Terry Prone: After two solid years, have we abandoned our 'duty of opposition' to Covid?
Sense Worry The Covid Latest Do People’s This Hospitalisations The To Wave Rise, As Of Of With But Tends Happened Hasn’t Same
He was 84 years old. He was HIV positive. He was in a wheelchair. A year later, he was dead. But on the last day of June, 2019, Larry Kramer, Aids activist extraordinaire, took to the stage in Central Park at the conclusion of the Pride parade. He was worried about the younger generation who seemed to be abandoning what he called their “duty of opposition” to the Aids virus.
Kramer spoke just five months before another virus devastated the world. That virus, Covid-19, came out of China rather than out of Africa. The global reaction was quicker than the shameful response to HIV. But also quicker came the abandonment of the duty of opposition to the virus.
If you looked around you in the shops or paid attention to media, you wouldn’t think almost 200 people died last month with Covid.
Never has familiarity so speedily bred contempt for something to which contempt cannot apply
According to the ESRI over the weekend, public concern about Covid subvariants isn’t anything like it was in earlier waves.
“Normally, as hospitalisations go up, people’s sense of worry goes up but we haven’t seen that in the latest survey,” says the ESRI’s Dr Shane Timmins, “Worries have actually remained stable.”
Tired of Covid
That’s being fed by arguably the silliest question ever asked on radio and television: “But aren’t people just tired of Covid?”
Funnily enough, our medieval counterparts never said they were “just tired” of bubonic plague. They were too busy dying of it, boarded up inside their homes with the corpses of Mam and Dad who’d died a few days earlier with the same symptoms, and a sign hammered up on the outside wall warning others of the dangers of getting closer.
We have huge advantages over those unfortunates of the past. We’re more educated, know more about what causes pandemics, have more possibilities to save ourselves from infection and generally fulfill Kramer’s “duty of opposition” to the deadly virus, yet we are tolerating the asking of idiot questions that position this disease as something so yesterday, like padded suit shoulders.
We’re tired of Covid, so we deny its threat and at the same time deny our responsibility to combat it. Which explains recent newspaper columns wherein writers happily quote themselves as having advised infected friends not to bother isolating themselves. Sure, why would you spoil your own summer, goes this thinking.
We’re tired of Covid, so even though this paper on Saturday quoted Professor Seamus Linnane of the Beacon Hospital to the effect that people who’ve been infected a couple or three times not only aren’t protected against the newest available variant, but are lined up directly in front of the firing squad; much more likely to get long Covid.
Blasé behaviour
The terrible thing is how easy it is to adopt that way of thinking, to feel unwell and open an antigen test with the vague notion at the back of the head that if it turns out to be positive, you might, if you don’t have much in the way of obvious symptoms, keep your little problem to yourself and not talk about it.
Because you have the tickets booked for Orlando and the ventilation systems on those planes are really, really good, plus you’ll have to be masked onboard except when eating ... Anyway, the US has dumped the requirement for testing in advance of a flight to their shores, so they’re not worried, right?
Same with the local powers that allow vaccines to age beyond use. So they can’t be that worried, either, right? Concentrate instead on the unevidenced theory that this virus has passed its sell-by date and so should not be allowed to interfere with that cliché of “getting on with our lives”.
The HSE’s clinical lead may channel Robert Bolt and describe this as “a virus for all seasons,” but — like the Aids virus — we’ve reached the dread point where a majority has decided that they’re done with this disease.
In the case of Aids, this manifested itself in a marked decline in safe-sex practices, tracked by polling among vulnerable sections of society. In the case of Covid-19, it’s manifesting itself in an articulation of impatience with the virus as if it was an irritating over-communicative neighbour.
If someone could just get it across to the virus how tedious it is being, we’d be grand.
Message ignored
The dispersal of the briefly united audience for Nphet messages exacerbates this mindset. Nobody’s rushing to news bulletins with the same FOMO mindset that pertained at the height of the virus. Instead, people have retreated into their own silos, their own social media feeds, their own bubbles, and their own podcasts.
Whereas 18 months ago, most people, stopped in the street, could have provided an interrogator with a reasonably accurate approximation of the figures then infected, hospitalised or in ICU, today, getting within hundreds of any of those figures would be unusual.
Neither knowing nor caring is fed into by the proposition that we are legitimately tired of Covid-19 and that it serves it right if we stop paying attention to it. All that stuff about valuing the medical people who gave their all, sometimes even their lives, to take care of the infected?
Not cool anymore. The ridiculous tiredness trope empowers behaviours likely to endanger ourselves and others and the awful thing is that you don’t have to suffer from moral ADHD to engage in these behaviours.
We’re not good, we humans, at cause and effect. Mark Twain said that “If a cat sits on a hot stove, that cat won’t sit on a hot stove again. That cat won’t sit on a cold stove either. That cat just won’t like stoves.”
During the pandemic, the authorities didn’t quite put us sitting on hot stoves, but they restricted us in ways we didn’t like, and, like Twain’s cat, the end result seems to be a decision to reject any and all future restrictions.
The cat on a hot tin stove syndrome doesn’t apply to everybody, but something has definitely gone wrong in the way the general public analyses the data around Covid-19, this time around. The connection between cause and effect has become fudged.
In every other area of Irish life, the relationship between cause and effect is inevitable and obvious. One follows the other as day follows night. So, to pick one topical example, a bit of eye-gouging in an All-Ireland quarter-final will speedily get you a 24-week suspension.
But after two solid years of data about Covid-19’s morbidity and mortality, many have ceased to care. They believe they won’t get it. Or, if they do, it’ll be like a bad cold. If they’ve had it before, they’re convinced the next dose won’t give them long Covid. They’re just tired of it.
With luck, the waning of this wave will save us from the delusional thinking that frames Covid-19 as a dated, impotent concept not worth our “duty of opposition”.