diminish the role of the opposition. The idea is that, like during a pandemic (albeit typically on a smaller scale), citizens are more willing to accept extreme measures from their incumbents when crises loom. This gives leaders leeway to blame common enemies, ensure support where they otherwise cannot find it, and pursue regime change in a direction they inherently prefer.
Indeed, we find in our study that there is a strong and systematic relationship between economic crises and non-democratizing regime transitions driven by the regime incumbent. For examples of this unfolding in the real world, we can look to the self-coup of President Fujimori in Perú in April 1992, which took place after a long slouch in growth and the ascension of the armed group Sendero Luminoso.
In a more hopeful vein for supporters of democracy, we also have reason to believe that crises can trigger incumbent-guided liberalization. Both previous scholarship and real-world examples suggest that crises may force concessions from cornered autocrats because they ultimately would prefer gradual democratization to full-fledged revolution or armed insurgency. Since we know that crises make both coups and revolutions, perceptive autocrats should anticipate the heightened threat levels and thereby be more motivated to, e.g., hold general elections to diffuse tensions.
For a classic example of crisis driving popular discontent, rising insurgency, and mediated democratization guided by the incumbent, we can look to Zambia when the rule of the United National Independence Party (UNIP) ended in 1991. Kenneth Kaunda and UNIP had ruled Zambia for 27 years, whereof 18 under a formalized one-party state. Yet, in 1991, multi-party elections were held, followed by a relatively peaceful transfer of power to the Movement for Multi-Party Democracy (MMD). Here, the economic crisis built up substantial pressure on the regime by way of widespread protest and increasing opposition alliance building. Under such conditions, the regime ultimately opted to reform a less favorable regime type than the status quo, presumably because this outcome was preferable to them compared to forced regime change by outside actors.
We thus know that crisis can help push the needle in some instances. However, we do not find in our analyses that there exists a robust, systematic relationship between crisis and incumbent-guided democratization, more specifically. It might be that many cornered dictators, during times of crises, preempt the need for concessions by consolidating power instead of liberalizing. Or, they make policy concessions to the opposition that fall short of democratization, but still ease tensions, such as increasing pensions payments.
Overall, then, we find that crises rarely pressure incumbents to democratize. Rather, crises enable regime leaders to alter their regimes either without affecting their democracy score, or by lowering it. In the midst of a global halt in democratic progress, there is thus particularly good reason to pay close attention to the actions of incumbents in weak democracies during times of crises.
Vilde Lunnan Djuve is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Political Science at the University of Oslo. Carl Henrik Knutsen is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Oslo and a Researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo.
Enlarge / Florida surgeon general Joseph Ladapo speaks at a press conference. (credit: Getty | Paul Hennessy)
Florida health officials deleted key data and statistics from a state analysis on the safety of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, falsely making them appear unsafe for young men, according to draft versions of the analysis obtained by the Tampa Bay Times through public records requests.
The final analysis, which was widely criticized for its poor quality and dubious conclusions, was the basis for a statewide recommendation by Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo last October that young men, ages 18 to 39, should not receive an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine. The analysis—posted on the Florida Department of Health's website with no authors listed—claimed to find "an 84% increase in the relative incidence of cardiac-related death among males 18-39 years old within 28 days following mRNA vaccination."
Ladapo, who has a history of fearmongering about COVID-19 vaccines, touted the analysis, saying in a press release at the time that "these are important findings that should be communicated to Floridians.”
"Maybe that’s one thing the pandemic has allowed—for us to be a bit more honest about our struggles."
The post “There’s No Normal to Get Back To”: The State of Higher Ed appeared first on Public Books.
Enlarge / A microscope image of Streptococcus pyogenes, a common type of group A strep. (credit: Getty | BSIP)
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and amid a tall wave of respiratory viruses, health officials in Colorado and Minnesota documented an unusual spike in deadly, invasive infections from Streptococcus bacteria late last year, according to a study published this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The spike is yet another oddity of post-pandemic disease transmission, but one that points to a simple prevention strategy: flu shots.
The infections are invasive group A strep, or iGAS for short, which is caused by the same group of bacteria that cause relatively minor diseases, such as strep throat and scarlet fever. But iGAS occurs when the bacteria spread in the body and cause severe infection, such as necrotizing fasciitis (flesh-eating disease), toxic shock syndrome, or sepsis. These conditions can occur quickly and be deadly.
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On March 11, 2020 — after nearly 4,300 deaths worldwide — the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a global pandemic. “It becomes clear this isn’t going to be over quick,” wrote Michael J. DeLuca in a publisher’s note in Reckoning’s Creativity & Coronavirus issue that April. The journal was one among a dozen or so literary magazines that produced special issues or sections, or even entirely new publications, in response to the “novel” coronavirus. A self-avowed introvert already working from home before shelter-in-place orders, I found myself drawn to such publications as a vital means of connection to the world beyond my window. The mundane details of interior lives proved oddly comforting, while also shedding light on the relative ease of my own seclusion.
Until recently, my wife and I lived on her family’s farm in Northern California. As she taught middle-school science on Zoom from the living room, I typed while watching white-tailed kites nest in the redwood trees bordering the property. There, we were afforded the luxury of both space and safety while much of the world was shut inside. While spikes in COVID cases continued to ravage the planet, we took to socializing outdoors (initially at six-foot distances and later unmasked in an open-air barn). “Amid this bucolic scene, with acres of sheep fields fencing us in from our neighbors, it’s easy to lose sight of others,” I confessed in an essay entitled “The Distance Between.” That disparity sharpened into focus when another writer, under prolonged lockdown at a senior residence not far away, attended my virtual workshops; she described the shock of fresh air on her face after 16 months of confinement, her account of delayed liberation published in Passager’s Pandemic Diaries.
The short-lived COVID LIT, an online mag and philanthropic endeavor, addressed such “positions of privilege” that countered the we’re-all-in-this-together platitudes designed by early campaigns to flatten the curve and slow the rate of infection. Three years later, as the public health crisis continues, the number of deaths worldwide is close to 7 million. Beyond the harrowing statistics of illness, isolation, and social upheaval, our personal stories hold significance and bridge our shared humanity.
Here are six stories from diverse voices and literary publications that point to the profound power of personal narrative: a global record from multiple nuanced perspectives. While each selection was written during the COVID-19 pandemic, some recount other types of sanctioned quarantines with similar themes of separation. Drawing on lived experience as well as historical research and firsthand observation, these authors tackle social issues from structural racism and the stigma of disability to repressive political regimes. Each one chronicles the heartache of disconnection and demonstrates the importance of collective remembrance.
Also for bioStories, Irish writer Phil Cummins uses humor in “134 Days” to document the 2020 lockdown outside of Dublin, with his wife and disgruntled grown son.
“Sharing the extraordinary in ordinary lives” is the tagline of bioStories. Although the online magazine, established in 2011, does not specifically solicit stories of quarantine, it was “conceived in the belief that every life can prove instructive, inspiring, or compelling.” Iris Chen’s essay, or “word portrait,” concerns itself with the spring 2022 lockdown in Shanghai, China — an effort to control the outbreak of an Omicron variant of COVID-19. Helpless from afar, and worried about the family, especially her ailing grandmother, Chen illustrates the impact of severe government measures on the city’s population. For any of us, like myself, who have ever used the term “lockdown” loosely, this piece urges us to reconsider its definition, and the dire consequences. In surreal prose, Chen offers a sobering look at the pandemic two years in.
The Chinese phrase for lockdown means to literally seal the city shut: fen cheng. It also means this: that no one leaves their apartment building. Hospitals shut down. Supermarkets stay empty and twenty-six million starve.
No one has cooked dinner and grandma still lies on the sofa, softly moaning. It is the night of Tomb Sweeping day. Ghosts walk on the streets, and all-around Shanghai there is a deep, asphyxiated silence: an honoring of the freedom that is now a privilege for the dead.
On this side of the ocean, a call is all I can give. Sorry is all I can say. I think about my mother when this is all over, about Shanghai when things open back up. How many bodies will they pull out of apartment doors? How will neighbors remain neighbors When my mother comes to California later this year, what will we talk about? The oceanic distance between us has changed.
Lindsay Zier-Vogel imagines a different mother-daughter separation in “Almost Forty Days” for The Quarantine Review, which was created “to alleviate the malaise of social distancing.”
First Nations writer Laura Vukson, sheltering in an old rambling house set against the rugged beauty of Ontario’s Georgian Bay, feels a fierce sense of protection for her young sons. Their little bodies snuggle under baby quilts sewn by their grandmother, who as a child endured family separation as a result of federal government policies. “Safer that way,” says Vukson’s mother, who observes her grandkids and their parents co-sleeping “like a wolf pack.” The Tlicho Dene woman was one of 150,000 Indigenous children forced to leave their families to attend residential schools across Canada. In haunting prose, Vukson reveals the reason behind her mother’s “bulging wrist bone” as she works on an Indian Day Schools class action settlement, breaking her silence for the first time.
They weren’t allowed to speak their language, practice their culture, or go home.
I can’t fathom my children stolen from me. My grannie Julie’s mind cracked. She was found wandering around Behchoko, a Dene community on the northwest cusp of Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories, in her nightgown. It was the dead of winter. Subarctic temperature. All 10 of her children were taken to those schools.
[The application] asked her, on a scale from one to five, to choose the level of abuse she faced. She had to write the story of as many events as she remembered, providing documentation to back it up. All spring and summer the application sat on her kitchen table as she eked out 16 pages of memories she’d buried long ago. Not only was she forced to relive it all, but she had to prove it was true.
For Lit Hub in 2021, U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón considers her gender in “Preparing the Body for a Reopened World.”
Nam Hoang Tran describes the horrors of discrimination in “An Issue Masks Alone Cannot Fix,” an essay in the Quarantine issue of Montana Mouthful in 2020.
In the Editor’s Comments introducing the Dwelling-themed issue of Speculative Nonfiction, Robin Hemley fondly describes an old family farmhouse in a “quaint” town in upstate New York, where he is briefly quarantined. His wife Margie, a woman of color, feels differently: “For her, the place was spooky and the area, dotted profusely with Trump signs and overwhelmingly white, felt threatening,” writes Hemley, who realizes he is protected by his whiteness.
In “No Kind of Good Trouble,” an essay in this issue, Shabrayle Setliff reflects on her upbringing as a biracial child — part Quechua, part Black — in a low-income, mostly white suburb of Oklahoma City. Later in the piece, Setliff recounts life as a resident in wealthy northern Virginia during the summer of 2020, when cities and communities around the world mobilized in response to the murder of George Floyd. “I have often been the only Black person in the spaces I occupy, as is the case now,” she reveals, contemplating class privilege and racial divisions in the ethnically diverse neighborhood where she and her white husband live. As protests kick off elsewhere, she notes the lack of real action and activism in her city: “I had become disquieted by the order in this overly resourced place.” A series of underwhelming local demonstrations for Black Lives Matter prompts Setliff to reexamine her own complacency, engendered by her surroundings.
Ever since I came to this U, I’ve known nothing but an uneasy peace, and I’ve wanted to leave. I want to unsettle our lives, get new jobs, move to a place with more class diversity, with people willing to engage, where the collective is lived out because proximity demands it.
There is an inviolable pact of safety and order here. A deep reliance on the myth of individualism. A commitment to comfort. Despite my unease, there is a part of me that wants to rest in this place, even if it’s an illusion, even if it’s wrong. I sometimes find that I’m satisfied to give money and time, call it mutual aid, go to demonstrations, put up a sign, and say that I worked for something, when I know that as long as eruption in the world never leads to disruption in my own life, it’s not true.
Check out the COVID flash nonfiction published at Months to Years, like Barbara “Bo” Jensen’s “Unloading the Kiln,” about their clinic’s failure to serve the unsheltered who didn’t die from coronavirus, but from living on the streets.
Published in this pre-pandemic quarterly exploring themes of “mortality, grief, or loss,” Michael Colonnese’s heartrending essay relays the seclusion and family division that arose from social stigma during the Great Depression. “This is a story about a dead woman I never met, my mother’s sister, Eva, who never became my aunt because she’d only lived to be fourteen,” he begins. Because of the congenital defect of a cleft lip, the teenage girl was “hidden away from the world” — first behind the walls of various tenement apartments in Connecticut, then in an asylum “for the insane and feeble minded.” Only at 94 did the author’s mother, who shared stories of her three brothers but never mentioned a sister, finally disclose their family secret. Part of what makes this tale so harrowing is what Colonnese discovers: not only the official cause of death, but also the unsurprising reason behind the institution’s closure.
And because my mother’s story about Eva had now also become my story—a story about resistance, helplessness and avoidance—I could see that there was a pattern to it. Those hauntingly tragic details got under my skin, and I took it upon myself to try to learn more if I could.
“Failure to thrive” sounded like a phrase that a deliberately evasive doctor might employ to explain a mysterious death, and except for her facial deformation, Eva had been a healthy and intelligent young girl who had probably just gone through puberty when she’d been sent to that asylum.
Also at Pangyrus: Susan Schirl Smith’s account of nursing at the height of the AIDS epidemic in “Hero.”
After the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services declared the ongoing spread of the monkeypox virus a Public Health Emergency, Darren Chase recalled the “quiet, shameful aftermath” of the AIDS epidemic for a column called In Sickness & In Health: Life in the Pandemic and Beyond. When he and his partner decide to break eight years of monogamy, he experiences the “visceral, cellular-level carryover from that old HIV hysteria and stigma,” even decades later. As a gay man who became sexually active in the late ’80s, before “sex-positive” was a concept and HIV still carried “the feeling of a death sentence,” Chase describes his metamorphosis from “cautiously-out teenager to out-and-proud adult.”
I, too, claimed my queer identity in the mid ’90s, in San Francisco. Back then we marched to protest government apathy to HIV with placards that stated: “10,000 SF deaths and rising.” On the wall above my single mattress was a poster of two nude women entwined, bordered by the words safe sex is hot sex — a campaign to make dental dams desirable.
Chase beautifully captures the paradox between sexual empowerment and paranoia under the looming threat of a new plague:
Nonetheless, during those first few dalliances after dark, part of me was still morbidly afraid that any extra-marital contact would irrevocably contaminate me. … It was like I’d be totally cool for a while, having a grand old time, and then all of a sudden I’d be bungeed back to the feeling of panic, as if I were seventeen again, sitting in a dingy clinic, clutching a handful of safe-sex brochures.
Quarantine Journal: Notes From Inside posted more than 70 dispatches, from an evangelical church to a prison cell. Read The Point’s “Gimme Shelter” by Helena de Bres, a philosophy professor who recalls her own “spinal lockdown” when one of her vertebrae cracked in middle school.
In “Saying Yes,” Kaya Genç’s short essay for The Point’s Quarantine Journal, the Istanbul-based journalist prepares for his wedding ceremony, which takes place just hours before a pandemic curfew begins. In this longer piece on the history of lockdowns, Genç registers citywide panic during a two-day lockdown in April 2020, which is reminiscent of Turkey’s 1980 military coup. He notes that “tactics used to curtail freedoms in 2020 are eerily similar” to that “years-long nocturnal confinement” when martial law was declared — only days after a curfew was lifted — and continued until 1985.
Genç, who recently reported on Turkey’s devastating earthquakes for the New York Review of Books and other publications, points to patterns of autocracy under the rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He urges against collective amnesia — “willful forgetfulness” — and argues for a historical record that reaches beyond “the viewpoints of warring generals and politicians.”
In Istanbul, the country’s biggest city, the announcement was met with panic. Crowds of people scrambled for groceries, showing little regard for social distancing. Fistfights broke out in bakeries; customers quarreled in department stores. City officials estimated that the ensuing chaos in the streets would cause a spike in COVID-19 infections. Two hours before the curfew was lifted at midnight on April 12th, the interior minister announced his resignation, admitting that it was a mistake to have hastily called a curfew that startled the nation.
No wonder that, for a certain generation of Turks, the COVID-19 lockdowns can be seen as a screen for the country’s authoritarian politics. In Turkey, the coronavirus poses a double threat: along with the risk of contagion, there is also the danger that, in trying to control the epidemic, the country will fall victim to its own past.
Further Reading
While longform nonfiction storytelling takes the stage at Longreads, here’s a mix of shorter reads from some small publications and pandemic-themed special sections that entertain, inform, and connect us:
Nicole R. Zimmerman is a writer based in the Bay Area. Her work appears in literary journals such as Litro, Sonora Review, The Rumpus, and Creative Nonfiction. Her essay “Autumn Inferno” was featured on Longreads in November 2021, in a reading list on loss, love, and living with fire in California. Nicole is at work on Just Some Things We Can’t Talk About, a memoir-in-essays about denial and family dysfunction.
Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Copy-editors: Carolyn Wells, Peter Rubin
About a year ago, Dicky Barrett — then lead singer of the legendary ska band, the mighty mighty Bosstones — coproduced an anti-vax musical anthem with professional anti-vaxxer Robert Kennedy, Jr. Several days later, the Bosstones abruptly announced that the band was finally, officially done for. — Read the rest
Many Boing Boing readers are likely familiar with science and physics educator, Dianna Cowern, aka YouTube's Physics Girl. With nearly 3 million subscribers, Dianna is beloved for her exuberant personality and her clear and entertaining explanations of complex physics concepts and her love for all things science. — Read the rest
Enlarge / Asian woman with protective face mask using smartphone while commuting in the urban bridge in city against crowd of people (credit: d3sign via Getty Images)
On March 28, 2020, as COVID-19 cases began to shut down public life in much of the United States, then-Surgeon General Jerome Adams issued an advisory on Twitter: The general public should not wear masks. “There is scant or conflicting evidence they benefit individual wearers in a meaningful way,” he wrote.
Adams’ advice was in line with messages from other US officials and the World Health Organization. Days later, though, US public health leaders shifted course. Mask-wearing was soon a pandemic-control strategy worldwide, but whether this strategy succeeded is now a matter of heated debate—particularly after a major new analysis, released in January, seemed to conclude that masks remain an unproven strategy for curbing transmission of COVID-19 and other respiratory viruses.
“There’s still no evidence that masks are effective during a pandemic,” the study’s lead author, physician, and epidemiologist Tom Jefferson, recently told an interviewer.
Enlarge / WHO's COVID-19 technical lead, Maria Van Kerkhove, looks on during a press conference at the World Health Organization's headquarters in Geneva, on December 14, 2022. (credit: Getty | FABRICE COFFRINI)
While the World Health Organization says it's continuing to urge China to share data and cooperate with investigations into the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the United Nations' health agency is calling out another country for lack of transparency—the United States.
WHO officials on Friday said that the US has not shared reports or data from federal agencies that have assessed how the COVID-19 pandemic began. That includes the latest report by the Department of Energy, which determined with "low confidence" that the pandemic likely began due to a laboratory accident.
"As of right now, we don't have access to those reports or the data that is underlying how those reports were generated," Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO's technical lead on COVID-19, said in a press briefing Friday. "Again, we reiterate, that any agency that has information on this, it remains vital that that information is shared so that scientific debate, that this discussion, can move forward. Without that, we are not able to move forward in our understanding."
The British government considered killing every domestic cat in Britain, thinking that this might stop the spread of Covid during the pandemic. Former Health Minister James Bethell…
— Read the resttold Channel 4 News: "What we shouldn't forget is how little we understood about this disease.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Hickman’s had a problem. The massive egg farm in Arizona relied on the wildly undercompensated labor of incarcerated people. How would it operate during the looming lockdown? The solution, engineered by Hickman’s and the Arizona penal system, was a prison labor camp:
Hickman’s remained the only private company in Arizona allowed to use incarcerated workers on its own turf. Two national experts in prison labor who spoke with Cosmopolitan — Corene Kendrick and Jennifer Turner, both with the American Civil Liberties Union — could cite no other instance of a state corrections department detaining people on-site at a U.S. corporation for the corporation’s express use.
Within days of the plan’s approval, a roughly 6,000-square-foot metal-sided warehouse on the Hickman’s lot at 6515 S Jackrabbit Trail in Buckeye, Arizona, had been repurposed from an apparent vehicle hangar into a bare-bones “dormitory.” It sat in plain sight, about 200 feet back from the road, near the Hickman’s corporate headquarters and retail store, where an electric signboard and giant 3D chicken beckon customers in for “local & fresh” eggs. Over the next 14 and a half months, some 300 women total would cycle through this prison outpost, their waking lives largely devoted to maintaining the farm’s operations while the pandemic raged.
Eleven of these women — all incarcerated for nonviolent offenses, which one could argue is beside the point — shared their firsthand accounts with Cosmopolitan. Our nearly yearlong investigation also turned up thousands of pages of internal ADCRR emails, incident reports, and other documents exposing a hastily launched labor experiment for which women were explicitly chosen. Housed in conditions described by many as hideous, the women performed dangerous work at base hourly wages as low as $4.25, working on skeleton crews decimated in part by COVID. At least one suffered an injury that left her permanently disfigured. These are their stories.
Horse paste has struck out again: even at high doses, ivermectin is "futile" as a treatment for Covid 19, according to a large double-blind trial published in JAMA.
— Read the restThe median time to sustained recovery was 11 days in both the ivermectin and placebo groups (hazard ratio [HR], 1.02).
Enlarge / A medical director in Germany sits in front of a monitor showing the real-time data of a patient with a heart attack. (credit: Getty | Arne Dedert)
A bout of COVID-19 is known to increase a person's long-term risks of having a major cardiovascular event, such as a heart attack or stroke. But being fully vaccinated or even partially vaccinated appears to bring that risk down, according to a study published this week in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
The study, led by researchers at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, drew on medical records from over 1.9 million patients who were infected with COVID-19 between March 2020 and February 2022. Of those 1.9 million patients, a "major adverse cardiac event," namely a heart attack, stroke, or another cardiac event, was identified in 13,948 patients, and 3,175 died following the event.
Overall, the researchers found that being vaccinated—fully or partially—was linked to fewer cardiac events in the six months following a case of COVID-19. After adjusting for demographics, comorbidities, and time since the pandemic began, the researchers found that being fully vaccinated reduced the risk of having a major cardiac event by about 41 percent, while being partially vaccinated reduced the risk by about 24 percent.
This is is a multilingual comic that serves as a meditation on the infrastructures of COVID-19, care, and time. In the spirit of the multilingual spaces I inhabit in Tio’tia:ke/Mooninyaang/Montréal, I have chosen to write bilingually—a process that can be messy, but that speaks to my experiences of COVID-19 locally as I am thinking of COVID-19 globally.
This refusal to separate my experiences into two linguistic boxes is an experiment in thinking about both the process and products of creation through the form of comics, an art form popular in Québec, where I lived during the start of the pandemic (and still live, at the time of this writing).
A note on translation: In panel 6, I have used “vie valide” (FR) as “abled life” (EN). This is meant to emphasize the language in the source material, which emphasizes both hypocrisy and violence of ableist and eugenicist approaches to a pandemic, and also serves as a power of refusal. As someone who is disabled but who is not francophone, I welcome conversations about this language over Twitter or over email (see profile).
Il s’agit d’une bande dessinée multilingue qui sert de méditation sur les infrastructures de COVID-19, les soins et le temps. Dans l’esprit des espaces multilingues que j’habite à Tio’tia:ke/Mooninyaang/Montréal, j’ai choisi d’écrire de manière bilingue – un processus qui peut être quelque peu compliqué, mais qui parle de mes expériences de COVID-19 au niveau local tout en pensant à COVID-19 au niveau mondial.
Ce refus de séparer mes expériences en deux boîtes linguistiques est une expérience de réflexion sur le processus et les produits de la création, en utilisant la forme de la bande dessinée, une forme d’art populaire au Québec, où je vivais au début de la pandémie (et où je vis toujours, au moment d’écrire ces lignes).
Une note sur la traduction : Dans le panneau 6, j’ai utilisé “vie valide” (FR) comme “abled life” (EN). Ceci a pour but de mettre l’accent sur le langage du matériel source, qui souligne à la fois l’hypocrisie et la violence des approches “ableistes” et eugénistes d’une pandémie, et sert également de pouvoir de refus. En tant que personne handicapée mais non francophone, je suis heureux de discuter de ce langage sur Twitter ou par e-mail (voir profil).
(note: the comic uses a dark brown, light brown, and blue color palette and appears to be drawn on a textured background)
(note : la bande dessinée utilise une palette de couleurs marron foncé, marron clair et bleu et semble être dessinée sur un arrière-plan texturé)
Panel 1: A comic spread with text that reads/Une bande dessinée avec un texte qui dit: “I don’t remember the first day I noticed COVID-19 infrastructure in Québec .” “Je ne me souviens pas du premier jour où j’ai remarqué l’infrastructure COVID-19 au Québec.”
“Stickers on the floor to tell us where to stand, lines on the floor to tell us how to queue.” “Des autocollants au sol pour nous dire où nous tenir, des lignes au sol pour nous dire comment faire la queue.”
In the background, there is a light and dark brown illustration of two stickers with footprints and “2m” written on them. / En arrière-plan, il y a une illustration marron clair et marron foncé de deux autocollants avec des empreintes de pieds et “2m” écrit dessus.
Panel 2: The text reads/Un texte qui dit: “There is a phrase, translated from Italian*, that describes hope in a post-COVID-19 future:” “Il y a une phrase qui a été traduite de l’italien* et qui décrit l’espoir dans un futur post-COVID-19 :”
Below, there are signs that read / En dessous, il y a des panneaux qui disent: “Tout ira mieux” (Belgium/Belgique), “tout ira bien” (France/France), “Everything will be OK!” (US, New Zealand, États-Unis, Nouvelle Zélande)
“*« andrà tutto bene »”
Panel 3: The text reads / Un texte qui dit: “In Montréal, the phrase written by children and taped to windows, printed on stickers and put on shop doors, and placed beneath a rainbow was « ça va bien aller »”
“À Montréal, la phrase écrite par les enfants et collée aux fenêtres, imprimée sur des autocollants et collée sur les portes des magasins, et placée sous un arc-en-ciel était « ça va bien aller »”
In the frame next to it is a drawing of a rainbow in brown, white, and blue, taped to something. It reads ça va bien aller. / Dans le cadre à côté, il y a un dessin d’un arc-en-ciel en marron, blanc et bleu, collé à quelque chose. On peut lire “ça va bien aller”.
Panel 4: The text reads / Un texte qui dit: “People with different kinds of relationships to labour, different identities, and different incomes have had different experiences under COVID-19 (and capitalism). Race, immigration status, class, and more shape how COVID-19 has been felt by people around the world.”
“Des personnes ayant des relations différentes avec le travail, des identités differentes et des revenus différents ont vecu des expériences différentes dans le cadre de COVID-19 (et du capitalisme).”
“La race, le statut au regard de la législation sur l’immigration, la classe sociale et d’autres factures façonnent la manière dont le COVID-19 a étè ressenti par les gens du monde entier.”
Next to the text is an image of a healthcare worker (who appears to be not white) in blue, wearing gloves, wearing a mask, and with hair tied up. À côté du texte se trouve l’image d’un.e travailleur.se de la santé (qui semble ne pas être blanc.he) en bleu, portant des gants, un masque et les cheveux attachés.
Panel 5: There are two panels, with text around them and images inside. Il y a deux panneaux, avec du texte autour et des images à l’intérieur.
On the left, the text around the panel reads / À gauche, le texte autour du panneau dit: “Capital shapes not only our relationship to labour, but also our relationship to health (and who gets heathcare).”
On the right, the text around the panel reads / À droit, le texte autour du panneau dit: “Le capital façonne non seulement notre rélatuion au travail, mais également notre relation à la santé (et qui reçoit des soins de santé)” Under, it reads: (Adler-Bolton and Vierkant 2022)
On the left, there is a drawing of a white deliveryperson who is pushing a trolley with a number of packages on it, including / À gauche, le dessin d’un livreur blanc qui pousse un chariot sur lequel se trouvent plusieurs colis, dont “HIGH RISK LOW PAY,” “MASKS,” “N95,” “FREE? TESTS.” Below, it reads / En dessous, on peut lire: “The surplus, or surplus populations, can therefore be defined as a collective of those who fall outside of the normative principles for which state policies are designed, as well as those who are excluded from the attendant entitlements of capital.”
On the right, there is a drawing of two white people. The person on the left is white, has shoulder-length hair, is wearing glasses, and is named as “Beatrice Adler-Bolton.” The person on the right is white, is wearing less tinted glasses, has a beard, and short hair, and is named as “Artie Vierkant.” / À droite, il y a le dessin de deux personnes blanches. La personne de gauche est blanche, a les cheveux longs, porte des lunettes et s’appelle “Beatrice Adler-Bolton”. La personne à droite est blanche, porte des lunettes moins teintées, a une barbe et des cheveux courts, et s’appelle “Artie Vierkant”.
Below, it reads / En dessous, on peut lire: “Le surplus, ou les populations excédentaires, peuvent donc être définis comme un collectif de ceux ne relèvent pas des principes normatifs pour lesquels les politiques de l’État sont conçues, ainsi que de ceux qui sont exclus des droits afférents au capital.”
Panel 6: There are two panels, with text around both. On the left, it reads / Il y a deux panneaux, avec du texte autour des deux. À gauche, on peut lire: “Disability justice organizer Mia Mingus reminds us that political refusals cost disabled lives.” Inside the square is a skeleton in brown ground, with some grass. A l’intérieur du panneau se trouve un squelette dans un sol brun, avec un peu d’herbe.
Inside the right panel, the text reads / À l’intérieur du panneau droit, le texte dit: “We will not trade disabled deaths for abled life. We will not allow disabled people to be disposable or the necessary collateral damage for the status quo.” “Nous n’échangerons pas les décès d’handicapés contre une vie valide.” The right panel has a drawing of an IV hanger. Le panneau de droite présente le dessin d’un support de perfusion.
Panel 7: A spread with three panels. Two on either side have drawings of masks on the ground, with leaves and dirt. Below the left, it reads, “Que se passe-t-il lorsque les infrastructures de soins collectifs son mises au rebut, jetées au nom du “choix” individuel ?” / Une page avec trois panneaux. Deux de chaque côté ont des dessins de masques sur le sol, avec des feuilles et de la terre. En bas à gauche, on peut lire, “Que se passe-t-il lorsque les infrastructures de soins collectifs son mises au rebut, jetées au nom du “choix” individuel ?”
In the middle panel, the text reads / Dans le panneau du milieu, le texte se lit comme suit: “We will not look away from the mass illness and death that surrounds us or from a state machine that is more committed to churning out profit and privileged comfort with eugenic abandonment.” “Nous ne détournerons pas les yeux de la maladie et de la morte de masse qui nous entournent ou d’une machine d’État qui east plus déterminée à générer des profits et un confort privilégié avec un abandon eugénique.”
On the right, it reads / À droit, le texte dit: “What happens when collective care infrastructures are discarded, thrown away in the name of individual “choice”?”
Panel 8: A spread of two panels. On the left, around the panel, the text reads, “What happens when COVID-19 is still here, but the infrastructure is being torn down?” Inside, is a drawing of a sign that reads “Couvre visage obligatoire / Masks required” taped to a door. / Deux panneaux. À gauche, autour du panneau, le texte a dit : “What happens when COVID-19 is still here, but the infrastructure is being torn down?” À l’intérieur, le dessin d’un panneau indiquant “Couvre visage obligatoire / Masks required” collé sur une porte.
On the right, around the panel, it reads / A droite, autour du panneau, le texte a dit: “Que se passe-t-il lorsque le COVID1-9 est toujours là, mais que l’infrastructure est en train d’être démolie ?” Inside the panel is a drawing of the tape on the door with part of the sign still remaining, but most is missing. / À l’intérieur du panneau se trouve un dessin du ruban adhésif sur la porte. Il reste une partie du panneau, mais la majeure partie est manquante.
Panel 9: Two panels. On the left, it reads (Silverstein and Lincoln 2022). / Deux panneaux. À gauche, on peut lire (Silverstein et Lincoln 2022).
On the left around the panel, it reads / À gauche, autour du panneau, on peut lire: “Broken pandemic infrastructures were not the “ça va” many of us hoped for.” Inside the panel, it reads / À l’intérieur du panneau, le texte dit : “How did the united States end up desensitized to mass death and disability, angrily opposed to almost all means of mitigating an occasionally fatal airborne virus, and willing to accept so little from the powerful?” “Comment les États-Unis ont-ils fini par êtr désensibilisés à la mort et à l’incapacité de masse, opposés avec colère à presque tous les moyens d’atténuer un virus aérien parfois mortel, et prêts à accepter si peu des puissants?”
Around the right panel, it says / Autour du panneau de droite, le texte a dit: “Infrastructures pandémiques brisées n’ont pas été les “ça va” que beaucoup d’entre nous avaient éspérées.” Inside the panel is a drawing of two people. On the left, is a drawing of a white person with glasses and brown hair, who is named Martha Lincoln. Below, is a drawing of a white person with brown hair and a beard named Jason Silverstein. / À l’intérieur du panneau se trouve le dessin de deux personnes. À gauche, le dessin d’une personne blanche avec des lunettes et des cheveux bruns, qui s’appelle Martha Lincoln. En dessous, se trouve le dessin d’une personne blanche aux cheveux bruns et à la barbe, nommée Jason Silverstein.
Panel 10: A panel spread that has a drawing of COVID-19 case estimates in brown (data via INSPQ), and a drawing of a lung with a brown trachea with blue lungs. Un panneau avec un dessin des estimations de cas COVID-19 en brun (données via INSPQ), et un dessin d’un poumon avec une trachée brune avec des poumons bleus.
The text reads / Le texte dit: “While state infrastructure remains broken, we still take care of each other…” “Alors que l’infrastructure de l’État reste brisée, nous prenons toujours soin les un.e.s des autres…”
Below, it reads / En dessous, le texte dit: “…through wave peaks and troughs.” “…à travers les pointes et creux des vagues.”
Panel 11: Two panels. / Deux panneaux.
On the left, around the box, it reads / À gauche, autour de la boîte, le texte dit: “We are not singular beings: we are social animals, and we depend on each other.” Inside (in light brown text on dark brown), it reads / À l’intérieur (en texte brun clair sur brun foncé), le texte a dit: “Interdependence acknowledges that our survival is bound up together, that we are interconnected and what you do impacts others. If this pandemic has done nothing else, it has illuminated how horrible our society is at valuing and practicing interdependence. Interdependence is the only way out of most of the most pressing issues we face today.” (Mingus 2022) is on the left / est à gauche.
Around the right panel it reads / Autour du panneau de droite, le texte a dit: “Nous ne sommes pas des êtres singuliers: nous sommes des animaux sociaux, et nous dépendons les un.e.s des autres.” Inside, it reads (in dark brown text on light brown) “L’interdépendance reconnaît que notre survie est liée, que nous sommes interconnectés et que ce que vous faites a un impact sur les autres. Si cette pandémie n’a rien fait d’autre, elle a mis en lumière à quel point notre société est horrible à valoriser et à pratiquer l’interdépendance. L’interdépendance est le seul moyen de sortir de la plupart des problèmes les plus urgents auxquels nous sommes confrontés aujourd’hui.”
Panel 12: A spread with text and images of the first panel’s stickers of feet and “2m,” but it is largely missing. Un panneau avec le texte et les images des autocollants de pieds et de “2m” du premier panneau, mais il est en grande partie absent.
The text reads / Le texte a dit: “COVID-19 infrastructure has begun to scuff, peel, and fade away. After a few years of pandemic life, I now realize: ” “L’infrastructure COVID-19 a commencé à s’érafler, às se décoller et à disparaître. Après quelques années de vie pandémique, je réalise maintenant :” “« ça va bien aller » is not a guarantee but a hope, only possible through interconnectedness.” “« ça va bien aller », ce n’est pas une garantie mais un espoir, uniquement possible grâce à l’interdépendance.”
Adler-Bolton, Beatrice, and Artie Vierkant. 2022. Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto. Verso Books.
Institute national de santé publique du Québec (INSPQ). n.d. “Données COVID-19 au Québec.” INSPQ: Centre d’expertise et de référence en santé publique. Accessed February 05, 2023. https://www.inspq.qc.ca/covid-19/donnees.
Mingus, Mia. 2022. “You Are Not Entitled To Our Deaths: COVID, Abled Supremacy & Interdependence.” Blog. Leaving Evidence (blog). January 16, 2022. https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2022/01/16/you-are-not-entitled-to-our-deaths-covid-abled-supremacy-interdependence/.
Silverstein, Jason, and Martha Lincoln. 2022. “Why We Fight.” Blog. Peste (blog). December 13, 2022. https://www.pestemag.com/first-row/why-we-fight-w55lm.
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