Post Ad56UJJ9DaScF3MHlw by neonsnake@kolektiva.social
 (DIR) More posts by neonsnake@kolektiva.social
 (DIR) Post #Ad56UIQuTF4jWpyyES by neonsnake@kolektiva.social
       2023-12-22T09:02:30Z
       
       1 likes, 0 repeats
       
       Shout-out to my fellow Covid survivors and Long Covid sufferers:Getting Covid was NOT a result of poor choices on your behalf!--------------------------------Why am I posting this?Because there's a thread going round that, due to a few unfortunate turns of phrase, implies that getting or avoiding Covid is a choice that individuals can make for themselves.Now, this is simply not true.You CAN (and should) make choices to MITIGATE RISK - mask-wearing, vaccines if available to you, avoiding unnecessary gatherings etc. But you CANNOT simply "choose" *not to get Covid*. It is very likely, for most people, that they will sometimes find themselves in positions where even the best defences might prove inadequate - if you're an essential worker, if you've been forced back into the office, if you're a parent with school-age children, and so on and forth.So if you *have* had Covid, despite taking all the precautions that you could, please:Do not let yourself be gaslit into thinking you could have made better choices. You've enough to deal with without that.Love and solidarity.
       
 (DIR) Post #Ad56UJJ9DaScF3MHlw by neonsnake@kolektiva.social
       2023-12-22T18:19:24Z
       
       1 likes, 0 repeats
       
       A few weeks back, I glumly noted a small trend I'd spotted:Amongst people who had *not* had Covid, there's a (small) subset of people who believe that getting Covid can only be a matter of poor choices, of ignoring the science, of being blase in the face of a pandemic.My experiences over the past few days cemented that view, unfortunately.For some people, in 2020 and 2021, this *may* have been true - I'm thinking here of the Covid-deniers who gleefully went around unmasked pre-vaccines whilst WFH was still the norm and attended large gatherings whilst all the official advice was...well, don't. And then they got Covid, and hey - who didn't feel a little bit of schadenfreude? (this DOES NOT include essential/front-line workers who were given no choice, to be clear)But in 2022 and 2023, as the advice fell away, and we *cough* returned to normal, this is *much* harder to justify. The minority of people who are left still being cautious are in an almost impossible position, given the failure of society as a whole to contain it.It reminds me a little of people who use terms like "fight cancer" or "beat cancer" or "lost their battle with cancer". It's ableist as fuck - you're massively outnumbered and whether you "win" or "lose" has little or nothing to do with your own personal response. Studying the blade here isn't going to help.------------------Offline, someone pointed out to me that this might come across as "Covid doomerism" in the sense of "everyone is going to catch it, so you might as well get it done."I don't intend it to. You absolutely should, and I very much mean this from the perspective of someone whose life has been absolutely ruined by Long Covid (I've done a few posts on my Long Covid, and how it's affected me. I - lol - actually forgot to include the fact that I've not worked for 4 months, and am slowly coming to terms with the fact that I might never be able to work again, with all that that implies), do literally everything you can to avoid it. But any "anti-Covid" advocacy at this point *has* to include care for people who have had it, and non-judgement for the same, otherwise it's *just as bad* as the dismissal we get from the Covid-deniers that we're faced with every day.