The Coronavirus Thread

[Brian Peacock]

Like with masks etc, let's not forget in response to AIDS a lot of people were advised to put their health at risk and not to wear condoms. The Catholic church in Africa springs to mind, for example.

[Cunt]

Like with masks etc, let's not forget in response to AIDS a lot of people were advised to put their health at risk and not to wear condoms. The Catholic church in Africa springs to mind, for example.

Those religious nutters blamed the gays, I think...

It's why I bristle when I hear people blaming groups of humans for virus spread...reminds me of some victimized friends, who went through rough times.

We met a biker, years ago, who was friends with my girlfriends dad. He was dying of aids, and had been smoking weed regularly, as it was more effective than the other pain meds.

His openness about it dragged her dad into a doobie circle, and sort of 'broke the ice' between he and I.

He died, with a lot of people tut-tutting and blaming his sinful ways. Keith, I think his name was...been 20 years or so.

[Brian Peacock]

Yeah. Got to be 30 odd years ago a friend died in the hospice with his religious parents refusing to see him after his diagnosis because of his 'sinful lifestyle'. He only came out to them when he found out he had it. He was only in his mid-twenties. They didn't come to the funeral. It was really sad.

[Cunt]

The lonely part might bother me the most. I get so much from the people around me, that I can't help but feel bad for people who haven't got it.

Kind of why the lockdowns alarm me, too. There are plenty of people who would choose to risk death to be with family one last time.

Similar to all the people who risked pregnancy in the age of AIDS. Human contact is more valuable than we might be acknowledging. I hugged a couple friends a few days ago, and wonder how long before this area begins to get crowded out. (we are maybe the last safest place on earth, wrt the pandemic)

[Scot Dutchy]

Goals have been achieved? We are now non-human?

Has a year of living with Covid-19 rewired our brains?

The pandemic is expected to precipitate a mental health crisis, but perhaps also a chance to approach life with new clarity

When the bubonic plague spread through England in the 17th century, Sir Isaac Newton fled Cambridge where he was studying for the safety of his family home in Lincolnshire. The Newtons did not live in a cramped apartment; they enjoyed a large garden with many fruit trees. In these uncertain times, out of step with ordinary life, his mind roamed free of routines and social distractions. And it was in this context that a single apple falling from a tree struck him as more intriguing than any of the apples he had previously seen fall. Gravity was a gift of the plague. So, how is this pandemic going for you?

In different ways, this is likely a question we are all asking ourselves. Whether you have experienced illness, relocated, lost a loved one or a job, got a kitten or got divorced, eaten more or exercised more, spent longer showering each morning or reached every day for the same clothes, it is an inescapable truth that the pandemic alters us all. But how? And when will we have answers to these questions – because surely there will be a time when we can scan our personal balance sheets and see in the credit column something more than grey hairs, a thicker waist and a kitten? (Actually, the kitten is pretty rewarding.) What might be the psychological impact of living through a pandemic? Will it change us for ever?

“People talk about the return to normality, and I don’t think that is going to happen,” says Frank Snowden, a historian of pandemics at Yale, and the author of Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present. Snowden has spent 40 years studying pandemics. Then last spring, just as his phone was going crazy with people wanting to know if history could shed light on Covid-19, his life’s work landed in his lap. He caught the coronavirus.

Snowden believes that Covid-19 was not a random event. All pandemics “afflict societies through the specific vulnerabilities people have created by their relationships with the environment, other species, and each other,” he says. Each pandemic has its own properties, and this one – a bit like the bubonic plague – affects mental health. Snowden sees a second pandemic coming “in the train of the Covid-19 first pandemic … [a] psychological pandemic”.

Aoife O’Donovan, an associate professor of psychiatry at the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences in California, who specialises in trauma, agrees. “We are dealing with so many layers of uncertainty,” she says. “Truly horrible things have happened and they will happen to others and we don’t know when or to whom or how and it is really demanding cognitively and physiologically.”

The impact is experienced throughout the body, she says, because when people perceive a threat, abstract or actual, they activate a biological stress response. Cortisol mobilises glucose. The immune system is triggered, increasing levels of inflammation. This affects the function of the brain, making people more sensitive to threats and less sensitive to rewards.

In practice, this means that your immune system may be activated simply by hearing someone next to you cough, or by the sight of all those face masks and the proliferation of a colour that surely Pantone should rename “surgical blue”, or by a stranger walking towards you, or even, as O’Donovan found, seeing a friend’s cleaner in the background of a Zoom call, maskless. And because, O’Donovan points out, government regulations are by necessity broad and changeable, “as individuals we have to make lots of choices. This is uncertainty on a really intense scale.”

The unique characteristics of Covid-19 play into this sense of uncertainty. The illness “is much more complex than anyone imagined in the beginning”, Snowden says, a sort of shapeshifting adversary. In some it is a respiratory disease, in others gastrointestinal, in others it can cause delirium and cognitive impairment, in some it has a very long tail, while many experience it as asymptomatic. Most of us will never know if we have had it, and not knowing spurs a constant self-scrutiny. Symptom checkers raise questions more than they allay fears: when does tiredness become fatigue? When does a cough become “continuous”?

O’Donovan sighs. She sounds tired; this is a busy time to be a threat researcher and her whole life is work now. She finds the body’s response to uncertainty “beautiful” – its ability to mobilise to see off danger – but she’s concerned that it is ill-suited to frequent and prolonged threats. “This chronic activation can be harmful in the long term. It accelerates biological ageing and increases risk for diseases of ageing,” she says.


“We are becoming a sort of non-person,” says Perry. Masks render us mostly faceless. Hand sanitiser is a physical screen. Fairhurst sees it as “a barrier, like not speaking somebody’s language”. And Perry is not the only one to favour the “non-person clothes” of pyjamas and tracksuits. Somehow, the repeat-wearing of clothes makes all clothing feel like fatigues. They suit our weariness, and add an extra layer to it.

Cultural losses feed this sense of dehumanisation. Eric Clarke, a professor at Wadham College, Oxford, with a research interest in the psychology of music, led street singing in his cul-de-sac during the first lockdown, which “felt almost like a lifeline”, but he has missed going to live music events. “The impact on me has been one of a feeling of degradation or erosion of my aesthetic self,” he says. “I feel less excited by the world around me than I do when I’m going to music.” And the street music, like the street clapping, stopped months ago. Now “we are all living like boil-in-a-bag rice, closed off from the world in a plastic envelope of one sort or another.”

No element of Covid-19 has dehumanised people more than the way it has led us to experience death. Individuals become single units in a very long and horribly growing number, of course. But before they become statistics, the dying are condemned to isolation. “They are literally depersonalised,” Snowden says. He lost his sister during the pandemic. “I didn’t see her, and nor was she with her family … It breaks bonds and estranges people.”

[Tero]

Like President Trump, his associates have received drugs that aren't yet widely available to the American public as they were treated for Covid-19, despite Trump's vow to make them free to anybody who needs them

https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1337940350900559873

[Tero]

[Sean Hayden]

[Cunt]

Can 'messenger' RNA be sent via the signal app? Or do you have to sign up for facebook's spyware?

[Scot Dutchy]

The numbers have shot up since masks have been mandatory. Explain it. We are now in lockdown thanks to the masks. People dont hold distance wearing a mask. Masks dont work.

[pErvinalia]

You've been telling us masks aren't mandatory in the Netherregions. So which is it?

[Brian Peacock]

Masks give you Rona and vaccines make you gay.

[Cunt]

I've tried to say this a few ways, but you guys love hating me more than understanding it (except nb)

Liking wearing masks is a problem. Wearing them only reluctantly, as a last resort, is a better approach.

In practice, always wear a mask when entering the groceriteria. Always try to order your groceries to be served in the parking lot or delivered, to avoid wearing the mask.

It's a more sensible mental space to be in.

[JimC]

That's where we're now at in Melbourne. We only need to wear masks in shops or on public transport.

[Cunt]

That's where we're now at in Melbourne. We only need to wear masks in shops or on public transport.

Then the way I would promote my idea, is to suggest that you take up endurance running, walking and cycling. This would allow you to avoid public transport. (not to mention cardio is a kind of vaccine against the most damaging infections)

It could be though, that I'm just a shill for Big Cardio, and I would dissemble with the truth if it made people get breathless and sweaty...