Ask yourself. . . Even if you stopped masking, you can always decide to start masking again! Would you rather live in ignorance and denial, or in reality? Are you willing to sacrifice your long-term health, and the health and lives of others, just to eat indoors at restaurants? What is holding you back from wearing a mask on the bus, at work, at the grocery store, to the doctor’s, or to a friend’s house? How can you unlearn internalized ableism? How does the way we allow covid to spread and mutate unmitigated in the U.S. Impact people in the global south? In places like Palestine, where disease is used as a tool of genocidal empires? What does it look like to truly make queer / black / trans / disabled liberation a central motivating force in your daily life?
https://maskupactup.substack.com/p/why-you-should-still-wear-a-mask
COVID MITHS
“MYTH #1: “No one is masking anymore”
People are still masking! A 2023 poll found 21% of Americans still mask most or all of the time, and 48% are continuing to mask in public on at least some occasions.
If you are thinking: “well, I don’t see anyone masking!”, remember that those with COVID cautious practices often visit public spaces at calculated times in order to avoid crowds. For example, individuals might avoid peak busy hours at the grocery by going right when it opens, or they might not be going to stores altogether due to the high risk nature if they have pre-existing health conditions.
Wearing a medical-grade mask (i.e. KN 95) continues to provide substantial protection, even if those around you are unmasked. Spaces without mandated indoor masking put everyone at risk, but particularly folks who are at higher risk.
MYTH #2: “COVID deaths and cases are low”
In 2020, people were very accurately criticizing Trump for saying, "If we stop testing right now, we'd have very few cases". So, unsurprisingly, the dismantling of public testing infrastructure under Biden and the shift to at-home rapid testing has resulted in a significant undercounting and underreporting of positive COVID cases and related deaths (including those from Long Covid complications).
While mainstream media has reported on the latest surge (Summer 2023), they aren't typically a reliable source and there have been multiple surges that they haven’t reported on. Testing COVID levels in wastewater is now the best remaining measure for assessing COVID risk, and it continues to show high levels of the virus are widespread. Staying informed about wastewater data outside of media coverage is one of the best ways to prepare for surges.
MYTH #3: “Only the elderly and immunocompromised are affected by COVID / I’ve already gotten COVID and I was fine”
Firstly, even if this was true our elderly, high-risk, disabled community members are not disposable– their lives are worth protecting and claiming otherwise is a eugenicist stance. It is a myth perpetuated by capitalism which would have us believe a person’s worth and relatedly their expendability is predicated on their ability to engage in labor. People currently in excellent health or younger in age are closer to being disabled or high-risk than we have been told to believe.
Secondly, anyone who has had COVID should consider themselves immunocompromised. Fighting off COVID does not strengthen our immune response, because COVID attacks the immune system and impacts its ability to fight off future infections. Our immune systems are weakened every time we are infected.
The truth is that many who have died or been disabled by (long) COVID had no previous health concerns. You may be at low risk before your first infection, but repeated re-infection exponentially increases the risk of damage to your body. COVID complications include serious harm to the functioning of every organ, including the heart, brain, and GI system.
MYTH #4: “I’m vaccinated plus COVID is milder now, so I’m safe!”
Officials claiming that we are completely COVID safe with a vaccine-only strategy displays a total lack of understanding of how the vaccine works and the conditions under which vaccine efficacies were initially determined. The high efficacies pharmaceutical companies were initially claiming were determined when there were several public health measures in place, including masking, limited occupancy, and other restrictions on indoor gatherings. COVID strains keep evolving and changing, and vaccines become less effective as new variants emerge. Newer COVID strains are just as severe as older variants. Even if a newer strain is considered less deadly, it can be more transmissible which can ultimately lead to more deaths overall.
Vaccines also do not prevent you from getting sick or spreading COVID: they reduce your chances of ending up dead or in the hospital. We must continue to employ other methods of protection to keep ourselves and our communities safe. The newer COVID strains may appear to be milder because fewer people are dying compared to the start of the pandemic, but this can be attributed to the sheer number of people with comorbidities that lost their lives during the early COVID waves. Fewer people are dying presently because so many of our most at-risk members of society have already died from COVID. Our government has subsequently abandoned remaining at-risk individuals, who have been forced to take their safety into their own hands as the world prematurely “moves on” from the ongoing pandemic.
MYTH #5: “We have reached herd immunity / Everyone is going to get COVID eventually”
You have likely heard the phrase, “We just need to reach herd immunity and things can go back to normal.” For the first two years of the pandemic, it seemed that reaching herd immunity was the objective. The problem, however, was herd immunity was never going to be possible with the nature of this virus. Unlike polio or measles, SARS-CoV-2 turned out to be more reactive to selective pressure which meant that the high levels of infection ironically served to give rise to many more variants that were even better at evading immune response.
A virus is under constant pressure to mutate to evade immune detection, but it doesn't do it in a vacuum, it needs a host. Once in a host, the virus will replicate until it is neutralized by the immune system. The longer it can reproduce unchecked, the higher the chances of it acquiring mutations. If any of those mutations, or combination of mutations is advantageous to the virus, then that mutant will end up in circulation. That's IF we continue to serve as hosts, something we can try to prevent by masking. And if we do get infected, we can at least try to stop that chain of transmission with us by isolating while sick (if possible), testing frequently, and, yes, masking.
The reason why we have so many COVID variants is because we have allowed for the virus to spread rampantly because our government repealed mask mandates, dismantled COVID testing infrastructure, and repealed all other protective measures early on. We do not have to give in to the defeatist stance that COVID will eventually infect every person on the planet. We can keep our communities safe by maintaining COVID practices. Wearing a mask, testing regularly, and staying informed can help save lives.” People’s Health Education Program
“The cold truth of the matter is that the motive behind COVID minimization is greed and social control. (…) Solving the pandemic was never in the cards for the capitalist world. Instead, the explicit goal of the ruling class has been to make the pandemic simply disappear from public perception.” Let Them Eat Plague! http://clarion.unity-struggle-unity.org/
#MaskUp #WearAMask #CovidRealist #CovidIsAirbone #LongCovid #YallMasking #DisabledLiberation #DisabilityJustice
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